Mulling Over First Impressions

It's Sunday morning, bright and early, and I think my biological clock may be trying to reassert itself, since I awoke waaaay too early this morning, so here I am.

We went for a drive to see some of the local areas, and provided some entertainment when the back wheels of our car went off the pavement when we tried to turn around on a narrow dead-end road running to the edge of the Laguna, the large inland bay between Manila and Los Banos, on the other side. Of course there was a muddy ditch right next to the pavement so the wheels just spun and spun, but, neighborhood to the rescue, lots of laughter and cheering when they lifted the car and the wheels got some traction, and we went on our merry way.

The landscape here, whether urban or rural, is a busy and often chaotic jumble of tropical growth and buildings of a very organic nature, with the ubiquitous cinder block, cement and corrugated sheet metal pieces seeming to grow and extend one from another much as the ferns attach themselves to tree branches. Little store-fronts extend from homes and other buildings, cheek-by-jowl with the road's edge and the vegetation behind,  so that everything depends on everything else in a beautiful and complex hodge-podge. It presents a paradox, where it seems that pulling out one small piece of corrugated could cause a whole city block to tumble down like a Jenga game, and at the same time all that concrete gives a sense of solid and immutable form. To further overstimulate the senses, every street is full of motion as people walk by often in groups of five or six at a time, or rush along in the little motorcylces with sidecars or the "jeepneys" that form the basis of public transportation. And in the old city, many many little carriages drawn by ponies so tiny it seems impossible they could pull the weight of all their passengers. Not to mention cars, trucks and huge tour buses everywhere as well. Streets are lined with mounds of fresh fruit or packaged snacks, candy bars, or bags of snails that people munch, or trays of fermented duck eggs, a delicacy here that I have not yet dared to try.

A tour of old Manila, or sadly what is left of it, the area within the old Spanish fort of Santiago (did you know that means Saint James? I didn't!) called Intramuros, informed us that General MacArthur bombed the ancient part of the city at the very end of WWII despite, according to the guide, being told it was unnecessary to dislodge the Japanese in this way. Sadly it wiped out almost all of Manila's early historical structures, going back to its origins as a small Muslim settlement some 4000 years ago. We have no idea what ancient history is, in the US of A!