File Under U for 'Unexpected'

One of the nifty features of the plan I picked up today is that I can dial the US for less than $0.10 per minute, which seems absurd but apparently works. I tried to call my parents and they weren't home, so I got to try it out on John McCain's press office. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

"If Anyone Needs To Make a Call, I've Got a Phone!"

Withdrawing money was a runaway success, (thanks, Bank of America!) but I had a rougher time finding an apartment and a phone. It turns out that walking around and looking for apartments is trickier than expected, since most places want you to sign a one year lease. (I probably should have foreseen that.) So I'm back to looking around for a place, or possibly just staying put for the next two months. I ate lunch at a hole-in-the-wall place that I picked at random, and when I asked what the best dish was, the waitress pointed to the most expensive dish on the menu. I asked what the best dish was without beef, and she pointed to the second most expensive dish. I just pointed to something with chicken at random, and ended up with sauteed egg noodles. (They were pretty good, but when I asked to use the bathroom by the kitchen and saw that it didn't have a) a sink or b) a flusher on the toilet, I sighed and wished my gastrointestinal system luck.)

So that was a pretty abortive morning, but I kept pushing south in the hopes that I'd find a condo that was cheap, near the university, and available for two months starting immediately. Instead, it started pouring rain. And when I say 'pouring rain,' I mean that torrential rain of a magnitude I've never experienced, ever, flooded the streets all afternoon. I forgot that I made the awesome decision to come during habagat, or the wet season. First, I tried to stay dry under an awning, then I ventured out under my umbrella and quickly got soaked from my ankles up, and then I gave up and trudged through knee-deep water alongside the road for about twenty minutes. (The highlight was when I passed a Shell station, where I walked through what appeared to be a sea of water and gasoline.) I conceded defeat and went back to my room to shuck off my pants, socks, and shoes, and then ditched my shirt, too, which was soaking wet despite my umbrella. When I walked in, one of the guys on the staff was just finishing mopping up the entryway, and I tried to look more and more apologetic with every squelch that my shoes made as I tiptoed awkwardly to my room. I hated myself just then.

When the rain let up, I decided to go north and explore toward Ermita, and randomly happened to find a shopping mall. "Hey," I thought, "malls are supposed to be huge here," and since I'm supposed to be an anthropologist, I went inside.

MALLS ARE AWESOME.

At first, I was like, "oh, it's just like Cambridgeside Galleria!" except that is false, because it was about five times bigger. And it had a Marks and Spencer (!?!) where I had one of their vanilla and lemon biscuits, and errybody knows that Marks and Sparks makes the best biscuits ever and it brought a single tear to my acculturated British eye. I found a couple of used book stalls and picked up Don Quixote and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, had my phone unlocked, found a place to buy a SIM card, and found a charger for my Nokia, which now has chargers for two-prong square plugs, two-prong rounded plugs, and three-prong plugs, making it a telecommunications equivalent of Esperanto. I found all of this for like $20, AND found a grocery store where I picked up bread and mango jam, mangoes, apples, bananas, and (the highlight of perhaps my entire day) Amazon Frosted Flakes, that weird organic cereal that was my lifeblood in the Lowell dining hall and I haven't encountered since my senior year of college. And that is what I'm having for dinner now, because thanks to the mall, I accomplished two of my three objectives for the day and I deserve it.

Uppers!

Packing the mini-packets of Alpen and the jar of Sainsbury's Taste the Difference coffee was about the smartest thing I've done in recent memory, because who needs drugs when you've got breakfast-for-dinner to restore your hormonal balance?

I'm in a peppier mood because I stopped trying to explore the city and resigned myself to sorting out my life, and I think I've found an apartment to check out tomorrow, finished Milan Kundera's 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being,' read an essay by Richard Rorty which was ostensibly about education policy but actually explained why one of my long-term relationships was destined to fail (it's a long story, but it feels very vindicating to have a famous theorist in your corner), and then called Bank of America, where I stopped asking what to do and just told them to fix everything, AND THEY DID. It's amazing how directive you can be when you're actually terrified and have approximately twenty dollars on your person, but apparently, you can't smell fear across thirteen time zones.

So the short version of the story is that I had called to activate a new card a couple of weeks ago, only to find out that you have to do it from a) your home phone or b) a Bank of America ATM, which are both in short supply on this side of the Atlantic (to say nothing of this side of the Pacific). They told me to keep the old card - okay, fair enough - but then decided to shut it off and not tell me, which was decidedly unhelpful as I tried every PIN I could think of and panicked at the airport this afternoon. Luckily, I brought both cards with to Manila, so when I called back and they told me that my card was cancelled, I was like, um, I really do need one of these cards. Unhelpfully, the woman just reminded me that I needed to call from the US to activate a card. And I was like, "unfortunately, I can't, but I bet you could make this happen if you wanted to" AND SHE DID. Yay! Tomorrow, I will either have funds so I can get a cell phone and stop eating muesli from my suitcase, or this will all still be fucked up somehow and I'll have a nervous breakdown. Either way, I'm sleeping better tonight!

Speaking Too Soon

I made it to Manila, collapsed in my closet-sized (but $10) room at my guesthouse, and now I've got the rest of the evening ahead of me to panic. Manila is intense. On the drive into town, the streets looked like Coney Island after a bout of firebombing, and I've already been cornered by a feral cat and a rooster on my way to buy groceries in the touristy part of town. Worst of all, both of my debit cards appear to not be working, although I (luckily) managed to get about three days worth of cash before they died. After that, I'm basically fucked.

I know it's only Day 1, so I'm going to try not to conclude that I'm not cut out for this type of urban fieldwork. I don't really know what to do with that fact, because I'm here until the end of September, so I'm going to try to be peppy and optimistic until I'm all settled into an apartment and start the research, and then despair if necessary. (And mood stabilizers are out of the question because the Philippines punish drug trafficking with the death penalty. That's my fun fact for the day, and also what they welcome visitors with at the airport.)

T Minus... I Have No Idea What Time Zone I'm In Anymore, And My Body Clock is So Messed Up That I Think I'm Eating a Cinnamon Roll for Dinner

(I'm in Abu Dhabi! And it's hot like whoa! My glasses fogged when I got off the plane in a very sharp contrast from Oxford, which could generously be called autumnal at this time of year.)

I'm in remarkably high spirits after regaining confidence that Everything Will Be Okay, possibly boosted by the fact that I haven't suffered through a red eye flight or had to navigate a sprawling metropolis quite yet. I suspect this will change by tomorrow, but for the moment, I'm going to try to keep riding that rare feeling where I'm both looking forward to the next two months and looking forward to what comes after the next two months. I wish there are drugs that could replicate that feeling. There might be, actually, and I think they're called Xanax, but you know what I mean.

"When I Was Seventeen..."

In a very unexpected turn of events, I've suddenly developed a taste for Diet Coke, which I've always unflinchingly hated. Not because it's diet, just because I don't like cola. (I've probably eaten my body weight in Splenda, and I have nothing against aspertame because (if you weren't already aware of this) it tastes like sugar because it's made from sugar.) Except suddenly, Diet Coke is okay. It joins the ranks of eggs, cheese, oatmeal, potato salad, and other staple foods that people frequently enjoy and I irrationally hated until recently, when I grudgingly decided they're okay for no particular reason.

Anyway, this is why I just bought my first bottle of Diet Coke at the age of 23. I'm a late bloomer.

T Minus 24 Hours...

I packed early for what might be the first time in my life, and it sucks. (I was forced into it, because I had to drop off everything I wanted to keep at Hertford by the time the scouts finished cleaning this morning.) I've started apartment hunting in Manila, and my entries might be a tiny bit sparse until I can find a place that's a) clean, b) cheap, and c) close to my field site and the university I'm working with. (I'm going to guess that it'll be approximately two days before I abandon two and possibly three of these criteria for the sake of having a permanent address in the Philippines.) Even better than being packed early, I managed to fit everything into one suitcase. I know, up is down and nothing will ever make sense again. (I packed my favorite granola bars and muesli, a jar of coffee, and my Blackwell's mug because I'm worried that I'm going to be overwhelmed at the beginning and familiar breakfast is apparently my adult equivalent of a security blanket.)