Daing na bangus and traffic

I’m back on the blog at last! First, a technical note. At first I thought of methodically going through each day of the trip, but then I wondered whether it might make more sense to do themes instead. In the end it looks like this first post has a little of both. Anyway, over the next several days I hope to post as much about the trip as possible, and if it appears at all organized, so much the better. If not, well, ya got tags you can use to find your way through.

The first full day of our trip got off to a good start, with what’s apparently a typical Filipino breakfast: daing na bangus at a local chain, Pancake House—yeah, quite the exotic name! Anyway, the dish is a fried marinated fish served with a pile of garlic rice that has a fried egg on top. Awesome hangover food, I imagine, and good jet lag food as well. In fact, after just one plate of this I wish I could have it every morning. (Here’s a recipe, here’s a pic.)

The first day also gave us the trip’s theme song, which is good—every trip needs a theme song. Thanks to kaskasero playing it incessantly in the car, it was track 9 from this disc: “Awitin Mo Isasayaw Ko”, a disco song covered by Pedicab. (Not that the band name means anything to me!) The beat moves a hell of a lot faster than the traffic in Manila, believe me. In fact, if you had to choose one word to describe Manila, it’d be traffic. Goddamn, I have never seen such traffic.

It’s hard to describe. Imagine a four-lane road, with at least six cars abreast. Imagine mopeds buzzing in between all the cars. Imagine a huge fleet of these crazy vehicles called jeepneys, full of people and decorated with all kinds of wacky designs. (Pic below.) Now imagine everything traveling at about 5 mph. Oh, and diesel smoke and pedestrians everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there are people who live in their cars permanently, trying to get to a house they haven’t been able to reach in years because of the awful traffic. In fact, traffic is so slow and heavy that vendors just roll their carts of stuff in between cars and hawk everything from peanuts to cigarettes. Totally insane.