GreenBelt
Some of my free time is spent at Green Belt Park. Not so much a park as a very green, open shopping mall with gardens and sculptures and elevated walkways like tree houses. It gives you the feeling of being in any very wealthy modern city, where even nature is planned. (which is one half of Manila - the other being poverty, chaos, manic traffic, shanty towns) Here I drink coffee at triple the price of a meal from a street vendor and am enticed into a bar for happy hour. The sudden flood of sensory memory, of the absolute luxury and holiday mood of outdoor bars in hot cities everywhere in general, and of drinking frozen margaritas with Jared in New York specifically, overwhelms me and I sit at a bar made exotic with memory and temperature, rather than décor, which is kind of American family restaurant.
The waitress, with a charming, American-accented gregariousness, launches into a monologue about the colour of my eyes. The colour of her own I can only imagine to have been brown as her bright blue eyeshadow overshadows any natural pigment of iris. She told me that I should come back later for “Laughology” where people from all different countries would come to tell jokes and I would be “laughing and laughing and laughing”. How I wished to return that night so I could laugh and laugh, so confident were the waitress's assurances of the fun I would have.
I went home and had dinner with Ed instead, who is often quite entertaining in his own way.
Ed is 60 and the CEO of his own PR company with clients such as Nestles, Louis Vuitton, Purina and British Airways. He seems to know, but maintain a healthy cynicism for all the celebrities in celebrity-focused Metro Manila and has stories of the “social climbers and social butterflies” he meets, including crazy old Imelda Marcos who came across for lunch at his friend's apartment in her dressing gown and slippers. Ed studied engineering at university but used to enter and win short story competitions so got picked up by an ad agency when he graduated. He worries about his rotund belly and eats American “healthy cereal” and drinks “weight loss juice”, ruefully aware that the bold claims on the packets are just marketing spin which he himself has helped design, but consumes anyway. He talks expressively with his hands and face as much as with words and seems kind and genteel and remarkably sage and down to earth for someone whose two small dogs have their own maid to look after them. He tells me the dogs, who live at his resort on Boracai, eat cereal for breakfast, carrot sticks for snacks and get brushed twice a day. Head cocked on one side he is able to perfectly mimic the expression of a street dog begging for food as he explains the dog rescue campaign which Purina is sponsoring in Manila. I consider bringing home a kitten I find in a park.
While most people probably don't have maids for their dogs, it is fairly standard for anyone in the middle classes to have a maid who lives in the house. Apparently it can be better paid than teaching and the Philippines struggles to fill all the teaching positions as they lose teachers to maid-jobs in Manila and even better paid, overseas. According to Bulatlat Magazine Vol v No 11 “ the exodus of Filipinos was instigated by Marcos in the 1970s urging workers to send back money to prop up the economy”. Marie, the maid here has lunch and dinner waiting for me on the table every day and almost snaps at me “just leave it Madam” when I try to clear my own plate. She sleeps on a bunk bed in the laundry and goes home on Sundays to see her children. (It’s normal for maids to leave their kids with their parents. Ed tells me that when they work overseas and send all their money home to their families, they often find their relatives have spent the money on themselves rather than on the kids whom it was intended to support. He blames they sway of Catholicism over the country, but can't understand why people already poor, would want to have more and more children they can't afford.) Marie speaks good English but I don't know how to begin to ask her what she thinks or hopes or wants from life. I know that my three weeks as a servant for some rich people in Britain didn't make me want to take it up as a career, even if cleaning can pay more than entry level journalism.
