Crowd control

First off, happy new year everybody! And now back to the Manila report.

I should backtrack a bit from the previous post and spend a little time describing our arrival on Monday night. It was a four hour flight from Tokyo, which definitely qualifies as insult to injury. We arrived around 10:30 pm local time, and you could feel the warm humidity from the jetway, of course. It was probably about 75F/24C and balmy, with a strongly funky overtone. Or maybe funky, with a slightly balmy overtone. Anyway, once we slogged through Immigration, waited an eternity for our bags—I think each person on that 747 was shipping eight boxes full of Christmas presents home—and got through customs, I figured we’d see the smiling face of kaskasero waiting to pick us up.

Not quite. I need to provide a little background on the scene, though, and explain about balikbayans and other overseas workers. Lots and lots and lots of Filipinos work outside the country all year, and then come home at the holidays. By lots I mean gazillions. So the international airport around Christmastime is a total madhouse (although for all I know, it’s like that all the time). For a lot of overseas workers, their whole family will come to meet them at the airport, and so there’s an outrageous mob of people waiting for arrivals at any time. So in order to handle the crowds, all the people waiting to meet arrivals are kept in an area away from the airport, behind a big fence and gate. If you’re the one arriving, you follow signs for the family waiting area and then get sorted by last name. Then you come out into an open area where your family can spot you from a distance, and persuade a guard dude to let you through the gate to meet your peeps. Kind of complicated, but totally necessary, I suppose. Fortunately it wasn’t too hard to figure out on no sleep!

In general, Manila is ridiculously crowded. Apparently the hordes are at their height around the holidays, so we saw the scene at max capacity. Besides the vehicle traffic on the roads, there’s also nutso amounts of people packed in the malls, and pedestrians randomly crossing streets whenever there seems to be a tiny break in the cars. (Or no break at all; I swear people were actually nudging pedestrians out of the way with their cars.) Occasionally the government sees fit to try and discourage people from walking across the faster highways; hence this sign:

Roughly translated, it says “Don’t cross here, you will die.” Of course it turns out that others have noted these signs. Funny, and yet not. People actually do cross any road, any time, even the elevated highways like EDSA, and apparently they don’t always make it.

Another thing I experienced that ties in with this theme is security. It was everywhere. You couldn’t walk into a mall or hotel without opening up your bags and often walking through metal detectors, and there were bomb-sniffing dogs and armed security guards in a lot of places, too. It was somewhat reassuring, given the unrest that the country experiences now and then, but also unnerving, since you recognize it’s all there because there’s a need for it. When we flew out, there were three separate security checks to go through at the airport, including one just to get into the building. Although, that wasn’t what bothered me about the departure. What bothered me was that they charge you 750P/$18 cash before they allow you to fly out. What the heck?! Fortunately we were warned at the hotel. Kaskasero, I’ll pay you back, I promise!