Letters to Mindanao

I’m moving out to my new address:

http://letters2mindanao.wordpress.com/

See you there.

Summer is coming and I feel very excited than usual.  I am going to Bora.

Yes, and this will be my first Boracay adventure.  I am going with four of my officemates, 3 of us are Bora virgins.   This is quite a trip, coz everything is set to date:  flying in on April 8 (P2,736.00) and out on Aprill 11 (P2,343.52) both via Cebu Pacific; bed and toilets will be provided by Villa de Oro (P1,600.00/ head for a 4 days/3 nights accommodation).  That’s a good price already because we don’t plan to stay in our room for more than 5 hours everyday anyway.  Maybe 3 hours in the wee hours of the morning, and another 2 hours napping in the afternoon.  The rest of the day (and night) — beachcombing and happy hour bar hopping. Sweet!

Here’s my “secret” plan, in case I get extraordinary high energy.  I’m listing them down so I wouldn’t forget a thing.  I’m calling this list the No Boring Moment in Bora and it is secret because I’m not sharing this with my Bora mates, at least not very soon.

Here we go:

First, the must not miss foodies.  A Boracay Island Guide Book says that there are more than 200 restaurants and eateries in the 1,083- hectare island.  I got curious of the following from my quick search of travel blogs, and promised myself not to miss any of these:  German-Filipino Gasthof’s baby back ribs (P550) Jonah’s Choco Banana Vanilla Shake (P90), chori burger (P- no idea), Bite Club Burger and a dinner feast of fresh seafood at D’Talipapa.

Next, the must do:

Explore Boracay island by bike.  What’s a better way to see the ins and outs of an island resort than a dependable 2-wheel?  Downside:  it will take a lot of energy to do this but I’m hoping that the terrain is flat and manageable.  Upside:  fitness is built in already. Biking is a good cardiovascular and leg exercise, it is cheap and readily available. 

Ride a boat to island hop.  For those places that a bike can’t bring me to, a boat can surely take me there.  Boating is a blissful activity, notwithstanding the noise generated by the boat’s engine.  What is there to do in a boat while it cruises the pristine blue sea but to be quiet for a while and enjoy the changing (deepening) scenery?  Boat rides allows people to have that inner talk, to meditate if you call it that. 

Snorkel if I can’t Dive.  I did some snorkeling before- in Puerto Galera and in Bohol.  Both have very breathtaking underwater worlds.  In Galera, we have to walk from the beach towards the deep part of the sea. You’ll feel the earth world vanish every step of the way, until you feel you don’t have any other choice but to swim or float.  The vast sea world welcomes you with a variety of never-before-seen creatures.  The Bohol snorkel adventure on the other hand is a dive right into the deep blue sea.  We rented a boat that brought us to the middle of the sea and there, right there, is our snorkeling field.  Both adventures are awesome, although I didn’t get to experience everything in vivid details because my contact lenses usually get either very dry or wet down under. 

Climb The Wall at D’ Mall.  I haven’t really climbed a wall before but I guess I can make it to the top.  I’m a climbing freak when I was just a kid— guava and mango trees, aratiles, makopa, fences, roof tops and truck tops.  I climbed them all.  Vertical climbing, I know is an altogether different and difficult challenge, especially without practice.  Hopefully my biceps can pull me up and my legs will cooperate.  All it takes is a bad cramp to put this thing off.  I don’t want that to happen.

Caves at the cove.  There is something attractive in caves- the dark, eerie, humid but slimy surrounding, the scent of the underworld and the sound of angry waves against age-old rocks.  Feels like Batman

Happy Hour! Alcoholics, unite!  We have nothing to lose but our hard-earned pesos! Please tell me where to find the cheapest beer in Bora.

Still standing after 15.  My cousin wants me to immortalize my Bora adventure in Cocomangas like she did.  All I have to do is drink all 15 mixed shots (P900+) of curious names- Test Tube Baby, Mexican flag, SS Bankero, Have-a-go, to name a few.  What do I get? A Cocomangas souvenir shirt and a brass plate with my name nailed forever in the bar’s Wall of Fame. I’ll do this for my country. Hik!

Get laid.  What’s a paradise without romance?  What’s Eden without Eve?  What is Bora without having a secret, and keeping it there?  As the Boraphiles use to remind us, “What happens in Bora stays in Bora”. 

My office friends are planning to mount a very huge and ambitious project (by my standard) — a docu-movie of our Bora adventure.  As for me, I’ll try to remember every little detail so I can commit them to my failing memory and write them down later. 

Last on my list is about attitude.  Nothing in this list is cast in stone. But I will really try hard to do them all.  I’m giving space to chance encounters, serendipity and spur of the moment moments.

I’m bringing my bohemian spirit to Bora:  come what may, seize the day. 

It just occurred to me one lazy Saturday afternoon; it was after my MBA class that a girl I just met invited me to watch a movie with her, only if I can find someone to tag along with us.  Apparently, my newfound friend would not want to be caught going out alone with a guy.  Or maybe, it was just plain and simple mistrust she has on me. 

What struck me then was the five, ten, no, sixty minutes of thinking for this someone whom I ca
n bring along with, to play the role of a lowly chaperone.   And then the sudden realization—oh my, there’s scarcity of friends.

That I thought is a paradox in more ways than one.  How come that as we grow older, we make lesser friends?  Why is it that we cannot have the usual pre-teen and teenage friends that we can summon at a short notice, even to the point of bringing them to places not first known to them? 

How things change as we grow old.  What most of us have right now are plain officemates, classmates, schoolmates, friends of friends, and friends of relatives.  Not really friends but simply acquaintances, or accidental kagimik.

To some people, there are characters like carpool mates, gym mates, and chat mates; playmates for the sports buffs, and bed mates for the promiscuous (also referred to as f*cking friends/ f*ck buddies).  You may have your friendly neighborhood barber/ hairdresser, suking tindero/tindera, members of your church, parents of your children’s classmates, and your kids’ teachers.  Then there’s manang janitor, manong guard, boy somebody, aleng Xerox, mamang taho, etc.  Among these characters, only a few, oftentimes none, become true and faithful friends.  Notice the use of qualifiers and the labels we attach to describe these people.

How I miss the simple life I had as a kid.  Anyone can easily be friends with another.  A new neighbor is eagerly welcomed in a game of patintero, a classmate is automatically a friend–and we call them by their first names, if not by their sweet, often repetitive nicknames.

Could I be right- that with age comes our diminishing chances of making new friends?  Do grown-ups distrust each other?  That much?

The saddest thing that could happen to me sometime in the future is to realize that I am married to someone who is not my friend…but just a wife.

Originally written in 2004 for peyups.com

Is queuing an alien concept to us promdis?

My cousin from GenSan is here in Manila for a management training in Red Ribbon.  Young and greenhorn in Metro living, she and her co-trainees were embarassed when a taxi driver scolded them for not lining up under a Taxi stand. 

I also received a lashing from a taxi driver when I was in Singapore last year, albeit for a different reason.   Unsure of where I was and where I was going next, I sat down in a covered taxi stand while examining my handy city guide.  A taxi driver stopped in front of me and impatiently waited for me to embark.  As I was still not certain of my whereabouts and there was nobody else in line after me, I ignored him.  That was when he shouted unnecessarily loud, “Dont stay in the taxi stand if you don’t want a taxi!”  I grinned.
 
When I was in Davao City last Christmas, waiting for a taxi ride has become an endless game of chase.  But no one seems enjoying it. 

I experienced this several times especially when coming out of Gaisano Mall.  At the exit near Gerry’s Grill, there are two or three taxi lanes purposefully built to serve as, well, a waiting area for taxi passengers. 

The scene in this area is calm when taxi cars are lining up waiting for passengers to arrive or when demand (for taxi) is less than supply (passengers).  But chaos reigns once supply exceeds demand. 

Under this scenario, where I was a helpless victim and participant, taxis speed over waiting passengers.  The passengers, like a mob, runs after the taxi.  Waiting passengers see other passengers as enemies, like a cat to a mouse and dog to cat. 

I wonder what happened to the taxi stand.  People just ignore them.  And taxis too.  Mall security personnel seems uninterested to the whole situation.  No one directs the traffic.  I even saw bystanders getting a taxi from across the street and bringing them to the mob.  As if in a cockpit, he sells the rights to take the taxi to the highest bidder…or the loudest nagger. Ah, perfect ingredients for anarchy.

What’s with queues that people’s behavior changes in their absence as much as in their presence?  Is queuing a measure of civilized and modern societies? 

It is odd why people seems to ignore lines and bump over people just to be first.  I spent most of my school life lining up:  first thing that I do in school everyday from kinder to fourth year high school.  You remember that too?  And most of us, especially graduates of Unibersidad ng Pila kept on lining up until college graduation.  That would have made practically all graduates of the Philippine education system majors in lining up. 

But how come we forget to line up when it matters most?  Here is where the Prisoner’s Dilemma comes in.

Prisoner’s Dilemma is a story of two prisoners who must decide whether to tell on their partner in crime. If they both squeal, they’ll get medium-length sentences; if they both stay quiet, they’ll get light sentences. However, if one stays quiet and the other testifies, the “informant” goes free, while the “sucker” gets a long prison sentence. What makes this interesting is that the pair ought to cooperate to get the light sentences, but they’ll both have the tempation of squealing especially if they are being interrogated separately. In the end, they with both likely rat on each other.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma illustrates why people should cooperate to achieve a win-win situation.  You either fall in line and wait for your turn or run amok like everybody else and chase taxi cars.  In the end, so much time will be wasted running around, not to mention the effort spent in doing it compared to just standing quietly waiting for taxis to arrive one at a time.  If nobody wants to cooperate, all passengers will end as a loser.  The sly taxi drivers will even ask for dagdag knowing that he has bargaining power over you.

Queues characterize order and discipline.  It shows how civil and educated people are.  There is respect for time (first come, first served), personal space, and for equal chances.  Most importantly, everybody wins.

I hope people would take lines more seriously, most especally mall owners and operators, policymakers, public managers, and the general public.  Queues and queueing systems have become an interesting subject for many scientists, mathematicians, operations managers and psychologists.  There’s so much we can learn from them.
   
Fall in line.  Live and let live.

Today I welcome myself to the blogosphere with my Letters to Mindanao.