Americano Promenade
12:51 on Sunday, December 21, 2003 • 2 responses
Filipinos can be included in the small but noble minority of people in the world who prefer to watch basketball over soccer. One of the nice things about being here is that no matter where you are, if you’ve got time to kill and you’re too tired to do anything cerebral, someone nearby—a shopkeeper, a security guard, or any one of a number of public establishments—has a basketball game on the tele.
Nevermind the fact that a healthy majority of the games I’ve seen here were actually played up to 20 years ago and that in some cases, I know how they end.
One such game is on offer now at the Cebu ferry terminal, where I’m waiting for a boat to take me to the Island of Bohol. A boat which has been delayed for the third time on account of rough seas. Apparently there has been a typhoon/ cyclone/ badass-rain-maker brewing up in tne waters south and east of here. I’ve been keeping a cautious eye on it, and over the last 24 hours or so it has dissipated. Still, I can think of better places to spend the time. Somewhere between broken speakers blaring Celine Dion, babies screaming, flickering fluorescent light, no fewer than 15 cellphones ringing simultaneously, and a group of xmas carolers singing three notes higher than the top of their vocal range, lies the line between sanity and insanity. I’d put my earplugs in, but my left ear has decided it doesn’t like them. In fact I think my left ear is on strike. Can’t say I blame it.
I couldn’t sleep last night on account of anxiety about traveling over miles and miles of open water at the periphery of a nascent tropical storm. Yesterday I met an American I’ll call Wally, who told me that the first time he made the ferry ride from Cebu to Bohol, he didn’t know what he was doing and booked it n a bamboo raft. As a result of my encounter with him, I’m traveling on a Supercat—a very large and, I hear, very safe—catamaran which transports no vehicles, only passegers.
Anyway, around 1am I realized I hadn’t yet eaten dinner, so I headed out to a restaurant I knew was open until 3am to grab some vittles.
I’m trying to think of a time in my life when I more strongly felt in danger, and only one comes to mind—finding myself at the wrong end of a gun’s barrel in Chicago. In four short Cebu blocks, starting literally from the first step I took outside the hotel to the moment I turned into the restaurant’s parking lot, I was accosted seven times. Four times by pimps, calling out (not discreetly, I might add) variations on a theme—”you want chicky-chicky, I get you girls”, “hot chicks, you like hot chicks”, “hot girls, sir, I get you hot girls”, and my favorite, “pretty pretty girls for low low price.” Also on the list to harass me this evening: three different groups of male teenagers, one of which followed me the length of the last block to the restaurant, chanting, “Americano! Americano!” Maybe they just wanted to talk. Yeah. About the weather.
The restaurant, a quiet enough place during the day, turned into a kind of upscale nightclub in the evening. I was there for an hour or so, reading the paper and enjoying a very well-prepared meal, and about halfway through my meal the clintele changed hands as if a work shift had ended. The twenty-somethings paid up their tabs and packed into their cars just as a group of four white men, I’m guessing mostly in their fifties, accompanied by teenage-looking Filipinas sporting tiny skirts and pounds of lipstick, came in and sat down.
I dont think any of the men knew each other, and judging by their demeanor and language, they were all American. I won’t spell out what was going on; let’s just say that one wouldn’t find the verbal arrangements made between these men and these girls transcribed in a church newsletter.
On my way out, I had a security guard call a taxi.
Perhaps yesterday I should have purchased a souvenir from this table at the market:
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