Why There are so Many

Yesterday was Lola Rosa's funeral. She had been teetering on the edge for a couple of months and finally succumbed a week ago. After lying in state whilst friends and relatives paid their respects for the week she was off to her final resting place.

The hearse followed by a stream of mourners on foot headed to the Parish Church of St Peter and Paul just off P Borgos St. There a mass was held for her departed soul and a communion for the faithful although your humble scribe was a tad disappointed that there was no lamb.



After the ceremony the hearse followed by its ambulatory throng headed off on its 2 mile trek to the South Manila Cemetery. Once there Lola Rosa’s coffin was placed in her waiting tomb which was sealed and the attending mourners then decamped back to the Zenaida Street compound for sustenance and discussion of the days events.

It is not an uncommon event in the Philippines to attend a funeral. In the short time I have been here, a little over a year, this was my third, which brings to a total of eight I have attended in my 50 odd years of shuffling about on this mortal coil. They being the mother of one of the best beloved’s friends and a distant cousin on the best beloved mother’s side of the family.

It is a well documented fact and one that I can attest to through personal experience that after a funeral significant others are drawn closer to each other with an intimacy that is more intense than at other times. With this in mind and taking into account the size of Filipino families and the frequency of funerals it is little wonder that the Philippine’s population is growing at an exorbitant rate. Especially in the light of the dominate arbiter of social values only answer to birth control being abstinence.

Where's the Number?

Finally,I got my grubby little paws on the latest telephone books, hoo-bloody-ray. For me gentle reader the telephone book, especially the Yellow Pages, is my life line in my pursuit of an income. When a service or a product is required I let my fingers do the walking.

I also use the internet for searches for suppliers but it is a technology that Philippine businesses have yet to embrace seriously. Listings are few and far between and those who have websites, including government departments, are littered with out of date information, dead pages and phone numbers with the dreaded “this number is not in use” recorded message – aaargh.

Thus getting the books was long awaited. The four volumes distributed on behalf of PLDT are a tad on the slim side with the residential listings coming up with just a few thousand over a quarter of a million listings in a city of ten million people.

Interesting? Is it like the internet that the telephone is a technology yet to be embraced by Filipinios? I think not, in our compound there are 4 land lines and up to 12 cell phones. I suspect that in the PLDT phone book only PLDT listings are included. Which would explain why, as a Globe customer, we are conspicuous by our absence.

Now in my experience PLDT is not the brightest light in the harbour and only listing their subscribers in their telephone book confirms this suspicion. They make their money from people making phone calls and it stands to reason that the more choices available the more calls can be made and the more revenue generated. By only listing their own customers they are shooting themselves in the foot.

If this methodology is also applied to the business listings the situation becomes even more ludicrous. If as a PLDT subscriber I am looking for a supplier who happens to use a different telco their existence will never be known to me and my potential conversations and faxes to them will be more lost business for PLDT. Not to mention the hindrance that this puts on business growth in a macro sense as business is all about communication.

This would seem to be the case, as the PLDT business directory is a slimmer one than the residential which is the direct opposite of my experience of other telephone directories where the yellow pages are double the thickness of the white. It will be interesting to see if the newly released Globe phone book applies the same limitations?

The New Yorker – a reprise

This gentle reader is a tale of woe, a cautionary tale along the lines of one swallow not making a summer. As reported in an earlier post the best beloved, number one son and your humble scribe are great fans of Pizza Huts New Yorker pizza.

Thus on a balmy Saturday evening with more time on our hands than is good for one we decided that pizza was the meal of the day and for a change of scenery we would visit the scene of the crime, so to speak. We would eat in at Pizza Hut. We arrived, after a casual stroll, at the establishment with a modest bottle of Spanish red tucked under one wing and settled ourselves at a laminex table in the eat in section.

Memories from the past flooded back from my time in Melbourne and Johnny’s Green Room with its robust home cooked Italian fare and bare kitchen tables. Why it was called Johnny’s and Green was a mystery, it wasn’t green and I never met a member of staff who answered to Johnny. But the food was plentiful and the booze was cheap even if served under the table.

Our menus arrived and the first disappointment of the outing arose. There was no New Yorker on the eat in menu. Ah well the deep pan supreme looked pretty good and, yes they could add some olives. Disappointment number 2 followed in quick succession, they didn’t have any wine glasses. Ah well on picnics I have drunk wine from jam jars so water glasses would suffice.

It is a little known fact that you, dear reader, will now discover through the exploits of The Expat that 2 out 3 Pizza Hut waiters don’t know what a cork screw is. The knowledgeable third waiter was sorry to inform us that the restaurant didn’t have a cork screw. A pizzeria without a cork screw. Memories clattered to the floor and were crushed under the foot of the departing waiter. This was turning into a Pizza Hut story of the Australian kind.

When our pizza arrived the analogy was complete. The deep pan Supreme tasted like the soggy cardboard concoctions that the chain had been serving to Bruce and Sheila for years and had me avoiding them like the plague when living in Oz.

Ah well the New Yorker is still a damn fine pizza, will just have to get them to deliver. And I know there will be a cork screw, a couple actually. Perhaps I should lend them one, then perhaps not.

Filipina

The First Tuesday in November

The first Tuesday in November is almost upon us and being an even numbered year means there are two horse races to watch.

The annual event is the horse race that stops a nation. At 3pm next Tuesday (1 pm for those in the Philippines) for 3 minutes Australia will come to a stand still as all eyes are turned to the Melbourne Cup. Now in its 145th consecutive year “The Cup” is one of the world’s riches horse races with a prize pool in excess of $5 million AU dollars. The city of Melbourne has a public holiday and at the cups home, Flemington Race Course, the champagne, huge hats and fashions in the field create a carnival to keep gossip columns alive for weeks.

On the other side of the Pacific the red and the blue will do battle in the 2 horse race known as the Mid Term elections. For some time now the candidates for either side have been calling each other names and belittling their opponent’s policies. If the red team wins it will be business as usual, should the blue team win it will come as no great surprise if the US President was on the blower to Gloria seeking impeachment defense strategies.

When the dust settles on the gallopers in these 2 events the honest winner will have four legs the rest will be politicians.

A New Yorker?

A shopping strip or mall without a Pizza Parlour or three is a rarity here in the Philippines. The major chains with their home delivery being the main culprits and now that we are in the throes of home renovation this food service is one which we are availing ourselves.

Our current favourite is the so called New York pizza. Pepperoni, bacon, olives, mushrooms, bell pepper, tomato sauce, Italian sausage and mozzarella cheese, how close it is to its name sake is anyone’s guess. Ah olives, Kalamartta olives to be precise, mmmmm, teamed with tomatoes, zesty cheddar, some crackers and a bottle of red, a meal fit for a king, but I digress.

With change from 500 pesos, 3 tired munchkins can dine on this motor bike delivered meal with scant regard for the washing up. We have tried three brands to date, Pizza Hut, Dominoes and Yellow Cab.

Topping this lot is Pizza Hut, their New Yorker is a good pizza from a chain although their web site (you can order online) has a variety of prices for the same item, don’t worry the highest price is the one they will charge. Dominoes, a very large chain in Oz but with only one shop here, don’t actually have a New Yorker as such but they will make one with the required ingredients if requested, the end result is OK, but one feels their heart isn’t in it. Yellow Cab comes in at a very poor third, way too much MSG resulting in a raging thirst an hour or so after consumption.

You are, so the saying goes, what you eat and MSG just says to me cheap, tasteless ingredients. Now where to find some plump, fresh Kalamartta olives?

Eye Sore or What

Driving into Manila on the South Luzon Expressway at night, as I did a few weeks back returning from the Batangas Weekend, is like entering a fun filled fairyland of bright lights and eternal dreams. On either side of the highway are huge billboards, all brightly lit expounding the delights of all types of products to fill a consumers heart with joy.
It was a ride down a tunnel into the unknown but one that was friendly if you have the cash, by day they look kinda tawdry, especially those that flank the EDSA.

Given an open space with passing traffic here in the Philippines and there will be hoardings erected. On the median strip that flashes past at eye level to towering monsters vying with the high rises to block out the sky they extol their virtues of all and sundry. From the benevolence of the local political incumbent to the quite dogs foot fetish each has its pitch in a graphic language that reflects the aspirations of their intended audience.

Want to know how where you fit within your society these silent sentinels will tell you. Those to which you have a positive reaction, emphasize with, those that offend or annoy, they are your barometer. Which fiction resonates, which repels, for they are fictions, but like all fiction are based on reality.

The beautiful babes gathered round the bottle of booze has more than a grain of truth to it as many a bloke with one or three too many under the belt will attest, although, perhaps not till the next morning. The heels that lengthen and accentuate do compensate for what nature has forgotten to lure the moth to the flame.

They may dress our hard facts in glittering vestments but the facts remain. And as we stagnate in an EDSA grid lock the visuals will at least match the babble from the radio.

Finding Not Killing

Yesterday was the 4th World Day Against the Death Penalty with events organized around the globe to bring an end to state sponsored murder. Like slavery this muddled thinking that leads to the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of our neighbours is slowly going the way of the dinosaur. The Philippines was the latest country to see the light when in June this year it abolished the killing of its citizens as an official policy.

When a state condones the killing of its citizens it is a no brainer that the citizens of that state will adopt the same behaviour for the resolution of their personal grievances. The USA re-introduced the death penalty in 1977 and as at 2002 the homicide rate per 100k people was 6.1 from a low of 4.7 in the 50’s via an all time high of 10.7 three years after the its re-introduction in 1980. Compare those figures north of the border in Canada where the death penalty was abolished in 1973 where the homicide rate has been steadily declining to an all time low in 2003 of 1.7 per 100K people.

The Philippines with a homicide rate running at 3 times that of the US will hopefully follow the Canadian trend but one suspects that the real deterrent will be detection and prosecution. And this is the arena in which a lot more work needs to be done. The host of unsolved murders of journalists and political activists must be addressed for the country's leaders to be taken seriously.

More Milenyo

A couple more pics taken and subsequently worked into art from Milenyo to see them all go here.

An Uninvited Visitor

It is only now that we are getting our lives back together again after Milenyo paid us a fully blown visit last Thursday. The strongest typhoon, cyclone, hurricane, call it what you will, to hit Metro Manila and the island of Luzon for over a decade. Although not a Katrina it did manage to dispatch 26 good souls to meet their maker in the city and another 40 in the provinces.

After changing its name to Xangsane it headed off to Vietnam leaving those of us not quick enough to get into pubs with generators to spend 3 nights by candle light and phone less especially after the cell’s batteries went flat.

Typhoon Palms

At the height of the storm a section of our roof decided it had enough of Manila and then was a good time to see the rest of the world. After rigging a tarpaulin to minimize water damage it was onto the roof to replace the missing iron to dissuade the rest its mates from joining the exodus. The next day was spent cooking perishables to extend their un-refrigerated use by date, 3 cheers for gas stoves, and affecting more permanent repairs to the roof than could be done in the wind and rain.

Aftermath

Now 120 hours after the event life is back to normal, the debris is being cleared away, schools and all government departments are back at work and I’m back online.