Christmas with the Monkeys

To escape some of the Holiday craziness in Manila and find some clean air, we spent the four day Christmas weekend in Singapore. I never thought about traveling to Singapore before we lived in Manila, but it's an interesting city. For us, its main attractions were its parks.

There are pros and cons to being in a country with very strict rules, but one of the pros is Singapore's commitment to conservation. We benefited from three of those projects, and four if you count the zoo: Fort Cannery Park, the Botanical Gardens, and the Nature Reserve.

Botanical Gardens

The Botanical Gardens are free to the public, responsible dog-owner friendly, and very close to the Embassy. You could easily spend your lunch hour de-stressing in the green.

The Singapore Zoo is a delight for adults and children. So many monkeys!!

 

Singapore Zoo

There is a family of orangutans who roam free in the treetops above the sidewalks. But watch out if one of them is above your head!

For an additional fee you can stay for the 7 pm Night Safari, which is in an entirely separate park next to the zoo. Even though tours leave every ten minutes, I recommend getting in line at 6 pm. You'll wait about an hour, but if you arrive at 6:30p you'll be in line for much, much longer.

Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, also free to the public, is a mostly undisturbed section of primary rain forest, and heaven to green lovers from Manila! Surprisingly polite wild monkeys roam about, and if you look closely you will see a flying lemur, or a Colugo, trying to blend in with a tree's bark. If you are especially lucky you might see one take flight.

Bukit Timah Nature Reserve

Singapore is Manila's polar opposite: it's quiet, exceptionally clean, and orderly. If you're looking for 3rd world adventure it's not for you, but it is a welcome break to Americans living in Manila. However, you'd best follow the rules.

In Manila most rules are a suggestion and open to various ways of "coping" with getting caught, but Singaporeans take their rules very seriously.

Bawal Umihi Dito

"Bawal umihi dito" is signage familiar to any resident of the Philippines. Variations include "Bawal umihi D2" and "Bawal umihi," but they all communicate the same: don't pee on me.

As you drive through Manila you will see this request scrawled on the sides of buildings, in corners, and pretty much anywhere there is an opening between the storefronts and carts that line the streets. If you are a male in the Philippines, the world really is your urinal. Unless, of course, you obey the signs.

At first a Western foreigner (with a basic understanding of Tagalog) might find these signs off putting. One might ask,"Do people just urinate everywhere?" The answer is, probably not, for two reasons: 1) there are designated male urinals provided by the MMDA and 2) considering the city's poverty, Manila is clean. For example, the man in the picture below may not be peeing inside the urinal, but at least he's peeing next to it.

From GMAnews.TV

You may be thinking, "How sexist. Where do women ihi?" Don't worry, earlier this year the MMDA announced that it will soon be placing female urinals in Manila. Since the male urinals are pink, the female urinals will be painted green.

Bawal umihi dito signs bring joy to my early morning and late evening commutes to and from yoga teacher training.  I understand it as a metaphor for life, and seriously, how many times have you wanted to say, "Dude, please don't pee here!"

I am not the first person to find these signs significant. If you Google "Bawal umihi dito," you will find links where you can buy T-shirts and baseball caps sporting the phrase. You too can ask the world to take its urine elsewhere.

http://shop.cafepress.com/bawalumihidito

Shangri-La

After three months of living and traveling in the Philippines, this past weekend I found myself  overwhelmed once again. Our Cebu hotel room had blankets, clean tap water, and reliable hot water, and even more disorienting, it did not have an odor wafting from the drains nor the little hand bucket found in nearly every Philippine bathroom. I didn't even find a chameleon in my drink glass in the morning.

When we first arrived I was surprised at how little I was impressed by the resort's comparative luxury. I got over it, but my initial reaction helped me see how much my perspective has changed in my time here. In our previous island travels we had been staying in places that, although nice, were rustic, and yet these places make you feel like you really are on a tropical island. Our Cebu hotel, although very nice, reminded me of a Disney resort.

Lonely Planet describes the Mactan island resorts as places that appeal to "fly-in, fly-out tourists from within Asia who pay top dollar to be insulated against the Philippines," and if that's what you're looking for then this is a darn good place to do it. Other than the natural beauty of the water and the coral reefs, the closest a tourist will get to experiencing the Philippines at this resort is the Filipino counter at the breakfast buffet. The hotel makes an effort to remind its guests that they are, in fact, visiting the Philippines by stocking its mini-bars with Pinoy ramen noodles. Available for purchase for P120.

Yet guests seeking insulation still can't avoid the road from the airport. On our night time trip to the resort we stopped at a crossroads in front of a sari-sari store, where two men stood with large, pink pigs on leashes. This was the first time I've seen a large pig on a leash, and while I looked on, one of the pigs began to urinate, creating a flowing river of pig pee in front of the resort's shuttle bus.

This amused me, but blankets in a hotel room? Now that's shocking.

 

"a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world"

FLOwing Home

The first few months in a new post are both wonderful and difficult. Each country is unique and presents its own set of challenges, and most people go through a period--usually within the first six months--where everything sucks.

I believe this attitude--which I am familiar with--comes from the cumulative stress of daily life being harder than it was before, and hardship posts may be more disruptive than others. Hardship posts earn their designations for a variety of factors, but they are all cities "where conditions of environment differ substantially from conditions of environment in the United States."  Life in a non-hardship isn't necessarily better, but it's probably easier--at least at first.

Manila is a hardship post with a relatively high differential rating (meaning it's harder than most places), but not for the same reasons as Mauritania, Africa or Kabul. Once I battle the traffic and the smog and arrive at the grocery store I can find most of the things I need (although not necessarily in the same place two weeks in a row) as long as I'm willing to pay for them. But Manila is certainly a place where the environmental conditions are different than the US, which has given me the opportunity to reflect on trade-offs in the Foreign Service.

Throughout our lives we prioritize and make choices, but when basic aspects of life such as housing are inconstant, we are more frequently confronted with the compromises involved in our choices. The Foreign Service requires you to make a lot of choices on faith. You don't really know what a post will be like until after you've lived there a few months. Some times things work out just like you imagined, and sometimes they don't.

When we headed to DC for A-100, I left my career as I knew it behind. A thriving therapy practice and foreign service spousehood don't mix well. I knew that was choosing a professional life change, but I had no idea what that change would look like.

We extensively researched ways for me to have a career--career being a loosely defined term that included everything from jam making to getting another graduate degree, but until recently I had no idea what would happen to my professional identity.

Fortunately I had something to ground me: I knew what I didn't want to do.

There are many things that you give up when you choose a life in the Foreign Service, but this life has benefits far beyond hardship pay differentials and weekend trips to tropical paradises (although I must say the weekend trips are pretty awesome). Thanks to my supervisor's support with unpaid leave and FLO's professional development fellowship program, I am beginning a month-long, intensive, 200 hour vinyasa flow yoga teacher training next week.

For several years being a yoga teacher has been my dream, but it was never feasible because the training requires a significant commitment of time and money, and I already had a full-time job. But now I have the opportunity to pursue a career that would have been difficult if not impossible before we joined the Foreign Service. Thank you, FLO, Manila CLO, and my husband, whose desire to be a Foreign Service Officer helped me find a new professional home!

Julie the Yogini

Where's the palm oil?

Our trip to Hong Kong reminded me why Manila is a fantastic post. Incredible cities like Hong Kong are a two hour plane trip away. We went to visit an A-100 friend and enjoyed a weekend in the first world. Our first night there our friend took us to what the locals consider a "seedy" area of town, but all I could see was evidence of working infrastructure and money. It's amazing how one's definition of "nice" changes. Manila has plenty of upscale malls and areas of abject poverty, but there's not much in between. And you certainly can't find Guinness on tap.

The view from the Star Ferry

If you look real hard you might see Batman jumping off the building.

Maybe some day we'll have such a view.

I love that they use bamboo

A misty trip to the peak

My other house is my castle

There are many things I love about the Foreign Service, but losing my feeling of autonomy is not one of them. When I wrote Freedom of No Choice, I described feeling grateful that I didn't have to decide which post was the best fit for our family. Now that we are living at post, I find that I am much less comfortable with my lack of choice in my environment.

Our post assignment is not the source of my discomfort. The city of Manila deserves its designation as a hardship post, but the beauty of the Philippines and Manila's proximity to Southeast Asia makes it a very enjoyable post. However, I never expected to be so uncomfortable in our assigned housing, nor did I anticipate having so much trouble with our shipments. Of course, I never imagined that our bedroom would be larger than the dining room and living room combined, and I didn't know how attached I was to my stuff until it arrived broken, or not at all.

It is because we are living in a foreign city--and a hardship city--that losing our autonomy over these aspects of our lives is especially stressful. When you are overwhelmed by the world outside, your home is your sanctuary. But if you don't feel comfortable in your home, you have no sanctuary.

The topic of housing is so saturated with negative emotion that it's the proverbial third rail in the Foreign Service community. There are some who will never be satisfied with their housing, but there is also a great deal of room for improvement in the housing assignment policies. Yet even with policy improvements it would still be painful to not be able to act on one's own behalf, especially when it is about something so fundamental as being comfortable in your own house. Unless, of course, your housing assignment meets all of your needs and exceeds your wildest expectations.

Julie was very glad when her house arrived

Crash Bang Scoot Drift

"Crash and Bang " is a course at the Foreign Service Institute [FSI] that prepares overseas staff and their families for driving in conditions where it might be prudent to wear protective gear inside your vehicle. If FSI had a course for driving in Manila they would call it "Scoot and Drift."

Manila's reputation for horrendous traffic is well earned. The money that we were saving by being a one car family will soon be spent on hiring a driver. However, we are not hiring a driver because the traffic is dangerous.

Manila is so congested there isn't room for reckless driving. Its drivers could be compared to small town USA drivers, but packed like sardines and with crazy buses, jeepneys, and scooters thrown in for fun.

When driving in Manila it is important to keep your eyes forward. You are responsible for the front of your car and the back end of the car in front of you, and if you spend too much time looking in your rear view mirror you will cause an accident. And regardless of the official laws, it will be your fault because you weren't obeying the "rules."

If you are unable to tolerate drifters, do not try to drive in Manila. According to the "rules," the best way to get across four lanes of traffic is to just go. Go slowly, but without hesitation--the people whose bumpers are behind yours are expected to let you through.

If you need to get into a lane, just go. I call this "scooting" because you can't go fast enough to dart. You scoot into a space, and then you sit. When scooting, never, ever, ever play chicken with a bus or a scooter. The buses know they are the biggest vehicles on the road, and the scooter drivers are just plain loco.

Considering the size of the city, there is a relatively low incidence of traffic fatalities in Manila, and most of those accidents involve scooters. Because they are NUTS. I haven't tried driving outside of Pasay and Malate so I can't speak for the driving conditions in Makati and beyond, but from what we've observed, it's not impossible to drive oneself, but doing so would require excessive amounts of Gatorade and chocolate.

Overall, unless you have an incredible amount of patience, hiring a driver will probably improve your quality of life, especially if you live in Makati or the Fort, or are driving outside the city during the work week. In the meantime, I will continue to pat myself on the back for deciding to keep our large vehicle and sell our smaller car. Size does matter.

The commuter buses in Manila are the size of large tour buses.  

 Jeepneys are about the size of a standard SUV.