General info about the Philippines
This page is meant to
reflect my daily living experiences in the
Philippines. It only represents what I've encountered, and
readers should not assume that my experiences reflect life in general
here or the experiences they may have as residents or visitors.
This is the page that I wish I had been able to read before I came to
the Philippines. I wasn't able to find anything on many of
the
subjects below, so I hope this will help other travelers feel more
prepared before they visit the Philippines.
Family:
My Filipino
family/household has lots of members. Marilyn is the owner of
the house. Her sister Grace is the youngest sister in their
family (of 6 children) and she lives in the house with her two-year-old
son Ian and her husband Edwin. Edwin worked in Subic Bay and
was only home on weekends, but he might be looking for something closer
to home. I sleep in Greg's room. Greg is the
youngest brother and just moved out to find a job and a place of his
own. He's working in a call center, probably answering calls
to an 800 number from the US. Olan is another brother, who
works for WR Grace (a specialty chemical company based in the US) in
Calamba. He commutes to work each day and gets home late at
night. Con is the only other member of the household besides
me who's not related. She's an undergraduate at UPLB and
works as the house help in exchange for room and board. She
and Marilyn share a room. On the weekends, various relatives
(including Edwin's) may stop by to visit and stay over - we had 14
people for lunch one Saturday. Rosalie, the oldest sister,
lives in Los Baños with her husband and two children.
They lived in Minnesota for a number of years. Her
daughter Sophie is a US citizen and wants to attend a US university
after she finishes high school. The other brother, Roger, visits
sometimes with his wife Lai and their two-year-old, Naya, who's a
bundle of energy.
Houses:
Houses range from bamboo and palm to plywood and corrugated galvanized metal shacks to
spacious tiled mansions. Many houses are built of cinder
blocks that are cemented over and painted. I live in a
recent subdivision where most of the houses are fairly large and
brightly colored. Yards are fenced in as a general rule.
We don't have much of a backyard, but it's enough space to
hang laundry and grow some orchids and a few food plants. The
yard flooded during the typhoon, and it's generally too damp for a
garden to do well, not to mention that the four dogs and the rooster
(now deceased) have a habit of trampling or eating greenery. The front yard
is concrete, and between our house and the next is a breezeway with an
outdoor sink and stove, the washing machine and spinner, Tita Olan's
car, and two fish tanks.
The
outdoor stove might be a surprise to some people, but it makes sense.
A lot of Filipino cuisine involves frying, and it's a lot
easier
to have the grease spatter everywhere outside the house. The stove
uses propane, which comes in a small tank and is attached right next to
the stove. There is no pilot light because it would waste
gas.
A small tank costs P600 and lasts about 3 weeks.
Cooking
outdoors also keeps the house cooler. We don't have air
conditioning, though fans help a lot, and there's definitely no heat.
There's also no hot water except for what's heated on the
stove
or in a 4 liter automatic kettle. I've been to other houses
where
the stove is indoors, and I'm sure there are plenty of places that do
have hot running water.
Bathrooms:
I'm relieved to report that I haven't seen a single squat toilet here,
unlike Thailand (and Indonesia according to my friend Jen).
However, that doesn't mean that a bathroom in the Philippines
is
like one in the US. There is a toilet bowl, but there's not
necessarily a seat, a lid, or a tank. It's a good opportunity to
develop those upper leg muscles. Toilet paper is almost
never provided - you have to bring your own in public places - and it
should never go into the toilet. Proper disposal is in the
wastebasket, which is frequently outside the toilet stall, so it's a
good idea to bring a plastic bag into the stall if you'll use more than
just a bit. Flushing usually involves using a dipper (tabo) to
move
water from a sink or barrel into the toilet. Sometimes the water
is shut off, so you can't flush. The floor is
likely
to be wet, so you have to be careful not to slip. Hand soap and
paper towels aren't
provided either - I'd definitely recommend bringing your own soap.
Also invest in a small bottle of rubbing alcohol to keep
handy.
The alcohol has glycerine and scent added and is widely used as a
hand sanitizer. Ladies' rooms are usually passably clean, but I
have it on good authority that men's rooms are frequently gross beyond
description. Part of the problem is the smell - apparently the
urinal is a sloped trough that is seldom if ever rinsed down with water.
Public restrooms are fairly common. You can find them at gas
stations, restaurants, shopping malls, etc. Buses don't have
bathrooms, but you can ask the driver to stop, especially on a long
trip, if you need to go. If you're male, finding a suitable place
to go is a lot easier than if you're female. (Male) public
urination is not illegal here. There is some etiquette involved.
It's not exactly polite to pee in someone's front yard or along a
storefront or office building, but out of the most modern parts of
Manila, any bit of blank wall or shrubbery will do, provided the man
can turn his back to passing traffic and other potential viewers.
In some parts of Manila, bright pink male urinals are located
along the sidewalks. As far as I know, they are basically
stand-up stalls to provide some privacy while men do their business in
areas where there aren't suitable blank walls or shrubbery. It
goes without saying that people here try to step over wet patches on
sidewalks.
My family talks about taking baths, though there's no bathtub in our
bathroom. Instead there's a bucket and a dipper in the shower
stall.
The bucket
is filled from the lower spigot in the shower and the dipper is used to
wet and rinse. I prefer to use the showerhead.
There's no
shower curtain. My hotel had one, and it had hot water, but
you
may not find either outside of hotels or resorts. In Banaue, the
inn I stayed at had a hot water tap in the shower but the only water
that came out was very cold. The tap water in our house is warm
during the day and cool at night, but it's quite bearable and by the
time it reaches my ankles, it feels warm. For Ian's baths in the
evening, his parents heat up water in an electric kettle and add the
hot water to cool in the bucket. Ian is still small enough that
he can pull his knees against his chin and sit in the bucket, with his
head poking out. It's very cute. I haven't used hot water
for a bath yet, but I did use the kettle to heat water for a hot
compress when I had an infection in my leg.
Water outages and plumbing problems seem to be fairly common.
I'm
not yet sure where sewage goes, but water may be unavailable at certain
times of day. The water in Los Baños is very hard
and it
can cause plumbing problems. The kitchen sink had broken
twice in the first 2 weeks since
I'd moved in, both bathroom sink drains leak, and there's a persisent
sewer line problem that
would require excavating the back yard to solve, so the bathrooms and
kitchen sink smell
unpleasantly of sewer gas. I don't know when it might be
fixed,
or when the broken seat (now removed) on the upstairs toilet will be
replaced. I have no idea how much repairs cost here, but I
suspect that time, money, and labor are all issues that are preventing
repair. At the Forestry building on campus, several of the
toilets in the bathroom don't flush except by dipper and at least one
faucet doesn't work. There's almost no money for maintenance.
Transportation:
Private car ownership has definitely increased in recent years, but
even in Metro Manila, most of the vehicles on the road are dedicated to
public transportation or delivery services. The range of ways to
get around is pretty amazing. Walking is always an option, though
not necessarily a good one. It can be quite hot when the sun is
shining, and though an umbrella will provide shade, if you have to
travel a long distance, you're likely to arrive at your destination
sweaty and dehydrated. In many places, the sidewalk, if present,
is so narrow that only one person can walk on it at a time. The
locals walk in the road, but you have to watch out for traffic,
including the motorcycles that will use the sidewalk to pass stopped
traffic. You're likely to find cars parked on the sidewalk, or
sections of the sidewalk missing for repairs to the drains that run
underneath the concrete. Parts of Manila have quite nice
sidewalks, complete with street over- or underpasses and a pedestrian
skyway that leads to the Greenbelt/Glorietta shopping complex.
But you'll also find areas covered by trash and used as bathrooms
by homeless people who have come to the city in hopes of finding a
better life. Certain areas of the city probably aren't safe to be
walking around at night, but the biggest health risk is breathing in
the gray clouds of exhaust that hang over the streets when traffic is
anything more than sparse (which is most of the time). After
dark, it can look like cars are traveling through gray fog.
Train service is almost nonexistent - one daily train goes to Manila,
but I've never seen it and I haven't heard it very often since Milenyo
passed through. However, you can pay a few pesos and get a ride
on one of the wooden roller platforms that their operators push down
the tracks. When the train comes, the platforms are lifted off
the tracks, then replaced. In the cities of more rural areas,
pedicabs are still quite common. I don't see too many in Los
Baños, but in Leyte they were still the most common form of
public transportation. The pedicabs can only carry about 2
people, and they can only go as fast as the driver can pedal, so
they're not practical in areas with a lot of hills. The more
modern (and more polluting) form of the pedicab is the tricycle, which
is basically a motorcycle with a sidecar attached by a welded frame.
The configuration varies depending on location. In Los
Baños, the sidecar is lower than the motorcycle and seats 2-3
(more if you have small children). Two adults can fit behind the
driver. In Leyte, the tricycles were called something else, and
had a bench seat next to the driver in the front, and a cab behind that
opened to the back and had three small benches making a U. Some
tricycles have a rack behind the sidecar where you can put groceries,
sacks of rice, or a spare person. We once came home from the
supermarket with a mattress tied to the top of the sidecar.
Tricycles aren't allowed on the highway because they're the
slowest motorized vehicles, and they produce copious blue clouds of
exhaust, but they're cheap and are frequently the most convenient form
of transportation because they'll pretty much go wherever you ask -
they don't have set routes. If you're clever about it and have a
bunch of children, you can get 8-9 passengers into and onto a tricycle.
Communication:
I didn't have a cell phone before I came to the Philippines, but it
would be hard to get by without one here. Actually, I'm sure one
could live quite happily without a cell phone here, but the fact is
that almost everyone has one, and they expect you to have one too.
And given the way cell phone plans work here, there's not really
a good argument against having a phone. Landline phones are
difficult to get. My house doesn't have one, and while many
larger businesses have them, most households don't. Public pay
phones can be found, and you can buy phone cards to use in them, but
they're not necessarily common or located in areas where you could
actually hear the person on the other end over the ambient noise.
Cell phones are fairly cheap - I got mine for about $30, though
it doesn't have games, take pictures, or have a color display - you can
spend a lot more for a phone that will do all those things. The
country has two main service providers - Globe and Smart. Each
one has several types of SIM cards. I have a Smart Talk'n'Text
card. Some locations have better reception for one provider - I
could hardly get a signal in Baybay, Leyte, but further north on Mt.
Janagdan, I had great reception while those with Globe had no
reception. SIM cards are cheap, so a lot of people have one for
each provider and switch between them. The SIM cards are the
equivalent of a cell phone plan in the US. Rates for texting,
domestic calls, and overseas calls will vary depending on the type of
SIM. But beyond that, everything is done on a pay-as-you-go
basis. I buy a P300 phone card, which comes with a bunch of free
text messages (I have yet to use up the free messages before I use up
the peso value on overseas calls), and overseas calls cost me P20 per
minute. I learned the hard way that you have to buy the right
kind of card for your SIM (Smart Buddy won't work for Smart
Talk'n'Text), but loading is also an option. At many small
stores, you can pay a few pesos, write down your phone number, and have
the money credited to your phone.
I have all kinds of numbers stored in my cell phone at this point.
Those of the Fulbright staff, my family members, and co-workers
aren't surprising, but I also have the numbers of several guides in
Banaue and reservation desks of hotels. I've used my phone
(almost all via text messaging) to plan to meet people, to make
reservations, to get directions.
Last updated: December 30, 2006
