Good Riddance

It’s hard to believe, but I head home in less than 48 hours.  The cold that I thought I had defeated during the week redeveloped this morning, leaving me uncomfortable and grumpy.  I’m in the perfect mood to bring back a tradition I started in China: listing things I will not mind leaving behind.

1.  The food.  It’s just not very good.  Most dishes tend to be extremely salty, very sweet, and completely devoid of any fruits, vegetables, or nutritional content.  The exception to the no-veggies rule are the restaurants that sell single servings of pre-made dishes.  These restaurants are sometimes okay but usually very mediocre, and the best one I found made me sick.

  

2.  Slow transportation.  There are no official jeepney stops, so when you want the driver to pull over you just shout out ‘stop!’  This sounds convenient, but it just means that the jeeps have to grind to a halt every 100 meters because everyone is too lazy to get their acts together and just walk a block.  

3.  Being mistaken for a sex tourist.

4.  Lack of history.  Coming from China, where every single little village has some important role in history that everyone wants to tell you about (“we’re famous for crabs!”), I find it strange to come to a country where nobody seems to care.  I visited three history museums and they were all in varying state of disrepair, ranging from passable to pathetic to, tellingly, closed until future notice.  Other than that I saw a few old Spanish churches that had been completely refurbished and took pictures of some old American buildings.  That was it.  And I was looking for history!  I know a lot of it was destroyed in the wars, but still.

5.  The food.  Did I mention how disappointing the food is?  What kills me is that it has so much potential.  I spent a lot of time in markets so I know that there is a huge variety of local, fresh, delicious produce just sitting there, waiting for someone to cook it, but somehow those veggies always end up in something salty and sweet and saucy or, in the case of a pinakbet, a dish of pumpkin and okra that could really be something great, covered in immense gobs of terrible, terrible shrimp paste.  Historically, this makes no sense.  The two most powerful foreign influences before the 1900’s were China and Spain, two countries with really good chefs, so the food should be an amazing Chinese-Spanish fusion with tropical fruits and vegetables.  But it’s not.  Really, not at all.

The Philippines is a pretty awesome place.  I can’t really think of anything else to complain about.