Life is a Jeepney Ride

The divine flame of thought is inextinguishable in the Filipino people, and somehow or other it will shine forth and compel recognition. It is impossible to brutalize the inhabitants of the Philippines!

-José Rizal

How about another sunrise picture to open up my blog entry? This one from my apartment in Quezon City

For some reason, it's always been easy for me to adjust to new places. It doesn't matter how unfamiliar or "foreign" they are to me, but after a few days to a week in one place, it starts to almost feel like home. Maybe it's from having moved around almost constantly over the past six years or so, or maybe my subconscious just has the memory of a goldfish when it comes to living places. So it's officially been two weeks that I've been living here in the Philippines. Logically that's nothing, and in all honesty I still know very little about my new home country. And yet here I am, and somehow it feels like I've been here forever. 

About a week ago, I made the move from the hotel Makati to my semi-long-term apartment in Quezon City, another component of Metro Manila. Technically speaking, QC is the largest city in the Philippines in terms of population, but in Metro Manila it's tough to tell where one city ends and the other begins. Although I guess when you have an urban area that's home to more people than live in some medium-sized countries, it makes sense to divide it into parts. Now, my original plan for my time in the Philippines was to spend only a month or so in Manila before heading out to do my field research. This meant that I wouldn't be able to find a normal apartment to rent, as most of them require a month's deposit in advance, and want renters to sign a lease for longer than a few weeks. So, I was forced to look for a place to live on Airbnb, the capitalist bogeyman of hotels everywhere. Being of modest means and modest needs (really all I need is internet and something vaguely resembling a bed), I went with the cheapest possible option I could find. 

Which, it turns out, isn't that bad at all. My new apartment is in an absurdly bougie condominium complex in northern QC, just off one of the main avenues. I have my own room, but I'm sharing the apartment with my host, a somewhat well-known Filipino director. Since soap operas here are based off of Mexican telenovelas (a guilty pleasure of mine) and come out with a new episode every day, my host works 24-hour shifts at least three days a week, and on his days off is mostly sleeping off his inhuman work schedule. So, it often feels like I have an entire apartment to myself. 

The next step, of course, is getting used to where I am, and how to get to other places. I believe the technical term for the state of traffic congestion in Manila is a "snafu". I've been over this in a previous post, and I'll probably mention it again. However, one nice thing about it is that transportation is very, very cheap. My insane 2-hour taxi ride from Makati to QC was about 250 Philippine pesos, or just over $5. However, I've always been a fan of using public transportation, both for economic and ecological regions. Now, Metro Manila has a metro, which is usually crowded to the point of uselessness on weekdays, and a few buses, which service only the large highways. The real way of getting around here is in a jeepney, the cultural symbol of the Philippines.

This thing.

Jeepneys came about at the end of World War 2, when American troops left behind a huge fleet of surplus military Jeeps. They were stripped down, had metal roofs added and had the backs extended and long seats put on the sides. Mechanics also added a bunch of extra sheet metal to the front and sides, and painted them a bunch of garish colors just for fun. The newer ones are  made of spare parts shipped from Japan and repurposed here. Apparently some jeepneys have such amenities as air conditioning, expanded passenger seating, and even TV screens, but every one I've been in feels (and sounds) like it could have come from the 1940s. It really is the perfect symbol for the resilience of the Philippines: no matter how many times it's been beat up, occupied, and reused, it still does exactly what it's meant to do, and makes no bones of it either. 

Jeepneys all have their destinations painted on the sides (thank goodness), so all I have to do to catch one is wait on the side of the street until the right one comes by and I flag it along. There's inevitably some double-takes and hushed giggles as 6 feet and 6 inches of foreigner squeezes into the back, probably dropping something in the process, and lots of awkward eye contact as everyone tries to pretend they're not staring at the weirdly-proportioned white guy sitting across from them. 

How it feels:

Despite the inevitable moments of cross-cultural discomfort, I love riding the jeep (as it's universally called)- it's incredibly cheap, they're everywhere, and once you figure out the right route it's probably the best way of getting from place to place. The days when I manage to stumble into a jeep with a roof high enough that I can sit up straight are even better, but it's best to keep my expectations realistic. 

My first weekend in QC, I visited the Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center, a wildlife rehabilitation center near the center of the city. It's a popular place for schoolchildren (and 22-year-old Fulbright scholars) to go ogle at endangered animals, and it also has lots of green spaces and pavilions for picnicking. For me, it was a good chance to see some of the animals I'll almost certainly never see in the wild here in the Philippines, and to catch a glimpse at the wildlife that's so quickly disappearing in this country. There's something that will always be sad to me about seeing so many animals cooped up in tiny cages, especially raptors like hawks and eagles, but at least in this case it was mostly for rehabilitation purposes, which I guess makes it better.

Crested Serpent Eagle (Spillornis Cheela)

White-Breasted Sea Eagle (Haliaeetus Leucogaster)

Mindanao Tarictic Hornbill (Penelopides affinis)

Juvenile White-Breasted Sea Eagle- this one had a wing injury that you can see at the bottom of the image

Forgot to get the ID on this one...

Rufous Hornbill (Buceros hydrocorax)

After the park, I also wandered for a while around the Quezon Memorial Circle, a large traffic circle in the middle of the city with a park in the middle. The park is dedicated to Manuel Quezon, the city's namesake and the first president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. He was a hero of the war for Philippine independence, and an extremely competent leader as president- among other things, he was responsible for promoting a universal Philippine Language besides Spanish and English, the languages of the colonizers. As such, he was given a fittingly impressive memorial. 

In my opinion it looks more like Sauron's vacation home than a monument to a national hero, but it's definitely impressive.

The park also has a big space for biking and skateboarding, some enclosed basketball courts, a big market, and even a pretty impressive open-air greenhouse. It was nice to walk around in, but for some reason I felt more uncomfortable there than I've felt almost anywhere else in the country. Perhaps it's because it's fairly crowded and open, but I felt more othered there than usual- there was just no way to escape the constant stares and occasional laughter, and hard to ignore the fact I was the only foreign-looking person in the entire place. It probably also had something to do with me wandering around aimlessly with a camera, which looks weird no matter where I am. Still, this more than anything else had me wishing I had a social group to explore the city with, rather than just doing it on my own. I'm the definition of an introvert, and I love my alone time, but doing cool things and seeing cool places is never as much fun for me when I'm the only one I know there. 

Pictured: my social life

Thankfully, I didn't have too much time to wallow in self-pity, as I was able to meet with my advisor a few days after I arrived in the city. My advisor, Jake, teaches at the University of the Philippines Diliman, which is objectively probably the best university in the country. UP Diliman is mercifully close to my apartment- 20 minutes and 15 pesos (about 35 cents) by jeepney- and has a surprisingly beautiful campus area. In a city full of high rises and exhaust fumes, it's one of the few large green areas I've been able to find. Huge trees overhang the main avenue, and there's a beautiful area of streams and meadows right in the middle of campus. I can tolerate living in cities, but I'll always crave some wild spaces in my life, and this is a welcome stand-in for that while I'm living here in the metropolis.

UP Diliman has also always been the center of activism in the country- as one could expect of a large, left-leaning college campus. It was the main base of opposition to president Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s, to the point that students barricaded themselves inside of buildings and operated the campus as a commune, refusing any sort of government control. It was also one of the main things that drove Marcos to declare martial law to crack down on dissent. As such, there have been many students, professors and others who were kidnapped, murdered or otherwise silenced due to their activism. There's an annual run to commemorate their sacrifices made, and a really beautiful monument in front of one school building in the same token. I'm generally not cultured enough to appreciate many sculptures (see my above comments on the Quezon memorial), but this was one I really could appreciate. Perhaps it's because I've taken part in some of my own activism, and have the utmost respect for people who are willing to risk their lives to speak truth to power.

As for the actual meeting with my advisor... well, more than anything it was a good wakeup call. I arrived in the Philippines planning, incredibly optimistically, to stay in Manila for a little less than a month, then immediately move out into the provinces to start my field work. It turns out, of course, that nothing is that easy- I'm missing the crucial step of actually finding people who are willing to work with me so that I can carry out the actual research thing. Obviously, for what I'm doing, I can't just go move to a hut in the countryside and start doing surveys of random people- I need to have some sort of NGO or affiliate who can help get me access to the populations I want to work with. Which is a problem given that I know essentially no-one in the Philippines. So, at the moment I'm stuck in a bit of a state of limbo, where I'm sending off as many emails as I can and prying into all my random connections, trying to network as much as possible. I've always prided myself on my networking abilities, but doing so in an unfamiliar country is an extra challenge. 

Over the past week, I've spent most of my days on the campus of UP Diliman, meeting with my advisor and mostly sitting in the university library, taking advantage of the fast wifi and decent study environment. It would be easy to feel a little driftless, but there's still so much to read about my research that I feel like I really am learning new things every day, and getting a clearer idea of the things I want to study. Which isn't to say my inner control freak isn't still panicking just a little. 

I've also been starting to meet new people, which feels really nice. I met a few of my fellow Fulbright scholars at a reception for the State Department last week, and got to go out with them afterwards. I've also connected with a grantee from last year who's living in Manila again with a real job and a friend of his, and got to go out with them to sample Philippine beer for the first time (I have.... mixed opinions). Not to mention other Filipino friends I've met, or the families of friends I made in the States. Since disaster risk reduction is such an active topic in this country, it feels like everyone has a couple of people they can connect me to. And more importantly, I'm starting to feel like I have people I can spend time with. So maybe my earlier assessment of my social life isn't entirely accurate. 

One of my favorite parts about my new apartment is that the tallest building has a deck on top with 360º views of Quezon City. I can see Manila Bay in the distance and the Zambales Mountains across it to the west, Mount Arayat to the north, the Sierra Madre mountains to the east, and the skyscrapers of the business districts to the south. A little more profound, though, is what's just underneath; while it's a posh, manicured little community where I live, just across the wall are houses with dirt floors and corrugated iron roofs.

Literally the class divide.

It's a good reminder that, no matter how many jeepneys I ride, or how much I like to complain about feeling the other in this country, I'll always be approaching it from a place of privilege. I have the choice to take a taxi when so many others don't, I can turn the air conditioning on when I get too hot, and I literally have someone come to my door and pick up my laundry. If I somehow end up living in a house with a dirt floor and a tin roof, it will (almost certainly) be my own choice, not what I'm forced into. Sometimes it's nice to get a birds-eye view of why I need to use my privilege for good.

Rooftop Geometry