Manila and Intramuros

On July 11, 2013 By Faine GreenwoodIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

The Philippines is looked over.

The visitor to the Philippines from the US is confronted with a large archipelago full of people who are very much aware of your homeland, who you yourself remain distinctly unaware of. All Californians grew up with Filipinos at school and in the neighborhood, but somehow we still looked through the reality of their place of origin.

Filipino restaurants didn’t dot the neighborhood, the local community college was unlikely to offer Tagalog lessons, and no one (other than Filipinos) spoke of saving up their money for that dream trip to Manila. Thailand and Vietnam seemed more real: even history books restricted the Philippines to a curious footnote in the remarkable career of MacArthur, or a paragraph or two about the Marcos regime, and Imelda’s fondness for footwear.

It is the overlooked Southeast Asian nation to the north, unless you’re a scuba diver: a long-term expat friend observed to me that he suspects the bulk of visitors are Hong Kong residents desperate to escape their peninsula for a long weekend. And there, Manila is only a brief plane ride away.

It is blighted perhaps but not all of it is blighted. In the rare event of seeing an image of Manila in the Western media, it is inevitable that a dump be portrayed. Perhaps a correspondent will be standing atop this remarkable monument to filth, looking concerned and talking about the Plight Of The Poor.

Manila’s not-so-poor warrant not a mention, and the decline of the corrupted but very interesting Marcoses has rendered even the elite unimportant. “There’s no there there,” one imagines Gertrude Stein observing of the place, circa 2013.

But Manila also possesses skyscrapers – great canyons of them, a skyline “that encircles you” as my friend observed — and universities with mowed grass, and an old Spanish center, and suburbs with single-family houses and a profusion of joggers. Also there are mallls, malls that would fit into Iowa City, with everyone nipping in for Taco Bell and the latest sale on Vons sneakers, and walking down long marbled corridors of entirely American-origin shops, with not a single hint that you are in fact in Asia.

A hefty percentage of the crowd is wearing a shirt with a NFL team logo on it, or the American flag, and even the children are outfitted in Adidas.

The entire city strikes me as some parallel American re-imagining in some ways. In some ways, it makes me feel embarrassed. We – nationally, in nationalist terms – did not do well by this country.

I decided to visit Intramuros because I am fond of Spanish colonial architecture, and also because I tend to feel that a good way to begin understanding what a city is all about is backtracking to where it first started from.

Manila was Intramuros and Intramuros was Manila before the slow progression of the city across the face of southern Luzon: here was the first Spanish feint into building their Ever Loyal City, populated by religious men, traders, and the local “Negritos” (as the locals, who were presumably both small and dark, were unkindly dubbed).

The sameness of the Spanish colonial experiment is remarkable to me, and it is also comforting, as someone who has spent a hefty percentage of my life residing within various bits of the former Iberian empire. The same cobblestone streets and high ceilings; the same growths of palm trees and yellow-washed walls, and courtyards with austere fountains in them, the same brown signs and road-side lanterns.

A stroll through Intramuros was very much akin to a stroll through the French Quarter (first built by the Spanish) or Ybor City in Tampa: I was disappointed to find that no one had thought to set up a shop producing hand-rolled cigars, though tobacco is not a primary Philippine export.

The San Agustin church in Intramuros was buit in 1589 and is one of the only structures still standing after the bombardment of the old city by WWII: it is an interesting mental exercise to stand here, and note that this church predates the oldest standing structures of the Spanish colonial experiment in New Mexico. The church itself is violently Iberian: a stone Roman Catholic edifice dotted with fading tapestries, chipped wooden sculptures of Christ and the disciples, and lightly-flickering candles. I was in Southeast Asia, but I was most reminded of my 2009 visit to Spanish Toledo: it was an entirely new form of exoticism.

San Agustin is also known as the wedding capital of the city, and for good reason: there was one going on the morning I was there. I spied upon the extremely long ceremony from behind a grate and from the balcony where the antique pipe organ sits: I never did manage to see The Kiss The Bride Part, and indeed, found it difficult to determine exactly when the ceremony ended. Thus is my knowledge of Catholic weddings.

I headed for lunch at the Ristorante Delle Mitre, acros the street from San Agustin. The restaurant is themed in a fashion that can only be described as “bishop,” with an extensive Philippine – Western menu where most of the dishes are named after either saints or former bishops.

Nuns in red and white habits circulate the place and man the kitchen, and the entire ambience is exactly that of a Cuban cafe in Tampa or in Miami. I ordered seafood chowder and an enormous pork knuckle in tomato sauce with plantains and was deeply satisfied. They brought me San Miguel in a frosted mug the size of my head, with lime in it. I did not try the cafe con leche: for a nation that grows excellent coffee, the coffee that is actually served in the Philippines is an exercise in disappointment.

I left the church and walked a block off Intramuros, the street beside the Manila House Museum, and you are back in the Phillipines: I walked down a Sunday street populated by people sitting about doing nothing in particular, as befits the Sabbath, listening to music and eating deep-fried bananas. “Hey girl!” a middle-aged man in a tank top said to me, waving from the corner.

I waved back. Waving back is a good idea here.

Angkor Again: Exotic Friends

On March 30, 2013 By Faine GreenwoodIn Uncategorized1 Comment

To feel jaded about one of the planet’s most impressive monuments, is perhaps, to be tired of life. Or it is just a normal state of the human condition: when confronted with wonder, we are inevitably prone to sorting it away into neat boxes, to (cleverly) making it less and less wondrous every single time that we view it.

So too, has this happened when it comes to me and the temples of Angkor in Cambodia.

I first visited Angkor Wat in 2010 when the idea of moving to Asia was still new and romantically exciting to me: I was set to begin my first-ever newspaper job but wanted first to spend a week wandering around Cambodia’s crown jewel (or whatever) before dropping into the 2 to 12 and the perennial agitated shouting of the newsroom.

So I went to Siem Reap — bought a flight out of Bangkok, instead of braving the dodgy trans-border bus — and waited expectantly in the flight waiting area, looking at the people around me for tell-tale signs of being seasoned expats: I imagined they would all possess thousand-mile gazes and weird scars and interesting clothing choices. I look back on it now and they were pretty much all Lonely Planet toting Dutch tourists wearing practical Khaki clothes, but it felt sort of alluring at the time.

We took a small turboprop with tropical fish painted on it over the great marshy expanse of Cambodia, which gleams like a mirror in the sun from a plane window, and dropped into Siem Reap at the small airport there. It is an old airport: one where you disembark down metal stairs in a Jackie-O esque fashion, stepping into a sweltering and sugar palm-tree festooned plains land. (A landscape that now populates both my dreams and my days — but then, it didn’t. This was before).

The first time I set foot in Cambodia. I was excited: it was a big moment. At the time, I didn’t know how big it would become.

My first Cambodian tuk-tuk ever was waiting for me at the airport to take me to my hotel, driving the ubiquitous motorbike-hitched-to-a-chariot thing that has formed a large part of my daily life and times ever since.

“Different from the Indian tuk-tuks,” I noted to the driver, who was aware of the context and agreed.

“Simpler,” he said, punctuating the statement with a typically Cambodian ironic burst of laughter.

There’s no need to run through the whole description of a first time visit to Angkor Wat, I’m pretty sure. Not here. There’s the shocking size of the place and its awesome antiquity, the creeping vines and austere and crumbling faces of the Apsara dancers the sweaty heat of the day, and the child salespeople who have somehow memorized every world capital at some uncertain point of study. If you have been, you know all of this.

I rented a bike that first visit (an idea i look back upon three days later as rather shockingly ambitious) and sweated my way miles in the sun to the temples, where I maneuvered around large shoals of guided tourists. I climbed to the top of a pyramid temple nearish the Bayon and sat there for a while as a light misty rain began to fall, alone at the top of the steps and watching birds fly from tall tree to tall tree.

In these moments, moving to Cambodia seemed like the best possible choice.

I then took a bus to Phnom Penh and began work at the Cambodia Daily. That is another story: through this, and the passage of months and experiences both excellent and horrifying, I became at one point or another an expat.

And I kept going back to Angkor — when friends came, when family came, when I was around. Because why go to Siem Reap without staring at it? Even if it did cost me $20?

But it has happened: even Angkor Wat has become familiar. I have become, as they say, accustomed to its face.

I would not say the thrill is gone now — but rather, I’d describe it as the sensation of going through a beloved book again that you’ve already read once or twice or three times.You love the book but have also internalized large bits of it — can anticipate what it is saying before it says it, have figured out the intricacies of the plot and can stare around the corners at what is coming up. You fill in large swaths of it without reading the words. It’s become part of you.

So too with Angkor and me these days, where I’ve found that I can tick off and describe the monuments almost before I see them, know exactly where to navigate to see my favorite carving or strange pillar, or that particularly mango tree swarming with pissed-off weaver ants.

To that insufferable normalizing bit of my brain, even an Angkor visit has become something like navigating a suburban neighborhood in a practical car to a Starbucks outlet: it is a thing I know, a direction I can steer myself in.

Perhaps Angkor has lost its exoticism with me but then I have gained something too.

A cultural marvel has become in some curious respect a personal friend, a closeness rendered to me by the singular advantage of my being able to visit often — just about as often as I’d like, whenever I’m willing to brave the bus-journey up from Phnom Penh and elbow aside a few European tourists to get to where I’d like to go. None of this is arduous.

Yes, there are small secrets still left at Angkor to me, and there are still smiling Buddhas wreathed in vine and pot shards buried in jungle, and forest trails and seasonal waterfalls — but the size and shape of the main temples have become well known and comforting.

It is not defeat but familiarity. It’s a love borne out of going again, and again, and again.

Assorted thoughts on Malacca

On November 9, 2012 By Faine GreenwoodIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

malakapedicab — Typical Malaccan pedicab.

I like Portuguese settlements, I suppose—not that I have visited them often, but there is something to the concept. They do not have the buttoned-down nature of British colonies, perhaps: there is a sort of wild Catholicism to them, the sort you might see in Spanish and Portuguese streets during a major religious celebration.

Malacca was once a major trading post, controlled first by the Malays, than shifting to the Portuguese,than the Dutch, than to the British—and finally, back to the Malays in the 1950s, after independence.

Trading ports attract all manner of strange people, and Malacca turned into an extremely cosmopolitan sort of place—illustrated by stiff Caucasian mannequins wearing the traditional dress of the area’s ethnic groups at the Sultan’s Palace museum. (Why only the Thai mannequin is grinning like an idiot…well, I don’t have a suitable answer for that).

The pirates and the havoc have gone, although there is a pirate-themed theme park and you will see small children waving around plastic cutlasses. Now, Malacca is a quiet, coastal town, with a rather interesting old district and big apartment and condo buildings sprouting like mushrooms on the edge of the historic area.

Old Malacca was designated a World Heritage Site a few years back, and it is worthy of the term: curving roads set off by ramshackle shophouses, some saved as museums, gutters with unidentifiable water running by them. There are little art galleries and cafes in them now, where you can sit and watch tourists from all over the world puzzle over which semi obscene t-shirt they’d like to buy.

But it is not a crass tourism, and there is not really much of it on the weekends: you can easily wander down a small path into an antiques store piled high with vintage money and carvings from Malaysia’s Hindu era, or find yourself very much alone in some back-alley bit of town.

The food is excellent here. Peranakans are Chinese Malays, and those Nyonya restaurant you see everywhere are well worth trying. (Baba refers to a male Peranakan, and Nyonya to a female, as I learned). There is also excellent Indian food, and Chinese food as well: much like the rest of Malaysia, Malacca is a melting pot. I went out the Portuguese Settlement today: that’s another blog post.

friendlymalays — Friendly Malaysians at the tandoori shop.

I was thinking today about Malaysia’s identity. Most Malaysians could probably identify themself as having a heritage of something else – this is rather like the USA.

It is also interesting to contemplate how developed Malaysia is. The taxi drivers liked to discuss this with me, in the rather elegant English that seems to come easily to 60-something men here: two of the taxi drivers I rode with had been to Cambodia, and they hastened to described its poverty, its corruption. They also hastened to compare Malaysia with the rest of the world – and the rest of the world was generally found wanting.

“There is all this fighting in Syria, Muslim on Muslim,” one cabbie mused, as we drove in from the bus station. “I simply don’t understand it. Here in Malaysia, we have peace. We all get along with each other.”

outwithgrandma — Boy out with his grandmother at the fort in Malacca.

Well, I’m unsure about that -and I really am, my lack of Malaysia-specific knowledge is disturbingly vast – but there is certainly a pleasant lack of tension in the air here, at least to the casual observer. I enjoy watching the shoals of hijab-donning women in colorful costumes mixing with Chinese tourists and slightly head-addled looking Westerners: the Malaysian melting pot, united by tourist attractions and food stuffs flavored with sambal.

ONE FINAL OBSERVATION:

Malaysians are absolutely wild about John Denver. I hear Country Roads multiple times a day in various locales here. Kids play it on the street, taxi drivers play it in their cabs, restaurant owners hum it while they work…what in the name of God is going on here?

Thais Worry About International Image in Wake of Bangkok Bomb Scare

On February 24, 2012 By Faine GreenwoodIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Thai Bombing Vs Thai Tourist Industry – UN Dispatch

Thai temple in Bangkok — Bangkok, Thailand.

Thailand is circling the wagons after a recent terrorist bomb scare in the heart of Bangkok—and some Thais are questioning if their nation’s relatively laissez-faire approach towards international visitors is the right one.

The swift police response hasn’t been mirrored by the Thai government, however, which appears to be focusing much more on damage-control than it is on solving the problem, or acknowledging serious gaps in Thailand’s security network exist. Many have piled on Foreign Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul, who said in a Feb 14 press statement that the attacks “were not acts of terrorism” and the bombers were merely assembling weapons for use in other countries – although he proceeded to request terrorists refrain from using Bangkok as a staging ground for any future violence.