There are dozens of dialects spoken among the 7,107 islands of the Philippines, but you wouldn't know that from a trip to the local bookstore. You'll find stacks and stacks of Tagalog-English dictionaries, Tagalog audio courses, Tagalog Rosetta Stones. But try to find even the most meager dictionary of Cebuano (a dialect-rich language spoken by a healthy third of the population), and you'll probably have to visit four stores. I did. And when I finally secured my quarry, and retreated to the flatbread pizza shop to learn the phrase for "excuse me" and the word for "scrumptious," I was not in luck.
Even though I quickly found the Cebuano word for penis (pikoy), testicle (itlog--the same as for "ovum," human or fowl), and rump (the delightful lubut), I couldn't find a preposition anywhere. I later decided that this had something to do with Cebuano grammar, but at the time, I just wondered at the ignorant text in front of me. I now knew how to say "understanding," but not "I understand;" how to say "here" but not "there;" how to ask someone to take me to the movies, but not the word for movie itself. This dictionary was a piece of trash, and if you know me, you know I am a fan of robust, unabridged reference books. The smell of the flimsy newsprint pages nauseated me.
Luckily, everyone in the Philippines under the age of 60 speaks a clear, articulate English, and you don't need much Cebuano to get along. Here's a basic vocabulary list, gleaned from my travels, with which you can easily make friends and enamor (or avoid) the opposite sex:
Carinderia (car-in-d'area): Imagine if your grandma cooked a massive Sunday dinner every day, and instead of spooning it into dishes and setting it on the table, she just hauled her silver pots out to the curb and set them up on a card table beside a cooler full of cokes. Of course, there are more established kitchens that copy this presentation-style, but they pale in comparison, and aren't nearly authentic enough for the gastrointestinal adventurist I know you to be. Go ahead--just lift up the lids and see what's inside. It's more than likely a little piece of heaven.
Gwapa/Gwapo ('gwah-pə/'gwah-poh): "Beautiful/handsome." If you're a decent-looking man under 40 years of age, you'll probably hear the masculine gwapo several dozen times a day. At first, it's flattering, but after a while, you'll get fatigued and start to shoot the feminine gwapa back at your admirers, just to watch them blush and retreat giggling behind a nearby obstacle.
Gusta ka ('goo-stə 'kah): "I like." Another Spanish holdover. Let yourself become a child again, pointing at foods and buildings and shiny objects, expressing your fool's approval.
Red Horse (rehd hoors): The Philippine strong beer, weighing in at 6.9% abv. It's shockingly drinkable, and only costs a quarter more than the popular and watery San Miguel Pilsen. ex. Gusta ka Red Horse.
Videoke: (viddy okey/ vidjokee) "Karaoke, basically, except the background video is almost always basketball highlights on loop." The Filipinos love them some sentimental rock ballads, and you're sure to find plenty on hand at the videoke bar. Be wary of choosing such relative rockers as Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive" or Jesus Christ Superstar's "Gethsemane." These will only net you confused stares and uncomfortable grimaces. But sing Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," and the revelers will flock around you like a brand new god.
3.03.2009
The Strand
There are two types of travel writing. You have classic British Isles style, in which the author employs latinate language to convey a shuddering distaste for native customs and hygiene. And you have what I will call gonzo modern, in which the writer puts himself forward as the object of ridicule. Both styles focus far too much on bowel movements and misfortune, and ultimately fail to communicate the fullness of the traveling experience. But if you chronicle with the wide-eyed excitement of the truly engaged, you will be written off immediately as naive, and no publishing house worth its teeth will touch your manuscript. There has to be another way, but until I find it, I will continue to give the details of my pepper-fired liquid shits, and err--in my cultural sensitivity--on the side of the gonzo. Of course, there is also the mundane genre of expat bloggery, where the writer has ceased to be surprised by the oddnesses of his host country, and spends time complaining about the fact that the new Nicole Kidman film is only showing in that dingy, out-of-the-way cinema far from the trainline.
I don't want this record to take that turn, but the truth is--at some point, I stopped touristing Cebu City and started living there. I mapped all the alleyways and fruit stalls within 2 kilometers of my pensionne room, sniffed out a reliable source for swamp cabbage and cucumber salad, and settled into a routine. It went something like this: street food, jeepney, streetfood, google, naptime, wash, repeat. Of course, It wasn't my plan to take up residence in the Queen City of the South, but my flight to Surigao--province of my mother's birth--was cancelled twice, and I eventually resigned myself to the will of the fates.*
I don't want this record to take that turn, but the truth is--at some point, I stopped touristing Cebu City and started living there. I mapped all the alleyways and fruit stalls within 2 kilometers of my pensionne room, sniffed out a reliable source for swamp cabbage and cucumber salad, and settled into a routine. It went something like this: street food, jeepney, streetfood, google, naptime, wash, repeat. Of course, It wasn't my plan to take up residence in the Queen City of the South, but my flight to Surigao--province of my mother's birth--was cancelled twice, and I eventually resigned myself to the will of the fates.*
2.21.2009
February 16, 2009
Dumaguete was billed as a laid-back college town, home to the hospitable and "gentle people of the south." But I found it otherwise. The folks at the Aldea Lodge were curt and unsmiling, and the sheets in my room there were strangely sticky. I imagined the last tenants eating pineapples in bed, shaving the sides off and plunging their fingers into the golden flesh, but I knew I was fooling myself.
After the charms of Siquijor, Dumaguete might as well have been New York--maybe even Detroit. In Cebu City, folks would at least look at me with a benign fascination. Here, they stared right through me. They didn't want my money, but they didn't want my company either. After finding the town square, and marveling at the brightly colored acre-wide playground there, I was chased off by the cold glares of some teenage mothers, and retreated to my room to relax on a protective layer of dirty shirts.
As I sat there, watching the Asian Travel Channel on mute as the jeepneys ran beneath my window, the mudbutt struck. After a quick peek in the mildewed, Bowery-style bath downstairs, I stole some napkins from the lodge cafe and went in search of a proper comfort room. I ended up squatting over a basin in the nearby Jollibee until my legs gave out and I relaxed my ass onto the seatless rim.
Now most tourists with mild dysentery would avoid Indian food like the plague, but I'm not like most tourists, and I was in desperate need of something meatless. I walked to the Persian Palate nearby--ordering Mongo Dal, ginger tea, cucumber-yogurt salad, and a massive plate of naan--and gorged myself, gasping and sweating as the waitress brought me extra napkins for my forehead and, laughing, turned a small metal fan in my direction.
Out on the street again, I suddenly realized the root of people's apparent disdain for me. Not only has the island of Negros been the site of several bloody sugarcane wars, but Dumaguete, the eastern capital, is home to Silliman University. That was it--these were the Filipinos I'd been looking for: the subversive intellectuals who despised Colonial rule, the bitter old men who wanted the oppressors' hands off their land and resources. I loved them, I wanted to speak with them, to collaborate and collude with them and maybe blow up a sugar truck.
The only problem was, they couldn't tell I wasn't white.
Dumaguete was billed as a laid-back college town, home to the hospitable and "gentle people of the south." But I found it otherwise. The folks at the Aldea Lodge were curt and unsmiling, and the sheets in my room there were strangely sticky. I imagined the last tenants eating pineapples in bed, shaving the sides off and plunging their fingers into the golden flesh, but I knew I was fooling myself.
After the charms of Siquijor, Dumaguete might as well have been New York--maybe even Detroit. In Cebu City, folks would at least look at me with a benign fascination. Here, they stared right through me. They didn't want my money, but they didn't want my company either. After finding the town square, and marveling at the brightly colored acre-wide playground there, I was chased off by the cold glares of some teenage mothers, and retreated to my room to relax on a protective layer of dirty shirts.
As I sat there, watching the Asian Travel Channel on mute as the jeepneys ran beneath my window, the mudbutt struck. After a quick peek in the mildewed, Bowery-style bath downstairs, I stole some napkins from the lodge cafe and went in search of a proper comfort room. I ended up squatting over a basin in the nearby Jollibee until my legs gave out and I relaxed my ass onto the seatless rim.
Now most tourists with mild dysentery would avoid Indian food like the plague, but I'm not like most tourists, and I was in desperate need of something meatless. I walked to the Persian Palate nearby--ordering Mongo Dal, ginger tea, cucumber-yogurt salad, and a massive plate of naan--and gorged myself, gasping and sweating as the waitress brought me extra napkins for my forehead and, laughing, turned a small metal fan in my direction.
Out on the street again, I suddenly realized the root of people's apparent disdain for me. Not only has the island of Negros been the site of several bloody sugarcane wars, but Dumaguete, the eastern capital, is home to Silliman University. That was it--these were the Filipinos I'd been looking for: the subversive intellectuals who despised Colonial rule, the bitter old men who wanted the oppressors' hands off their land and resources. I loved them, I wanted to speak with them, to collaborate and collude with them and maybe blow up a sugar truck.
The only problem was, they couldn't tell I wasn't white.
2.20.2009
February 14, 2009
If I feared that the fourteenth would be a letdown after yesterday, that fear lifted when a tiny girl approached me in the town center this morning, chanting "Ba-dok! Ba-dok! Ba-dok Obamaaaaa!" I laughed like a fool, and we exchanged thumbs ups back and forth for a little while before her mother led her away.
After a quick snack of red rice and lipton tea, I decided to turn down a tree-lined street on the way back to my room. Around the first bend, I found a couple kids shooting a worn basketball against a homemade backboard, and decided to join them. One of the boys ran off to get his cousin Shen, the resident English scholar, and I sank my first three shots--much to everyone's delight--before missing about 19 in a row. At one point I chased the ball into their front yard, which was populated by dozens of beautiful fighting cocks. "Is he gonna try and fight me?"--stepping gingerly around the scary looking bastard, his thin leash too long for my liking.
I told them about a story I read in Granta, on the tradition of cricket fighting in China. Shen ran to fetch their fighting spider, a creature in a velveteen box with a massive abdomen, and told me he'd be battling at 1 pm that day, if I wanted to see. As a culture tourist, I probably should have gone, but as a spider-lover, I couldn't.
After the seeming selfishness of Cebu, I had hardened myself, and I was unprepared for the generosity of these kids. They offered me pork kebabs and lemon water and marijuana, but I was vaguely afraid that they were after my internal organs, so I left, but not before beating Axel in a game of one-on-one. My final shot was an unlikely spinning jumper that kissed gently off the plywood backboard.
If I feared that the fourteenth would be a letdown after yesterday, that fear lifted when a tiny girl approached me in the town center this morning, chanting "Ba-dok! Ba-dok! Ba-dok Obamaaaaa!" I laughed like a fool, and we exchanged thumbs ups back and forth for a little while before her mother led her away.
After a quick snack of red rice and lipton tea, I decided to turn down a tree-lined street on the way back to my room. Around the first bend, I found a couple kids shooting a worn basketball against a homemade backboard, and decided to join them. One of the boys ran off to get his cousin Shen, the resident English scholar, and I sank my first three shots--much to everyone's delight--before missing about 19 in a row. At one point I chased the ball into their front yard, which was populated by dozens of beautiful fighting cocks. "Is he gonna try and fight me?"--stepping gingerly around the scary looking bastard, his thin leash too long for my liking.
I told them about a story I read in Granta, on the tradition of cricket fighting in China. Shen ran to fetch their fighting spider, a creature in a velveteen box with a massive abdomen, and told me he'd be battling at 1 pm that day, if I wanted to see. As a culture tourist, I probably should have gone, but as a spider-lover, I couldn't.
After the seeming selfishness of Cebu, I had hardened myself, and I was unprepared for the generosity of these kids. They offered me pork kebabs and lemon water and marijuana, but I was vaguely afraid that they were after my internal organs, so I left, but not before beating Axel in a game of one-on-one. My final shot was an unlikely spinning jumper that kissed gently off the plywood backboard.
2.15.2009
February 13, 2009
My brother was born on Friday the 13th, and I've always considered it an auspicious date. I disregard most pointless superstitions--black cats, broken mirrors, and the like have never frightened me, and in fact, I generally regard other folks' anathemae as lucky charms. Of course, some irrational fears are based in reality. Walk under a ladder and you may be struck from above. Fail to knock on wood and your ego may swell to dangerous proportions, unhumbled by a natural world that could swallow you at any moment. But the idea that a simple date can paralyze people--making them unable to leave the house, or even, apparently, the bed--this, I find ludicrous.
In the past few years, though, I've felt the thirteenth slipping from my grasp. It hasn't been unlucky, really, but it hasn't been grand like it was in past years.
But this Friday, on the island of Siquijor--called isla del fuego by the Spanish due to its November firefly swarm, and supposed home to witches and magicians--I reclaimed the date, and I made it gleam with sweat and shine.
The story is remarkable, but I will let the pictures do the telling:
Little Love Lodge.
The brilliantly clear waters of Salandoong Beach.
Bathing at the 400 year old balete tree.
A rare heart-shaped sea potato.
Intrepid guides Fulgen and Elie, shampooing Spike at the spring-fed pool.
Just one of the numerous basketball courts dotting the island's 45 kilometer circumference.
Cambugahayan Falls.
Metaphor.
One thing I didn't get a picture of: that night, after walking 2 miles without socks and feeling the blisters start to rise on my tender Achilleses, I finally made it to La Marmarine, a Japanese-run resort far from my guest house, whose food came highly recommended by the locals. When I ordered a simple green curry, the owners became noticeably and adorably offended, and forced seven pieces of Grade-A sashimi upon me. How could I resist? The squid was spectacular.
February 12, 2009
When that rare right whale beached off the Carolina coast 2 weeks ago, I assumed it was a bad omen for my journey. But today, after reading of 200 melon-headed whales in Manila Bay finding their way back to sea, I realized that the right whale was a different kind of warning. It wasn't telling me to stay in North Carolina--it was telling me to leave as soon as possible, before my blowhole sealed shut. If I'd stayed any longer, the air would have become too rarefied to breathe, and I would surely have died.
When my passport turned up missing five days before departure--and after hours spent searching through the endless stacks of paper in my parents' house--I started accepting the fact that my trip was doomed, justifying the doom with stories of my unpreparedness, of my frivolity and caprice. But, friends, the thing is: plans are merely corsets for the gorgeous unbridled flesh of life. When we depend on maps and itineraries to harness our world into a reasonable shape, we overlook the natural heft of chance, and lose some of those decadent and unexpected love handles that an unmapped life offers to the observant lover.
February 11, 2009
Chain Letter Rip-Off (updated)
Some friends of mine--who will remain unnamed--just love to update that damned facebook status, sometimes as often as 20 times a day. Now I'm not complaining. I understand they want to keep me abreast of the goings-on in their lives, but it's starting to fuck with me. I've been out of the country for four days now, and let me tell you: there is nothing worse than walking through the streets of a foreign city while constantly trying to find interesting statuses to perform and then post.
The feeling is similar to the one you get when traveling with a camera in hand. You spend so much time trying to capture moments, to capture some "proof" of your experience, that you run the risk of missing the experience entirely, coming home with mere souvenirs, and little else. My internal dialogue for the past few days has been driven by this impulse, and while I guess it is the curse of those who want to write, to shape reality into sentences and snapshots for others' consumption, it's starting to drive me a little mad:
Should I eat this 3 week old duck embryo? That might turn out to be a fine status update.
Ooh--Maybe I can find an interesting update in that dank, deserted alley.
Look! A man with horrible burns all over his face! That's definitely going on facebook.
Anyway, in honor of the ubiquitous 25 things craze that seems to be exciting the young people so much lately, I'm posting 21 unpublished status updates from the past four days of my life. Hope you folks enjoy.
1. Joel's carbon footprint is bigger than yours.
2. Joel is learning not to eat everything the airline puts in front of him, but it's an uphill battle against decades of Herring Family conditioning.
3. Joel's backpack is 33% clothing, 12% electronics, and 55% books and fruit.
4. Joel is surrounded by beauty. Beauty, and mangy cats. Oh, and 24 hour McDonald's.
5. Joel is a magnet for the ladyboys.
6. Joel just performed a massive version of Elton John's "Levon" while an infinite loop of Clyde Drexler highlights played on the videoke screen. I am home.
7. Joel is thinking about having a shirt made that reads either "I am not a sex tourist" or "Ask me about my Filipina Grandmother."
8. Joel would rather sleep curled in a piss-ripe alley than visit the fucking Cross of Magellan. Long live Lapu-Lapu!
9. Joel is eating tiny mandarins by the handful.
10. Joel found a used bookstore 5 minutes from his pensionne, filled with unexpected titles: Derrick Jensen's "A Language Older than Words," Rick Bragg's "All Over but the Shouting," and, perhaps the most unlikely, "Short Bike Rides: Ohio."
11. Joel wanted to tell you that the banana-curry pizza was good, he really did. But the truth is: it was...just...sacrilege.
12. Joel saw Obama on a supermarket billboard today. "YES YOU CAN Buy More With Your Spare CHANGE."
13. Joel doesn't have much of an appetite lately. It's a sensation he is unfamiliar with.
14. Joel just wasted three days of street-food penury on an air-conditioned comfort food binge.
15. Joel is learning to wipe his ass with a wet hand.
16. Joel is sound of billiards, smell of pork, taste of diesel, flesh of Christ.
17. Joel assumed that the "shared bath" would at least have running water. Good thing there was some left in that derelict hot tub in the lobby.
18. Joel ran across some fine graffiti this afternoon: an ambitious blackletter BIGG'N, the unintentionally ambiguous die Korean, and my personal favorite, Lil Dong.
19. Joel may have singlehandedly brought (a bastardized, east-coast white-boy version of) crumping to Cebu City.
20. Joel has stopped cursing the gods that twice cancelled his flight to Surigao, and is now entreating them with scraps of animal.
21. Joel is gradually finding the things he needs to survive. Yesterday: Sweet potato fries. Today: Sanitarium-brand granola and sweet ube ice cream.
February 10, 2009
Innocents Abroad
Sam Herring enjoys smoking cigarettes on the curbs of unfamiliar cities. I do the same thing with food, but I get fucked doing it.
I was eating Siopao--a pork-stuffed hot bun of the kind my grandma used to make--on a Cebu street corner when I was approached by two seemingly nice ladies. Ana, who spoke very fluent English, noted my red shoelaces--my last purchase in the states, which I'd bought to replace the bright white originals--and said they were "unique." With the predictable narcissism of a shut-in former beauty queen, I opened up immediately. I had just been thinking about my friend Tali's advice, that I should find a "gatekeeper" early on in my trip, and Ana seemed like she might fit the bill. She told me I could go to the radio station and have them make an announcement that Olivia Bacus's grandson was searching for his long-lost cousins, and hope someone might email or call back. Apparently this is not such an uncommon practice, but I found it odd and delightful to imagine. Of course, there's very little chance that anything would come of it, but still--the notion of my (nascent) purpose being broadcast over the airwaves got me very excited.
We talked for a while, and I asked Ana and her cousin Amanda where I might find a cheap cellphone, and they spoke in Tagalog for a moment before offering, with a shrugging reticence, that I could buy Amanda's old phone if I didn't want anything too fancy. I agreed to go with them to their house to get to retrieve the phone.
I was excited about checking out the inside of a local house--something I'd never experienced in Thailand--and I wasn't disappointed on that front. Everything was pink: the curtains, the couches, even the videoke-related game show on the television. As I sat with Ana's uncle Chris, though, I felt some odd tension between us, like he was sizing me up as a potential in-law. I flashed back to my conversation with Ana in the car, where she asked if I was married--she had seemed a bit upset when she found out I had a girlfriend, and asked why exactly then was I traveling alone? Obviously, I am somewhat of an anomaly. A solo white man in Cebu who's not looking for a wife or sex-friend.
Eventually, talk turned to Chris's job at a nearby casino, and before I knew it he had me in his "VIP room" showing me a little pokerjack scam. Basically, he would give me wordless hints from his privileged position as dealer, and with this knowledge I would scam the banker--the man sitting beside him. I was enjoying this enough, and I thought it was all completely theoretical until Mr. Dakoy showed up at the door. Now I have no idea why a man who won 50,000 USD at the casino the night before would come to Chris's house, off a claustrophobic graffiti-covered alley a good ways from the city center, but for some reason he did, and all of a sudden I had 200$ thrust into my hand and was part of a plot to scam this well-dressed businessman and split the take 50-50. It was all going well enough at first--I kept up an appearance of authenticity, letting him win one to make things seem less awry, but I was destroying him for all intents and purposes, and I was stacking the chips when he decided to trump me. I had around 2000$ on the table in front of me when Mr. Dakoy cashed in 20,000$. If he couldn't beat me with numbers, he would outbid me, and I'd be forced to forfeit.
I knew from Chris that Dakoy had a ten and a jack, while I had a 10, a 5, and a 6--21 exactly. I was seconds away from taking home 10,000 dollars, and I was shaking slightly with the implications--how I could fly Ingrid out here and spoil her with kebabs and prawns and brilliant white beaches, how I could travel so much further if I could only win this game. But Dakoy got wise. He looked at the numbers, and realized how foolish it would be for him to lose to someone with nothing on the line--Chris had allowed me 19,000$ worth of credit, and there was no cash in the kitty to cover my loss.
So the game was postponed, we sealed up our cards in separate envelopes, and I tried half-heartedly to get some money out of an ATM. Why, I don't know. I was obviously trying hard not to be the suspicious and cock-eyed American, to trust my new friends, and instead I was turning into another stereotype--the greedy white dude. I mean, shit, if we could show the old man 19,000 dollars we could take home 22. Right?
Chris claimed to have some connections for cash, but when I told him I could only get a little money from the bank, he was upset, and said we would have to forfeit the game, asking if I could pay him back the 200 he placed in my ignorant palm several hours before. At first, I agreed to give him half--must have been my white guilt flaring up--but then I remembered that this was his tip from a single night at the casino, and that I'm a poor traveler for whom 200 bucks is about 10 days of travel.
I bucked up, and told him this was his scam, and as long as we were fooling the rich man, I was fine with it, but the minute his money was lost, I was not responsible, and I wasn't going to be his white guy. I gave Ana 500 pesos for cab fare, though, as she had been very helpful on all fronts except the getting me involved in a weird and unlikely blackjack game, and I walked off to wonder if this was all part of an elaborate scam, or if it was just happenstance gone awry. The girls invited me to the disco tonight, but I think I'll decline.
February 10, 2009
The Difference Between Bangkok and Cebu City: a Primer for Novices.
When you walk into a disco bar in Bangkok, chances are you'll see a host of bikini-clad girls on a raised platform, dancing impassively to some bad classic rock covers.
When you walk into a disco bar in Cebu City, chances are you'll see everyone dancing on a raised platform, just destroying it in the laser-pierced fog, with Joel Herring at the edge, covered in sweat and trampling every sandal in a 5-foot radius.
At a Bangkok street stall, for the equivalent of 5o cents, you can buy a delicious bowl of broth with mung beans, cilantro, hot pepper flakes, and thinly sliced discs of cured pork.
At Cebu street stalls, there are no vegetables. There is only pork.
In Bangkok's Nana district, small children will accost you in the street at 3 in the morning and physically prevent from going on until you hand them some coins.
In Cebu's Fuente Osmeña district, small children will accost you in the street at 3 in the morning, but when you hand them money, they'll just hang from your arms and chant the generic name Joe repeatedly, begging you to buy them some Jollibee, and by the time you've figured out that they mean bad fast food and wrested yourself from their seemingly benign grip, they will have taken your fucking cellphone, the one you just bought that afternoon, and which cost more than you want to admit in public.
In Bangkok, you will be shocked, bored, amazed, and horrified, in roughly equal measure.
In Cebu, you will learn to live by your wits, to find Fuji apples & fresh ponkas in the hidden corners of the capital, and the days will be brilliant and rich, and when you walk into your overpriced pensionne after being robbed and held hostage by children and sentimental ladyboys that break into faux-hysterics on your shoulder and nearly get your wallet, and you look at the fresh handprints on your arm and feel the rain soaking through your shirt, you will laugh out loud, and think: this is life. This is it. And, still laughing, louder now--this day was rich and brilliant and filled to the fucking brim.
February 8, 2009
Touchdown, Manila.
My horoscope today in the in-flight magazine: You are oozing charm right now. The cat may have your tongue at the start of the month, but soon you'll be back to your usual glib self. Focus on creative pursuits, and embrace your childhood impulses.
Check, and check.
February 7, 2009
My last enduring image of America will be that sainted Harris Teeter at 7 in the morning--strolling through the multicolored aisles with gentle fluorescence and Beatles muzak shepherding me along. So much abundance. Such foolish appreciation of a Braeburn apple.
February 6, 2009
Lift Off
Ryan, sweet sonuvabitch that he is, decided to pick me up in Morehead and drive me to the Raleigh airport. On the surface this seemed like a perfect plan, but it turned sour quick.
You see, Ryan's gone full-vegan on us, and when we realized, we started scrambling to find something suitable for him to eat. Finally, we decided on Mexican--it wasn't ideal, but worst-case-scenario, the man could fill up on chips and salsa. Now, my dad merely tolerates Mexican food, and I'm not the biggest fan myself, especially on travel days. I mean, I'm gonna have mudbutt for the next few weeks anyway, so why rush into it before I'm even out of the country?
As it turned out, the beans were lard-free, and my sincronizada tortilla sandwich was pretty damned impressive. But the restaurant was crowded and the booth claustrophobic--somehow the table wasn't as long as the seats, and we were cramped and uncomfortable. Like Herrings, I guess you could say, in a too-bright silver tin.
My dad has an odd way with our childhood friends, and although I've witnessed it several times, I still can't make sense of it. I'm not sure he's even aware of it. Whenever someone visits the house, he has a habit of directly addressing them with deep life questions, keeping the blinders on for anyone else in the room. It's unnerving, but I usually laugh at it, or try to force words in edgewise past the blinders, or just give up and play some piano songs with mom in the other room as the in-depth manversation takes its course. But this was my last night in the states, and I was hungry for a little Joel-focussed dialogue. You can't fault me for that, can you? Instead, I just shrunk into my cramped corner as the Stephen & Ryan show carried on next door, getting sulkier as my potential threads were picked up and discarded.
At some point, when the conversation turned to what type of furniture Ryan's girlfriend prefers ("Mediterranean?"), I stood up quietly and headed to the bathroom, where I started crying into the remarkably clean toilet. I eventually gathered my composure, leaving the faintest hint of tears on my face in full regressed-high-school-drama-queen fashion, and walked back to the table, but not before swallowing the sweet 7.5 mg Percocet that Nina gave me to ease my 24 hour flight.
I decided I would not create a scene. I'd keep my composure, and try to steer the conversation in a different direction. Hopefully, um, towards myself. Unfortunately, this just devolved into me repeatedly challenging and antagonizing Ryan. At some point, after he claimed Flaubert's Parrot is Madame Bovary written from Charles Bovary's perspective, I laughed derisively, and he stormed off to the bathroom to have his own little fit.
When he came back to the table, I tried to iron things out and let the tension fade. But when my dad leaned forward--all conspiratorial stage whisper--and asked if Ryan needed some meds to deal with my shit, the irony was just too much, and I retreated into my corner, miffed. When dad explained: "Look, y'all are talking about books I don't even know about," I shot back reflexively, "Well I don't give a damn what kind of armchair Elizabeth likes either, but you talked about that shit for 5 minutes."
We Herrings are a proud people, and in this sense my father is the model Herring. Wounded, he gathered his hat, made sure mom had enough money to cover the bill, and walked outside to smoke a string of cigarettes. I broke down at the table, and I'm pretty sure the waitress decided right then that Ryan and I were lovers. Earlier, I had playfully chided him about his diet in front of her--"Don't worry, he's making us miserable too"--and now here I was holding my mother's hand with tears running down my face in the middle of a busy Mexican restaurant. Havelock is a military town. These things just don't happen here.
My brother was born on Friday the 13th, and I've always considered it an auspicious date. I disregard most pointless superstitions--black cats, broken mirrors, and the like have never frightened me, and in fact, I generally regard other folks' anathemae as lucky charms. Of course, some irrational fears are based in reality. Walk under a ladder and you may be struck from above. Fail to knock on wood and your ego may swell to dangerous proportions, unhumbled by a natural world that could swallow you at any moment. But the idea that a simple date can paralyze people--making them unable to leave the house, or even, apparently, the bed--this, I find ludicrous.
In the past few years, though, I've felt the thirteenth slipping from my grasp. It hasn't been unlucky, really, but it hasn't been grand like it was in past years.
But this Friday, on the island of Siquijor--called isla del fuego by the Spanish due to its November firefly swarm, and supposed home to witches and magicians--I reclaimed the date, and I made it gleam with sweat and shine.
The story is remarkable, but I will let the pictures do the telling:
Little Love Lodge.
The brilliantly clear waters of Salandoong Beach.
Bathing at the 400 year old balete tree.
A rare heart-shaped sea potato.
Intrepid guides Fulgen and Elie, shampooing Spike at the spring-fed pool.
Just one of the numerous basketball courts dotting the island's 45 kilometer circumference.
Cambugahayan Falls.
Metaphor.
One thing I didn't get a picture of: that night, after walking 2 miles without socks and feeling the blisters start to rise on my tender Achilleses, I finally made it to La Marmarine, a Japanese-run resort far from my guest house, whose food came highly recommended by the locals. When I ordered a simple green curry, the owners became noticeably and adorably offended, and forced seven pieces of Grade-A sashimi upon me. How could I resist? The squid was spectacular.
February 12, 2009
When that rare right whale beached off the Carolina coast 2 weeks ago, I assumed it was a bad omen for my journey. But today, after reading of 200 melon-headed whales in Manila Bay finding their way back to sea, I realized that the right whale was a different kind of warning. It wasn't telling me to stay in North Carolina--it was telling me to leave as soon as possible, before my blowhole sealed shut. If I'd stayed any longer, the air would have become too rarefied to breathe, and I would surely have died.
When my passport turned up missing five days before departure--and after hours spent searching through the endless stacks of paper in my parents' house--I started accepting the fact that my trip was doomed, justifying the doom with stories of my unpreparedness, of my frivolity and caprice. But, friends, the thing is: plans are merely corsets for the gorgeous unbridled flesh of life. When we depend on maps and itineraries to harness our world into a reasonable shape, we overlook the natural heft of chance, and lose some of those decadent and unexpected love handles that an unmapped life offers to the observant lover.
February 11, 2009
Chain Letter Rip-Off (updated)
Some friends of mine--who will remain unnamed--just love to update that damned facebook status, sometimes as often as 20 times a day. Now I'm not complaining. I understand they want to keep me abreast of the goings-on in their lives, but it's starting to fuck with me. I've been out of the country for four days now, and let me tell you: there is nothing worse than walking through the streets of a foreign city while constantly trying to find interesting statuses to perform and then post.
The feeling is similar to the one you get when traveling with a camera in hand. You spend so much time trying to capture moments, to capture some "proof" of your experience, that you run the risk of missing the experience entirely, coming home with mere souvenirs, and little else. My internal dialogue for the past few days has been driven by this impulse, and while I guess it is the curse of those who want to write, to shape reality into sentences and snapshots for others' consumption, it's starting to drive me a little mad:
Should I eat this 3 week old duck embryo? That might turn out to be a fine status update.
Ooh--Maybe I can find an interesting update in that dank, deserted alley.
Look! A man with horrible burns all over his face! That's definitely going on facebook.
Anyway, in honor of the ubiquitous 25 things craze that seems to be exciting the young people so much lately, I'm posting 21 unpublished status updates from the past four days of my life. Hope you folks enjoy.
1. Joel's carbon footprint is bigger than yours.
2. Joel is learning not to eat everything the airline puts in front of him, but it's an uphill battle against decades of Herring Family conditioning.
3. Joel's backpack is 33% clothing, 12% electronics, and 55% books and fruit.
4. Joel is surrounded by beauty. Beauty, and mangy cats. Oh, and 24 hour McDonald's.
5. Joel is a magnet for the ladyboys.
6. Joel just performed a massive version of Elton John's "Levon" while an infinite loop of Clyde Drexler highlights played on the videoke screen. I am home.
7. Joel is thinking about having a shirt made that reads either "I am not a sex tourist" or "Ask me about my Filipina Grandmother."
8. Joel would rather sleep curled in a piss-ripe alley than visit the fucking Cross of Magellan. Long live Lapu-Lapu!
9. Joel is eating tiny mandarins by the handful.
10. Joel found a used bookstore 5 minutes from his pensionne, filled with unexpected titles: Derrick Jensen's "A Language Older than Words," Rick Bragg's "All Over but the Shouting," and, perhaps the most unlikely, "Short Bike Rides: Ohio."
11. Joel wanted to tell you that the banana-curry pizza was good, he really did. But the truth is: it was...just...sacrilege.
12. Joel saw Obama on a supermarket billboard today. "YES YOU CAN Buy More With Your Spare CHANGE."
13. Joel doesn't have much of an appetite lately. It's a sensation he is unfamiliar with.
14. Joel just wasted three days of street-food penury on an air-conditioned comfort food binge.
15. Joel is learning to wipe his ass with a wet hand.
16. Joel is sound of billiards, smell of pork, taste of diesel, flesh of Christ.
17. Joel assumed that the "shared bath" would at least have running water. Good thing there was some left in that derelict hot tub in the lobby.
18. Joel ran across some fine graffiti this afternoon: an ambitious blackletter BIGG'N, the unintentionally ambiguous die Korean, and my personal favorite, Lil Dong.
19. Joel may have singlehandedly brought (a bastardized, east-coast white-boy version of) crumping to Cebu City.
20. Joel has stopped cursing the gods that twice cancelled his flight to Surigao, and is now entreating them with scraps of animal.
21. Joel is gradually finding the things he needs to survive. Yesterday: Sweet potato fries. Today: Sanitarium-brand granola and sweet ube ice cream.
February 10, 2009
Innocents Abroad
Sam Herring enjoys smoking cigarettes on the curbs of unfamiliar cities. I do the same thing with food, but I get fucked doing it.
I was eating Siopao--a pork-stuffed hot bun of the kind my grandma used to make--on a Cebu street corner when I was approached by two seemingly nice ladies. Ana, who spoke very fluent English, noted my red shoelaces--my last purchase in the states, which I'd bought to replace the bright white originals--and said they were "unique." With the predictable narcissism of a shut-in former beauty queen, I opened up immediately. I had just been thinking about my friend Tali's advice, that I should find a "gatekeeper" early on in my trip, and Ana seemed like she might fit the bill. She told me I could go to the radio station and have them make an announcement that Olivia Bacus's grandson was searching for his long-lost cousins, and hope someone might email or call back. Apparently this is not such an uncommon practice, but I found it odd and delightful to imagine. Of course, there's very little chance that anything would come of it, but still--the notion of my (nascent) purpose being broadcast over the airwaves got me very excited.
We talked for a while, and I asked Ana and her cousin Amanda where I might find a cheap cellphone, and they spoke in Tagalog for a moment before offering, with a shrugging reticence, that I could buy Amanda's old phone if I didn't want anything too fancy. I agreed to go with them to their house to get to retrieve the phone.
I was excited about checking out the inside of a local house--something I'd never experienced in Thailand--and I wasn't disappointed on that front. Everything was pink: the curtains, the couches, even the videoke-related game show on the television. As I sat with Ana's uncle Chris, though, I felt some odd tension between us, like he was sizing me up as a potential in-law. I flashed back to my conversation with Ana in the car, where she asked if I was married--she had seemed a bit upset when she found out I had a girlfriend, and asked why exactly then was I traveling alone? Obviously, I am somewhat of an anomaly. A solo white man in Cebu who's not looking for a wife or sex-friend.
Eventually, talk turned to Chris's job at a nearby casino, and before I knew it he had me in his "VIP room" showing me a little pokerjack scam. Basically, he would give me wordless hints from his privileged position as dealer, and with this knowledge I would scam the banker--the man sitting beside him. I was enjoying this enough, and I thought it was all completely theoretical until Mr. Dakoy showed up at the door. Now I have no idea why a man who won 50,000 USD at the casino the night before would come to Chris's house, off a claustrophobic graffiti-covered alley a good ways from the city center, but for some reason he did, and all of a sudden I had 200$ thrust into my hand and was part of a plot to scam this well-dressed businessman and split the take 50-50. It was all going well enough at first--I kept up an appearance of authenticity, letting him win one to make things seem less awry, but I was destroying him for all intents and purposes, and I was stacking the chips when he decided to trump me. I had around 2000$ on the table in front of me when Mr. Dakoy cashed in 20,000$. If he couldn't beat me with numbers, he would outbid me, and I'd be forced to forfeit.
I knew from Chris that Dakoy had a ten and a jack, while I had a 10, a 5, and a 6--21 exactly. I was seconds away from taking home 10,000 dollars, and I was shaking slightly with the implications--how I could fly Ingrid out here and spoil her with kebabs and prawns and brilliant white beaches, how I could travel so much further if I could only win this game. But Dakoy got wise. He looked at the numbers, and realized how foolish it would be for him to lose to someone with nothing on the line--Chris had allowed me 19,000$ worth of credit, and there was no cash in the kitty to cover my loss.
So the game was postponed, we sealed up our cards in separate envelopes, and I tried half-heartedly to get some money out of an ATM. Why, I don't know. I was obviously trying hard not to be the suspicious and cock-eyed American, to trust my new friends, and instead I was turning into another stereotype--the greedy white dude. I mean, shit, if we could show the old man 19,000 dollars we could take home 22. Right?
Chris claimed to have some connections for cash, but when I told him I could only get a little money from the bank, he was upset, and said we would have to forfeit the game, asking if I could pay him back the 200 he placed in my ignorant palm several hours before. At first, I agreed to give him half--must have been my white guilt flaring up--but then I remembered that this was his tip from a single night at the casino, and that I'm a poor traveler for whom 200 bucks is about 10 days of travel.
I bucked up, and told him this was his scam, and as long as we were fooling the rich man, I was fine with it, but the minute his money was lost, I was not responsible, and I wasn't going to be his white guy. I gave Ana 500 pesos for cab fare, though, as she had been very helpful on all fronts except the getting me involved in a weird and unlikely blackjack game, and I walked off to wonder if this was all part of an elaborate scam, or if it was just happenstance gone awry. The girls invited me to the disco tonight, but I think I'll decline.
February 10, 2009
The Difference Between Bangkok and Cebu City: a Primer for Novices.
When you walk into a disco bar in Bangkok, chances are you'll see a host of bikini-clad girls on a raised platform, dancing impassively to some bad classic rock covers.
When you walk into a disco bar in Cebu City, chances are you'll see everyone dancing on a raised platform, just destroying it in the laser-pierced fog, with Joel Herring at the edge, covered in sweat and trampling every sandal in a 5-foot radius.
At a Bangkok street stall, for the equivalent of 5o cents, you can buy a delicious bowl of broth with mung beans, cilantro, hot pepper flakes, and thinly sliced discs of cured pork.
At Cebu street stalls, there are no vegetables. There is only pork.
In Bangkok's Nana district, small children will accost you in the street at 3 in the morning and physically prevent from going on until you hand them some coins.
In Cebu's Fuente Osmeña district, small children will accost you in the street at 3 in the morning, but when you hand them money, they'll just hang from your arms and chant the generic name Joe repeatedly, begging you to buy them some Jollibee, and by the time you've figured out that they mean bad fast food and wrested yourself from their seemingly benign grip, they will have taken your fucking cellphone, the one you just bought that afternoon, and which cost more than you want to admit in public.
In Bangkok, you will be shocked, bored, amazed, and horrified, in roughly equal measure.
In Cebu, you will learn to live by your wits, to find Fuji apples & fresh ponkas in the hidden corners of the capital, and the days will be brilliant and rich, and when you walk into your overpriced pensionne after being robbed and held hostage by children and sentimental ladyboys that break into faux-hysterics on your shoulder and nearly get your wallet, and you look at the fresh handprints on your arm and feel the rain soaking through your shirt, you will laugh out loud, and think: this is life. This is it. And, still laughing, louder now--this day was rich and brilliant and filled to the fucking brim.
February 8, 2009
Touchdown, Manila.
My horoscope today in the in-flight magazine: You are oozing charm right now. The cat may have your tongue at the start of the month, but soon you'll be back to your usual glib self. Focus on creative pursuits, and embrace your childhood impulses.
Check, and check.
February 7, 2009
My last enduring image of America will be that sainted Harris Teeter at 7 in the morning--strolling through the multicolored aisles with gentle fluorescence and Beatles muzak shepherding me along. So much abundance. Such foolish appreciation of a Braeburn apple.
February 6, 2009
Lift Off
Ryan, sweet sonuvabitch that he is, decided to pick me up in Morehead and drive me to the Raleigh airport. On the surface this seemed like a perfect plan, but it turned sour quick.
You see, Ryan's gone full-vegan on us, and when we realized, we started scrambling to find something suitable for him to eat. Finally, we decided on Mexican--it wasn't ideal, but worst-case-scenario, the man could fill up on chips and salsa. Now, my dad merely tolerates Mexican food, and I'm not the biggest fan myself, especially on travel days. I mean, I'm gonna have mudbutt for the next few weeks anyway, so why rush into it before I'm even out of the country?
As it turned out, the beans were lard-free, and my sincronizada tortilla sandwich was pretty damned impressive. But the restaurant was crowded and the booth claustrophobic--somehow the table wasn't as long as the seats, and we were cramped and uncomfortable. Like Herrings, I guess you could say, in a too-bright silver tin.
My dad has an odd way with our childhood friends, and although I've witnessed it several times, I still can't make sense of it. I'm not sure he's even aware of it. Whenever someone visits the house, he has a habit of directly addressing them with deep life questions, keeping the blinders on for anyone else in the room. It's unnerving, but I usually laugh at it, or try to force words in edgewise past the blinders, or just give up and play some piano songs with mom in the other room as the in-depth manversation takes its course. But this was my last night in the states, and I was hungry for a little Joel-focussed dialogue. You can't fault me for that, can you? Instead, I just shrunk into my cramped corner as the Stephen & Ryan show carried on next door, getting sulkier as my potential threads were picked up and discarded.
At some point, when the conversation turned to what type of furniture Ryan's girlfriend prefers ("Mediterranean?"), I stood up quietly and headed to the bathroom, where I started crying into the remarkably clean toilet. I eventually gathered my composure, leaving the faintest hint of tears on my face in full regressed-high-school-drama-queen fashion, and walked back to the table, but not before swallowing the sweet 7.5 mg Percocet that Nina gave me to ease my 24 hour flight.
I decided I would not create a scene. I'd keep my composure, and try to steer the conversation in a different direction. Hopefully, um, towards myself. Unfortunately, this just devolved into me repeatedly challenging and antagonizing Ryan. At some point, after he claimed Flaubert's Parrot is Madame Bovary written from Charles Bovary's perspective, I laughed derisively, and he stormed off to the bathroom to have his own little fit.
When he came back to the table, I tried to iron things out and let the tension fade. But when my dad leaned forward--all conspiratorial stage whisper--and asked if Ryan needed some meds to deal with my shit, the irony was just too much, and I retreated into my corner, miffed. When dad explained: "Look, y'all are talking about books I don't even know about," I shot back reflexively, "Well I don't give a damn what kind of armchair Elizabeth likes either, but you talked about that shit for 5 minutes."
We Herrings are a proud people, and in this sense my father is the model Herring. Wounded, he gathered his hat, made sure mom had enough money to cover the bill, and walked outside to smoke a string of cigarettes. I broke down at the table, and I'm pretty sure the waitress decided right then that Ryan and I were lovers. Earlier, I had playfully chided him about his diet in front of her--"Don't worry, he's making us miserable too"--and now here I was holding my mother's hand with tears running down my face in the middle of a busy Mexican restaurant. Havelock is a military town. These things just don't happen here.
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