I'm at Ninoy Aquino International airport in Manila, feeling refreshed after a hearty three-hour nap at my Nanay's house. I feel incredible. Throughout my trans-Pacific journey, I'd felt sort of an ambiguous malaise, confused about why I was making this trip in the first place, wondering what I was doing with my life, etc. I ambled around airport terminals, poking in and out of duty-free shops in a quasi-drunken stupor--brought on partially by overpriced beer but mostly by irregular, insufficient sleep, constant changes of altitude and pressure and gallavanting across time zones.
That malaise is gone. I remember now why I came: the Philippines are spectacular. I stepped off the plane around 11:30pm onto the big mechanical worm that carries passengers from plane to terminal and I was greeted instantly by two things: the humid tropical air (hovering refreshingly in the low 80s at night time) and vivid Filipino advertisements which, reflecting the natural splendor they replace, have little concern for the constraints of western color palettes. I felt infused instantly with an unshakable vivacity, as though the polluted Manila air held some secret to happiness. There has to be some reason that Filipinos are such inherently jovial people, sometimes even in spite of abject poverty, and I hadn't yet drank the water. . .
While I didn't have to go through any swine flu shenanigans like the ones in Tokyo, it took a good forty minutes for me to get my luggage. My backpack came out quickly, but my guitar was buried at the tail end of a procession of balikbayan boxes that seemed cartoonish, flowing incessantly onto the revolving belt the way clowns pile out of a vintage Beetle.
I finally got through customs and out to the street, where my uncle Erwin awaited me; it was about 12:40 by the time we got on the road. "Are you hungry?" he asked.
"No, not really." I thought about whether or not that was true after I'd said it. I wasn't really hungry, but I'd slept through the meal on the flight from Tokyo, which meant I hadn't eaten in about eight hours, and I probably wouldn't have time to eat in the morning, because I had to catch an early flight to Tacloban in a few hours.
"You have an early flight tomorrow. You probably need to get some sleep."
"Yeah, I guess I should."
We spent the next twenty minutes catching up on family, life goals, etc. What are my twenty-seven sisters doing? When are they coming to the Philippines.
"I think you're hungry," Uncle Erwin says suddenly. "I think you want to eat. We should see a band while we eat. Are you sleepy?"
I like where this is going. "Let's do it," I says.
Ten minutes later, we're in a big restaurant/bar in Las Piñas called Padi's Point, with a live band on a huge stage. In my first hour in the Philippines, despite the handicap of it being one o' clock in the morning, I had live music, pizza, and beer in front of me. Life is good. Above all, I'm excited about the live music culture here, the way live music isn't taken for granted--or perhaps it's that it is taken for granted that there will be live music as entertainment, wherever you go. Karaoke is an acceptable substitute, but the emphasis is on musicians making music come alive in front of you. That's not to say that the quality of the live music is uniform, and sometimes the repertoires are a little too uniform, but Filipinos love their live music, and it shows.
We got home around 3:00am. My nanay woke up and wanted to see my degree, so I obliged. It felt good to see her face light up as she read it: at least someone got something out of the five years I spent at University. I woke up at 6:00 this morning, and now it's off to Tacloban where I'll catch a five-hour jeepney ride to Borongan, and then be (officially) in paradise. My plane's boarding now, so until then.
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