5/28/2017 Sunday in Manila

We lost a day in flight from LAX. We left on Wednesday, May 24 and arrived in Manila on Friday, May 26, after a thirteen hour flight with no stopover. We touched down at 4:36 a.m. on the tarmac of Pinoy International airport. Loi, who we met on the flight and who sat across the aisle from me, was a unique individual, if only for his appearance. He looked white but he was Filipino. He attributed his Caucasian features, especially his nose, to his Spanish ancestry. He was going to Mindanao. At first, I couldn't figure him out. When he spoke English he had a Filipino accent. I thought, at first, that he was a white man who had assimilated into Filipino society to the extent of acquiring an accent like a Filipino who speaks English as a second language. It was already in the newspaper I read on the plane that 22 people had been killed in Marawi. Loi was not going to Marawi. He was originally from Mindanao and living in California. He was sitting next to a Filipino travelling home on vacation from an oil rig he worked on in Guyana. He was on a very long flight.
Having arrived so early made the day very long. One of my nephews, L., sister-in-law, N-N., and brother-in-law, S., met us at the airport in a Toyota Hiace Grande, one of the big vans for transporting passengers seen on the streets of Manila. L. drove and used the new Skyway, which is an elevated freeway that was built some time after my last visit to the Philippines, which was in 2007. It made the drive to N-N. and S.'s house quicker. L. has a tour guide business where he takes small groups of Filipinos or Japanese on tours of the Philippines. L. seemed subdued, but, maybe, I thought, it was the early hour and he was groggy. (He would be taking us on two excursions while we were in the Philippines, one to Ilocos Sur and Ilocos Norte, and the other to Bataan.) S. and N-N.'s house is in barangay las Piñas, in BF (Banco Filipino) Homes, Phase VI, Inner Circle, a gated community, which is located south of Central Manila and Pasay City. (There was always a guard in the booth at the gate to raise the arm that allowed us to drive through. Later I would notice that if the car did not have the proper sticker or decal to gain entrance, the driver would have to relinquish his driver's license and was given a temporary ID, a large, colored card with a number on it, which he would return to the same guard booth to regain his license upon leaving. Tricycles, though, don't have to do this, as they already have been registered with the barangay I assume.) Their address is quite long, as we had to write it on the four tags for our four pieces of luggage we checked in at LAX. My carry-on bag exceeded the maximum weight allowed for a carry-on bag by two times the maximum weight. The allowed weight of a carry-on is seven kilos. Our flight number was 103, departing at 11 p.m. from gate 34. E. had told me to refuse to comply with the counter clerk at the airport if she asked me to put the carry-on bag on the scale. Of course, I didn't refuse when she asked me to put it on the scale. It weighed fourteen kilos. I played dumb. She said she would give us a "complementary". Both my wife and I did a double-take (later retelling to each other the incident), thinking that she meant that we had to pay her some money as a kind of bribe in order to allow the bag on. Weighing the check-on bags before the flight had been painstaking, making sure the bags were exactly 22 kilos (about fifty pounds), lifting each one onto the small floor scale, propping the bag up with something so we could see the numbers through the small window of the scale. I neglected to weigh my carry-on bag. So, my wife and I were a little surprised when the pretty Filipino counter clerk said we exceeded the weight limit for carry-ons. I said, "complementary is good, right?" She smiled and said 'yes'. I had asked her if I could get an aisle seat or one behind the "bulk head" so I could stretch my legs out. She said the bulk head seat would cost eighty dollars. My wife and I thought that getting a bulk head was not worth the price because it was too expensive and so we settled for an aisle seat, which the immediate superior of the pretty young counter clerk was able to get for me after a few minutes of working on the computer (seat 58E at the back of the plane). In the meantime I had asked if she still had our passports. (She needed them to check us in.) She still had both of them. After our four bags were checked in and weighed, she said she would come and get the carry-on when we were at the gate before boarding and that we should check to see if there was anything we needed in the bag before relinquishing it. Then we proceeded to our gate with our boarding passes. On our way to the gate I noticed a sign at the bottom of an escalator that indicated it was only for certain passengers. I asked a Mexican-looking airport security official what the sign meant. He explained to me that it was for those passengers who had paid the bureau of Homeland Security for doing a background check, in other words, for the privilege of foregoing the hassle of going through the metal detector before getting to the gates. Before we got to the last check point before going to the gate our names were called on the intercom system. We were told to return to the check-in counter. We wondered why until we found out that our passports had not been returned to us.  
That afternoon Manang (an honorific meaning 'older sister'), my wife's oldest sister, and her husband J. came to the house. We unpacked one of our checked in luggage, which we had packed with gifts. We gave our gifts to J. and Manang. (When you travel to meet relatives in the Philippines you do not come without presents.) She did not hesitate to begin her lesson on how to use tarot cards, since I had brought a brand new Waite deck of tarot cards with me. I had been wanting to learn how to do readings with it. She went through the cards one by one and told me what each card meant. (She is an expert and has many years experience doing readings with the Waite deck. She even gained some notoriety as a reader when she lived in Tehran when her husband worked there. According to my wife, Virgos--Manang and I both are Virgos--have a penchant for things mystical, or, as I would say, metaphysical, so I should develop the skill of tarot card reading.)
My wife and I tried to take a nap the first day, Friday, but I could not fall asleep. It rained in the afternoon. Late June is the cusp of the rainy season. Later that day we went on an aborted trip to a tailor shop to get my wife's gown altered for the wedding of our niece. When we arrived, my wife realized that she had forgotten to bring the gown. It was raining and we used umbrellas. Filipinos don't wear raincoats and motorcyclists are the only ones who wear ponchos during storms. It's too hot to wear one.
We went to my other brother- and sister-in-law's (Manang) house in las Piñas. Manang did a reading of the tarot cards for my wife. She gets paid for it, so my wife paid her some money. The one who gets her cards read is called the querent because during the reading she asks a question that is answered either in the affirmative or the negative. That evening, I believe--maybe it was not that first evening but the evening of the second day, I am not sure, but, in any case, as I wrote in my journal, "let the first day recede in the fog of memory"--we ate at Mama Lou's, an Italian restaurant. M., Nonoy and Manang's daughter, drove us there. She is on a short vacation from Dubai, where she works as a radiologist. (Later I was able to sit and chat with her about her brother's tragic death.)

They live in another part of las Piñas, in Pampano, in BF Resort, where the houses are smaller and one story, though some residents have remodeled to add a story. (The whole time I was in Manila I was under the impression that Nonoy and Manang lived in Parañaque, but a Filipino, after I arrived home, told me it was Pampano.) The lots are smaller and BF Resort doesn't seem as clean as BF Homes. It is painted rose, as you can see in the picture above.
The second day, Saturday, I got up very early at 4:00 a.m. After Mary got up we took a walk around the neighborhood, down Pedro Reyes street, around the block inside the Inner Circle. We could not enter another part of Phase VI, Inner Circle because the gate was closed. The guard told us it would be open at 5:30, so we did another lap around the block.

Then I made pancakes from the mix we brought with us. I showed S. and L. the servant how to make them. Then we drove with S. in his Kia Picante to another tailor shop to get my wife's gown altered. I took some pictures of tricycles while I was waiting outside the shop. All of the tricycles in this part of town were blue.

  There is always a plethora of signs.

There are virtually no yards in front of the homes in BF Homes because every house is surrounded by a wall, some of which have broken glass embedded in the top of the wall to discourage burglars from getting in. (I first encountered this home security practice of festooning a wall with shards of glass from broken bottles in Jakarta many years ago when I lived there.) There are not a limited number of model homes in BF Homes, as is the case in the American suburb I live in, where there is a uniformity that the big developer, McMillen Homes, forces a buyer to choose from four models that have variations that are not radically different from one another. (Unfortunately, I did not take any photos of homes in BF Homes.) In the Inner Circle, you have to pass through a relatively narrow gate of one car lane with a hump and a guard in a box before entering. 

I had the sense of sitting in a postage stamp-sized park in Paris when I sat in S.'s front yard, which was not often, since it was so hot and humid the time we were there. We had only an a/c in the wall in our bedroom and S. and N-N. used electric fans in the rest of the house. Since it was so hot and humid my wife and I took showers usually three times a day. 

Since there are virtually no front yards to speak of, the houses are closer to the street than residential houses in American suburbs. One feels closed-in, claustrophobic, and lost in a labyrinth, especially when one drives through one of the gated communities to pass through it in order to make a shortcut to avoid traffic on the main streets of Manila. Communities that allow through-traffic are called 'friendship' communities. 

Many of the homes have two tiles attached to the house, the image of Jesus on the right hand of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This indicates that the family of the household is Catholic.