Celebrating Manila’s Cheap Coffee Renaissance

Obligatory photo to accompany article: Hockey legend Paul Coffey. Source: http://hfboards.hockeysfuture.com/showthread.php?t=1641273
Obligatory photo to accompany article: Hockey legend Paul Coffey. I’m not saying he’s cheap, though; I have no reason to believe he is not a perfect gentleman. Source: http://hfboards.hockeysfuture.com/showthread.php?t=1641273

Something wonderful is happening in Manila right now – something that too few people are commenting on, even as that effervescent, unmistakable sparkle of magic fills the air! That is, cheap coffee is starting to get really good.

For too long, coffee in Manila has been divided between between the dodgy and the highfalutin. On the dodgy end of the spectrum, you could plop yourself down at the local corner store and order a sachet of 3-in-1 instant coffee mix for a few pesos, and get an incredible sweet coffee-like beverage that is more palm oil and sugar than actual coffee. (I will make an exception for Kopiko Brown and Black, two instant coffee mixes that contain even more empty calories than their competitors, and don’t get much closer to tasting anything like actual coffee, but do have the significant advantage of actually tasting really good.)

On the other end of things, there has long been no shortage of places for the beautiful people and those who wish to be seen as beautiful to plop down more than 100 pesos for a cup of actual coffee or, more popularly, a shot of espresso and 500 calories of sugar and whipped cream. When you want to take the best possible selfies while also getting a bit of caffeine in the process, Starbucks, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, and their various competitors are always there to satisfy your cravings. I personally avoid these options, not just because of my pathological cheapness, but also because I am opposed to paying western prices or higher for a cup of coffee that is being served to me by people making decidedly less-than-western wages. All the more so in a country that grows a good amount of its own coffee, if only anyone would bother to drink the local stuff – which I can say isn’t the best coffee I’ve had, but is actually pretty damn good! (Please, support your local barako farmer!)

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On Animal Cruelty and the Virtues of Keeping My Mouth Shut

My neighbours a few houses down seem like nice enough people. We greet each other pleasantly from time to time, and I remain grateful for the time, back when I was originally house-hunting in the neighbourhood, that they let me step inside their house and use their landline to call up the owner of the house that I would eventually rent. They also run a tailoring business out of their house, and I have to assume they did a good job of fixing the hole in my jean pocket, although I haven’t actually worn the jeans since I got them back.

Unfortunately, my neighbours also have two medium-sized dogs that they keep confined in very cramped cages, not much larger than their bodies. I don’t think this is from simple lack of space – their house, while not lavish, looks reasonably roomy and comfortable. But the dogs probably aren’t pets in the way that westerners would understand; they’re treated more as living burglar alarms, which is a fairly common practice here. I do hear the dogs bark from time to time, as you probably would if you had to spend your life inside a small cage, but the noise isn’t really much of an issue – mostly I just feel bad every time I pass by the house and witness their deplorable living conditions. (I won’t be posting a photo here, both because I’d rather make a boring post than a painfully sad one, and also because I don’t want to make my otherwise pleasant neighbours wonder what kind of malfeasance I’m involved in.)

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In Defense of Manila’s MRT

MRT
Probably not a good photo for an article with the title “In Defense of Manila’s MRT”. Source: http://mrt3.com/index.php/news-page.html

When people talk about how bad the public transit in Manila supposedly is, they like to hold up the MRT as an example of all of its supposed dysfunctions. It’s so crowded!, they say. It’s always breaking down! Sometimes it even falls off the tracks! It’s a death trap!

Well, I came not to bury the MRT, but rather to… OK, not praise it, but at least offer a measured defense of it. So let me speak up on behalf of the MRT, since trains and tracks cannot speak for themselves:

It is absolutely indispensable. Manila’s train network may be woefully inadequate, with 14 million+++++ people being serviced by a total of 3 train lines (LRT1, LRT2 and MRT) with only 44 stations in total. (Compare Mexico City, a city not known for its cutting-edge infrastructure, still managed to build a whopping 195 metro stations.) And of the three train lines, all of which suffer from malfunctions, random aircon breakdowns on hot afternoons, and severe overcrowding during rush hour, the MRT is the worst: in spite of being the busiest of the three train lines, it has the smallest cars, and suffers from the most technical glitches. Being roughly pushed into a jam-packed MRT car at rush hour as the humble air conditioning struggles to keep up with the sheer outpouring of body heat is quite the experience indeed.

Nonetheless, the MRT has always been the most useful mode of transit for me in Metro Manila. For one thing, it runs along EDSA, a road which provides access to most of Metro Manila’s main commercial centres, and which you could credibly argue is the single most congested thoroughfare in the entire country. An MRT ride, though sometimes traumatic, can potentially reduce a 2 hour road journey to 25 minutes. The ridiculous 40 km journey from my home in Muntinlupa to my occasional workplace in a far-flunt area of Quezon City is only made bearable by the MRT, along with my dear friend the Skyway. (However, on a not-unrelated note, I’ll be quitting that job soon, because traveling 40 km in Manila will never not be hard.)

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Expressway Jeepney Gate Galleria

Keen-eyed Bloggerbels readers will know that when I go to Alabang, I usually take a jeepney. And in the course of many trips to Alabang to eat delicious and inexpensive S&R Pizza (before I went gluten-free), drink coffee at the nicest McDonald’s in the Philippines (the one on Commerce Ave), or visit the public market to buy beef bones for my dogs (THEY LOVE IT!), I noticed something interesting.

Express jeepneys that are fortunate enough to take the South Luzon Expressway to Alabang instead of the horribly congested National Highway are required to have a gate covering their back entrance, one which can be locked shut while on the expressway – unlike most jeepneys, where you just hold on tight and try not to fall out of the back. I eventually realized that each one of these jeepney gates is, as with many things in the Philippines, unique, custom-made, and in many cases quite endearingly improvised. Each one has its own mechanism for locking, too: Sometimes involving hooks, other times wire or even string. All this uniqueness can often be quite bewildering for the passengers near the rear of the jeepney, who are asked with shutting the gate as the jeep nears the expressway.

And so, with the crappy camera that I carry around with me in my man-purse at all times, I have endeavoured to document all the shapes and sizes of jeepney gates that valiantly prevent passengers from bouncing out onto the expressway between the Susana Heights and Filinvest exits.

Aside from the crappiness of my camera, allowances also have to be made for the fact that I took most of these photos from inside vehicles that were rocketing down the highway, bouncing all over the place and shaking uncontrollably while trying to squeeze out every ounce of juice they could muster from their refurbished tractor motors. Oh, and I had to do it while trying to not look like a total weirdo creep – something that’s not very easy to do when you’re taking out a camera and photographing God-knows-what inside a crowded vehicle full of strangers.

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Some Positive Thoughts

Do you know someone who causes you a lot of frustration? Maybe you find them obnoxious or petty. Maybe their mere presence grates on you terribly. Maybe you have to work with them everyday, and just being around them makes you hate your job.

Or maybe you know someone who is smarter than you, or more attractive, or more charming, or who makes more money than you, or is more successful with the opposite sex (or their preferred sex, whatever that may be). Maybe the envy you feel towards them just eats away at you from the inside every time you’re around them, or even when you’re not.

Well, don’t worry about it… because one day they’ll be dead, and so will you!

Climate Change and the Three Jewels

Source: https://www.wunderground.com/climate/greenland.asp
Source: https://www.wunderground.com/climate/greenland.asp

Climate change scares the shit out of me. I don’t think I’ve ever cursed before in this blog, but climate change scares the shit out of me. We are all… well, I don’t think I wanna use a word even more offensive than “shit”, but we are all basically doomed, unless the Chinese discover a miraculous source of unlimited clean energy or we manage to narrowly avoid utter catastrophe through some sort of wacky geoengineering scheme. Perhaps that’s why Elon Musk is working on his Mars colony?

If you want to cry, or perhaps just redouble your efforts to retain your sanity through sheer force of self-delusion, here are more reading materials to convince you that we are all fu… I mean, doomucked:

There are certainly rosier assessments of the climate situation, and the idea that we’ll all be extinct within 15 years isn’t exactly a mainstream opinion among climate scientists,  but I’m pretty sure the world will at least be a hot mess (ha, ha!) within a couple of decades. Of course, you are welcome to convince yourself that everything is fine because at least Iceland is colder than usual. And hey, El Niño! Unfortunately, your remarkable capacity for self-delusion will run out sometime before you are up on your roof with a rifle, shooting at starving looters who are trying to break into your food storehouse. Read More

Upcoming Bloggerbels Posts

At the time of writing (April 24, 2016), I am coming off a three month blogging drought. To get back into the groove, I thought I should post a rough list of possible future posts. If I end up going a few months without posting anything again, you are encouraged to angrily demand that I get back to work and write whichever of these posts sounds most interesting to you. You’ll be doing me a great service!

So here’s the list, which I will continue to update occasionally:

The Great Evil of Gluten
Everything Gonna Kill Ya
Patriotic Orthography
Retraction of Yogurt-Making Article
Kill the Ego, Find the Gap
Manila Is Not A Cheap City
Gratitude
For My Mother
For My Father
Chivalry for Hot People
Spread Those Utils Around!
I Want To Marry All Coconuts
My Neighbour With Thirteen Kids
The Limits of Clan Compassion
The Myth of Discipline
Chichi Chicken Killer
24 Hour MRT, Please!
The Geography of Alienation
Asperger’s Syndrome and Theravada Buddhism: A Match Made in Nibbana
Manila’s Cheap Coffee Renaissance

A Huge Election

It’s election time in the Philippines! I have a lot of unsolicited opinions about politics in this country, but in writing this post I am aware that I am walking on thin ice. When I last landed in Manila, the immigration counter prominently displayed signs informing visitors that they would be deported for participating in any political activism. Unlike the immigration cards which declared “DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER PHILIPPINE LAW” years after the death penalty was abolished, I knew this was no joke: I have indeed heard of foreigners being summarily deported for joining in protests. (Not that I’d want to traffic drugs here, anyway – the prisons here don’t seem like very nice places to hang out for a few years.) So, you won’t see me waving any placards this election season. Instead, I’ll take the safer ground and write about the election from a cultural perspective, as a recurring event of monumental significance. I’m not trying to advocate for or against any candidate or position – I just want to share my utter fascination. Read More

How to Be Comfortable in Manila – Part 1: Traveling Comfortably

Metro Manila has a reputation, not entirely unwarranted, for being a rather chaotic, messy place – the Tagalog word for this, magulo, is much more mellifluous than any English equivalent, and I’m not sure that any one English word can really capture its spirit. And while it’s true that Manila can get pretty nuts compared to what most westerners are accustomed to, the fact is that people’s experiences of the place vary greatly. The spoiled expat (of which I am not one!) and the humble sidewalk cigarette vendor selling his wares on a polluted highway obviously have very different experiences of the place. But nonetheless, it is possible to lead a comfortable existence here.

When I say “comfortable”, I do not mean comfort in the preferred local sense of entirely avoiding ever doing any of the things that 75% of Filipinos have to do, like riding public transit, washing their own dishes, or going to places that they don’t especially like. For me, doing things comfortably involves a reasonable balance of efficiency, relaxation, and relative freedom from crime, pollution, traffic, extreme heat, and the various other pitfalls of urban living. But by my definition, comfort doesn’t have to mean living one’s entire life inside a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned bubble, free from any awareness that the Philippines is, in fact, a subtropical country, or carefully avoiding the slightest unwanted intrusion from poor people in non-servile roles. A full, varied adult life has at least a bit of room for discomfort, confrontation, frustration and stress, as long as we ultimately have enough moments of serenity and joy to balance them out. I consider myself comfortable because my life is, by and large, ridiculously easy and low-stress; but I am not unfamiliar with the smell of diesel, the rivers of sweat that pour down my forehead on a hot summer’s day when my jeepney is stuck in traffic, or having a stranger’s nose in my armpit on the MRT (better them than me, at least!).

For most people in Manila – certainly office workers in cozy air-conditioned buildings – the main discomfort of their day occurs while in transit through Manila’s mind-boggling traffic jams and its byzantine public transit system. And for that reason, one of the biggest parts of a comfortable life in Manila is traveling comfortably. A comfortable life may not be one where we spend hours of each day stuck in traffic, squeezed up against strangers on the bus or choking on pollution, but a comfortable life can include all of those things, as well – in moderation.

So here, now, are some ways to travel comfortably in Manila:

 

1. Have A Lot of Money

This is, by far, the easiest way to live and travel comfortably in Manila – assuming, of course, that you actually do have a lot of money. By Manila standards I am not exactly rich, and I live like someone who earns even less – living below my means, so to speak. I prefer to live a simple life, and having a lot of money isn’t a requirement for my version of comfort. But, all other things being equal, it sure doesn’t hurt to be rich out here! In a place where Cash Rules Everything Around You (C.R.E.A.Y.), having buckets of money will let you take constant shortcuts in life while never leaving the lap of luxury. Got an overflowing basket of dirty laundry? Pay somebody to wash it! Want to get to work comfortably? Buy a car and pay somebody to drive you! Want to get to work even faster? Buy a condo next to your office! Need somebody killed? Well, you really shouldn’t, but that can be arranged for a price, as well. Read More