Saturday February 1, 2014

6:15 a.m. Cebu City, Philippines

Room 406 Hallmark Hotel

An account of yesterday will, unfortunately, sound much like the accounts of all my days in Cebu. I went to shopping malls and couldn’t find the things I was looking for. But there were variations, so here I go:

I was up quite early, and I went out into Cebu to get something to eat. Unfortunately, almost everything was still closed. The only two options were Jollibee and McDonald’s. It’s ironic that the two places that open early and keep regular hours and offer great customer service are two mega fast food chains. I couldn’t face Jollibee and opted for an Egg McMuffin and coffee at McDonald’s. It’s kind of a miracle when you think about it that that Egg McMuffin was identical in every way to every Egg McMuffin I’ve had at any McDonald’s anywhere in the world. And it was really tasty.

After my breakfast snack, I grabbed my camera and went for a short walk to the St. Nino Cathedral down the street. I snapped some pictures of some homeless people along the way. These homeless people are the most striking feature of my new neighborhood. A lot of them are children or mothers with young children, even babies, sprawled out and naked on cardboard. It’s ridiculous that in these modern times anyone should have to live like that. This neighborhood also has a lot of mentally challenged homeless people. They are a frightening-looking bunch. One has to wonder what the world looks like through their eyes. I can’t even imagine. A surprising fact is that there are almost no beggars. None of these street people have approached me to ask me for money. I have seen no one sitting anywhere with a begging cup or bowl. What does that mean? I assume that if they aren’t begging, they haven’t been driven to that extreme and somehow manage to get enough money and food on a daily basis to survive. They’re not flourishing, obviously, but they’re surviving. It could also be that they just don’t feel comfortable begging from me. Filipinos have a strong respect for foreigners – at least for Western ones like me. And this might even spill over to beggars and make them reluctant to approach me while they would approach fellow Filipinos. I’m most surprised at the street urchins – these young, very dirty, and very rough-looking boys that roam around everywhere. They seem to come straight out of Dickens and I imagine they are street-wise and tough in ways that I could never be. They actually put me on my guard because they are so clearly in their element on the streets that there really is no fear in them – no fear of punishment, no fear of the law, certainly no fear of me. So I imagine that if they had the chance to snatch something out of my hands and run away with it, they would do it without a second thought. I don’t know if they would, though. They ignore me for the most part. I stopped at one street corner yesterday and while waiting for the extremely long traffic light cycle to complete, I saw some of these street urchins running around and collecting scrap plastic and paper for recycling. They were more dirt than flesh and yet had all dyed their hair bright red. They ran on bare feet almost black with encrusted dirt and raced across the large intersection with total disregard for traffic or anything else. They were full of energy. Another association popped into my mind while I watched them: Lord of the Flies. These boys seemed like the boys marooned on the island – totally free of any societal laws or constraints. Yet, they paid no attention to me. None at all. That surprised me very much.

I found myself at a back or side entrance to the St. Nino Cathedral. This was the spot where Magellan’s Cross was located. To get inside, I had to submit to another security search of my bag and my body. I wonder if Filipinos are affected by these constant searches. I’ve only been in Cebu for a few days, and I find I’m quite tired of them. They’re also pointless. They ask people to open their bags, and then they poke inside them with a wooden stick. Essentially, this tells the security guard whether this or that bag is packed to the brim with guns or contains a collapsible assault rifle. With such a cursory search, that is about all they could ascertain. Anyone could have any number of hand guns and hand grenades packed away inside their bags. I could have had a dozen of each in my pannier bag and with their search, they would never have seen them. Yet, you have to submit to this search everywhere you go – even at a cathedral.

I took a bunch of photographs inside the cathedral – of the small red candles people were lighting, of a few people, of some statues. But there was nothing special about the pictures I was taking, and the camera didn’t seem to be bringing things into sharp focus like it used to.

There was a service underway, and I stayed for a while and watched and listened until it was over. I didn’t really understand any of it, but it clearly followed a regular and comfortable pattern. The people knew what was coming next and they had a series of different hand gestures to go with each part – either holding their hands out in front of them with palms up or raised up into the air or something else. The priests – or whoever was running the show – did a lot of singing. There were a lot of prayers. It seemed to go on and on and on.

On the street outside, elderly women were selling large candles and people lit them and placed them lying down on top of metal grills over barrels and buckets. I don’t know what the difference was between lighting these candles and lighting the small red ones inside the cathedral itself. I took a few pictures of that as well.

Eventually, I went back to the hotel and got my bike out to ride over to another shopping mall – one that was supposed to contain a large camping store called ROX. I had the usual adventures getting there as I kept losing my way because of the lack of street signs. And once inside the mall, I was completely lost. The place was huge and difficult to figure out. I also could not find any maps of the mall to guide me. When I asked people for help, I didn’t understand what they said. By the time I left the mall, I must have walked ten miles. ROX turned out to be another one of these fake camping stores. They sold expensive and fashionable outdoor clothing from North Face and Columbia Sportswear, but next to no actual camping gear or other outdoor equipment. I did, however, make one interesting purchase. For some reason, they had a basket of emergency reading glasses. These were tiny lenses that could be slipped inside a small case the size of a credit card and kept in your wallet. I’m sure the company makes them in different strengths, but ROX only had the very strong +2.25 type. I bought a pair anyway to give them a try, and I’m very pleased with them. They are too strong for me – more like magnifying glasses than reading glasses – but they are quite useful. And being so small and light, I can carry them with me all the time. This takes me back to one of my purchases that I regret more than any other – my Hugo Boss bifocals. Horrible and expensive glasses. A complete waste of money. I would have been far better off just purchasing these $4 emergency glasses. One could say “live and learn”. I just seem to do a lot more of the living and very little of the learning along the way. I keep making the same mistakes over and over.

Throughout the day, I was very aware of a new storm system that was heading for Cebu. Wunderground had it listed as a tropical depression, but the people here called it a typhoon. Locally, they don’t seem to make a distinction between a tropical depression or tropical storm and an actual typhoon. They’re all referred to as typhoons. When I left the big shopping mall, the storm clouds had moved in and it was starting to rain. I quickly rode back downtown to my hotel and I got there without getting soaking wet.

I had something to eat at my favorite carenderia, and then I went to an Internet café. It’s a place called Tresor’s and apparently is owned by a man from France. I haven’t had very good luck there – mice don’t work, etc. – but it is the nicest of the bunch I’ve come across so far. Unfortunately, they close relatively early, and last night they kicked me out before eight o’clock. The guy running the place said that since there weren’t very many customers, they were just going to close for the night. I was very annoyed at that. It seemed another example of very poor customer service. I even gave another one of my little overblown speeches. I pointed out to the guy that he was shooting himself in the foot. By tossing me – a paying customer – out, he was ensuring that I would go looking for another Internet café – one that didn’t close as soon as they decided they didn’t have enough customers. He was kicking his customers out because he didn’t have enough of them, and by doing so was making it more likely that he would soon have NO customers. My speech obviously had no effect, but I was glad I made it. I dislike that as a customer, I’m constantly having to take it on the chin. My annoyance wasn’t aimed only at this Internet café. It was a cumulative thing. I had been annoyed at the outdoors store that didn’t have any outdoor equipment. And after that, I had returned to the Welson bike shop to ask about spoke nipples. When I walked in the door, the two store clerks were standing at the counter and chatting. One of them was pouring Coca Cola from a bottle into her water bottle. I stood beside them and waited patiently to be noticed. They ignored me and kept talking amongst themselves. When the woman pouring out the Coke finished her task, she finally turned to me. She was the same woman that I had spoken to briefly two days ago. She now looked at me and said with a sarcastic tone, “What is your problem TODAY?” A petty speech instantly rose up in my head, and I wanted to say, “Well, my biggest problem is that I’m still in Cebu – a city with the world’s worst bicycle shops and the rudest and least helpful store clerks.” But I didn’t say that. I told her that I was looking for spoke nipples. She heaved a big sigh and went off somewhere and came back with a single plastic bag of some bright green spokes and threw them onto the counter. That’s all they had. I tried to ask her about spoke nipples in general, but it was pointless. She knew nothing and didn’t care. I even asked her about their mechanics being able to change the nipples on my wheels and rebuild them and retension them. She said they couldn’t. They had other work to do and couldn’t do any repairs. She was so awful and her bike store was so awful that I found it hard to process. All I could do was leave. While I was outside unlocking my bike, I looked back and made eye contact with this woman. She gave a snort and tossed her head and smiled in triumph – as if treating me like dirt was a victory for her.

So after all of that, I wasn’t in the mood for this Internet café to kick me out because it was to their advantage. Yet another business I won’t return to. It was raining heavily when I stepped outside, making this rather grim area of downtown Cebu even more grim. I decided to wander over to the 7-11 and comfort myself with something sugary and good to eat. There, at least, one gets good service. It is 7-11 after all. Outside the store, I ran into Chris and his friend Don. We had a pleasant chat, and by the end of it, I felt much better. Don was teaching English in China, and we talked a little bit about what it was like living and working there.

I bought a delicious ice cream cone and enjoyed it while sitting inside the 7-11 and playing with my new emergency glasses. Then I returned to the hotel for an early night. I woke up at one point during the night and realized that the power had gone out. The fans were no longer running and the lights in the hall were out. I smiled in the darkness. Even after super typhoon Yolanda, I had done nothing at all to prepare for the arrival of this latest storm. You’d think that after Yolanda, I’d have at least bothered to buy some candles to prepare for a blackout. But I hadn’t even done that. It just never occurred to me, again, that the storm could do any damage. I keep forgetting that I’m in a country where the power can go out easily and does so all the time. This morning, the power is back on, so I dodged a bullet. I have no windows here, so I don’t know what the weather is like outside. I guess it is time to find out.

9:20 a.m.

The parade of idiocy continues. I really have to stop getting up so early. In this part of the world, people sleep in apparently. Nothing is ever open when I go out onto the streets. I went to McDonald’s again and had an overpriced breakfast. Then I decided to hop on my bike and ride down to Park Mall. It’s far away, but I I thought it would be pleasant to drop in on Cycle Logic and bask in their unique friendly customer service. Then I was going to use the nice Internet café/coffee shop in the mall. There were several things I hadn’t counted on in this plan. One was that it had rained heavily all last night, so the streets were full of standing water and mud. It’s too much to ask for proper road engineering and water drainage, of course. So I got splashed by lots of mud and water. And, of course, it has slipped my mind that a large percentage of Filipino drivers are quite  rude – particularly in Cebu. So I was subjected to pointless honking, dangerous swerving, cutting me off, and all the rest of it. And then when I finally got to Park Mall, I found that it was not open yet. I had hoped that at least the Internet café would open at 9 or 9:30, but it was not to be. The place is shut up as tight as a prison until ten. So I’m not off to a good start and this may turn out to be another wasted day.

What else can I babble on about? Well, I looked up spoke nipples on the Internet last night. I did so very carefully so as not to get a massive search return of pornographic websites. One thing that pleased me about Tresor’s Internet café was that they had Avast anti-virus installed on all their computers, not just on the server as at the place in Tacloban. So whenever I plugged in a flash drive or a memory card, Avast immediately detected all the viruses and worms and dealt with them. So all my flash drives are now clean. It was so simple. I was glad about that, but it made me reflect on how poorly things were handled at the Internet café in Tacloban. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to install Avast on their computers, but they didn’t do it. Plus, I had so many conversations with them about this problem, and the promised over and over again to fix the problem when the technician was there. The technician was there several times, and I spoke to him about this virus problem, but he did nothing about it. This incompetence on their part caused me and their other customers so many problems and it would have been so easy to fix – assuming they cared.

After entering my careful search terms into Google, I did some reading about spokes, spoke nipples, and wheel building. I encountered what I expected – a universe of specific spoke nipples for specific rims and spokes and for different purposes, none of which would be available in the Philippines and about which the people in bike shops here know nothing. Anyway, it was pretty clear that ideally I would replace my spoke nipples with heavy-duty brass nipples from DT. Were I out there in the real world, getting some would be as simple as clicking on an order form or going to a bike shop and having them order it. But that is not going to happen here.

I also spent some time uploading pictures to Flickr – before I got kicked out, that is. Things are getting a bit out of control on Flickr because I haven’t been very consistent about uploading photos. Nor have I been every good about organizing them. So I’m now going to try to come up with a structure of Collections to keep it organized. I had trouble doing that last night until I figured out that a Collection can’t contain both Sets and Collections. It is one or the other. So you have to figure out a complete system of Collections until you get right down to the lowest level of the hierarchy where you keep your Sets and photos.

My world of photography and journaling has gotten a bit out of control, I must say, especially when you consider that there is no point to it. With the desire to put all of this content on the Internet for safekeeping comes a large time commitment. Too large. Oh, well.

I’m less and less happy with staying downtown in Cebu. That area is jammed with older foreign men, and they are not a wholesome bunch. They strike me as lost and sad and pathetic, and I don’t like being lumped in with them. It’s funny that when I think about the future at all, I keep an emergency plan in the back of my mind that at least I can live in some third world country cheaply when I have no money. But that’s what these men are doing, and it seems so sad. I don’t want to be one of them.

 

 

 

Tags: bike, customer service, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, ROX, Tacloban, typhoon