Day One
I'm writing this while suffering from a sort of alcohol fueled jet lag. Which makes sense given exactly what I've been up to lately, tipsy on my own disorientation; time unfixed and mutating all around me convincing me to stay up even though the sun has far and away gone down and midnight has begun chase on a new day. My brother seems to be suffering the same illness, sympathy jet lag a thorny bitch as we giggle about nothing and he makes motions with his hands, floppily shaping the words coming out of his mouth.
As tradition dictated we ate at a 'lugaw' stall early in the morning after coming home from the airport. We ate hot rice porridge from chipped ceramic bowls and drank lukewarm water out of cold metallic cups, sweat pouring off our faces as the heat of the sun bore down upon our backs like a man with a whip and a sadistic temperament.
I was fishing trip out of the bowl like a pro, slurping down tenderized cow stomach like a local while the lady at the counter made vague comments about the color of my hair and the size of my waist, not knowing I spoke Tagalog like my brother spoke English. Which is to say fluently but with an exaggerated accent.
On the way home we bought a bottle of gin, a Pinoy brand, that tastes exactly like cat piss but kicks like a mule, taking tentative puffs out of my American Spirits as we dodged kamikaze motorcycles and vans with drivers on a mission; possibly to eradicate all pedestrians.
I was hyper then, fresh from a flight, sweat making my make up run in an attractive sex worker fashion, hair a delightful red mess bundled at the base of my skull. We discussed what we wanted to do that day, how surreal it felt that I was there, here, in Pasig City Philippines, bright eyed and bushy tailed and eager to spiral into a mighty mess of alcohol and prescription drugs as we explored places my brother was about to become reacquainted with. We spent the morning drinking, or rather, I spent the morning drinking while my brother unpacked all of my stuff like the good little soldier that he is. Eager to get his hands on a brand new tablet that I brought back all the way from the states. I almost got excited for him if it weren't for my need to have a chat with my chef friend online, who I promised a call to. Or it could have been a call, I might have promised him one of my kidneys and sexual favors for a year. I honestly don't remember much of our conversations, as most of them turn into a concert of food and porn.
Eventually, after failing out at getting contact with the outside world and my brother ripping boxes to shreds we got bored and decided to go to the mall. In my defense all I wanted was working internet and fancy new fine tipped pens like the one I'm writing the first draft of this blog entry with.
I didn't expect to the fucking mall to be step two in what I hope to be a long series of culinary adventures.
We rode a tricycle to the mall. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a motorcycle strapped to a metal chassis with only the barest minimal of welding work and MacGuyvering to run like a taxi service, ferrying people from one point to another; carrying up to five people at a time not counting the driver.
We sat on the back of the motorcycle, me clutching my hip-flask like a religious object, and my brother, more used to dangers such as this, calmly holding onto the roof with what looked to me like fucking duct tape turned into a handle bar of some sort.
"Fuck me," said I to no one in particular, as we raced down narrow streets; sharing the road with hundreds of other similar vehicles and a fucking horse drawn carriage pulling a cart stacked with propane tanks. "Seriously, fuck me."
Like this we rode on, barely clinging to metal death trap to metal death trap as we traversed the nasty snarl of traffic Pasig city calls a transport system. It's better than Six Flags on the terror scale, humidity clinging to our clothes and our skin like a love lorn teenager, smog mixing with god knows what that festering scent was, I dearly hope it isn't rotting pig corpses, but it smelled so similar.
Am I painting a glamorous enough picture of my adventures yet?
WE reach the mall, narrowly avoiding death, myself deeply within the throes of half a handle of gin and my brother, sober as a saint.
We make a quick stop at a drug store where I buy 14 vicodin without a prescription and pop two straight out of the child proof bubble wrapping and dry swallow like House would if he were there to see me and be proud.
We bought clove cigarettes with real motherfucking cloves at a cigarette stall manned by a woman that at my great and terrible height of five five only reached my shoulder and we continued on in our search for internet and caffeine.
One thing I can say about the Philippines is that they know how to treat their smokers right, as we shut the door to the walk in cold smoking area and into a cloud of cigarette smoke London fog thick.
"I change my mind," I said to my brother, "I fucking love this country."
"Damn straight, sis." He says, impressing me by blowing a perfect 'o' out of his mouth.
From there we got valuable information from the rest of the smokers, that there is an all you can drink buffet in the atrium of the mall, my liver protested but my upstairs brain said "oh yes please, daddy." And thus, off we went, to a tiny little spot called Tong Yang, where I immediately hit on the female security guard and almost got hot broth in the lap by staring blankly at the waitress as she laid out our options. Seriously, I was just there for the never ending flow of beer in actual facts beer steins like we have in the states.
Dear me, was I in for a surprise.
At the table where they sat us were to fire pits embedded into the top, one for steaming hot broth of varying levels of spiciness separated into two by a partition at the center and a French-top style grill where you could cook tougher meat. On the buffet line next to us was a man in a chef's coat doing unspeakably dirty things to a still twitching mackerel, sliding his knife through pulsing flesh to separate them out into largish bite sized pieces. Among the other choices were lapu lapu head, a carp relative with jowls practically white with fat and collagen, squid that curled inwards to the touch and fish paste balls of varying levels of seasoning, all in glass plates over ice, gleaming like gems in a jewelers and just as tempting.
Oh yeah, I had some fun over there.
Sated and barely moving I began pleading with my brother to relay the news of my find to my chef friend who would no doubt be envious, so it was back to the smoker's heaven of a coffee shop and to the internet where I was thwarted once again by the slow moving bandwidth and a distance many thousands of miles wide. But no matter, nothing could have blunted the sharp blade of my optimism and it was back home, off again in one of those death traps I spent such a long time moaning about, back to Pasig City and out of Manila proper, where little did we know that another feast awaited us.
My little brother, trained from birth, or possibly through association with me, imprints onto people who are cooks and instead of taking me home where I can have some more gin and another dose of vicodin, he took me instead to another stall. A quaint little bar of some type, growing out of a residential house like mushrooms growing out of a tree.
There the chef greeted us by first asking how our day went, the proceeded to grill chicken intestines, chicken feet, bright red sausages bursting with pork and dark blood, and of course, since my liver probably did something terrible in the past life, two (for each of us) largish pint bottles of beer that tasted like Bud but kicked like Arrogant Bastard.
And then, since we hadn't eaten our body weight in grilled offal yet; he gave us a dessert of sticky rice risotto (is the only word I can use to describe it) peppered with little bits of sweet corn and long butter smooth pieces of jack fruit.
My body protested by my pride got in the way, and I ate and drank till the plates were cleared and the bottles were emptied.
"Oh god," I said, resting in as close to the fetal position as possible without actively throwing up, "Bourdain missed a whole bunch of shit in his run through the Philippines. I aim to fucking fix that."
Which is when the chef rolled out a cigar the literal length of my face and took a puff.
"Who's this Bourdain?"
As tradition dictated we ate at a 'lugaw' stall early in the morning after coming home from the airport. We ate hot rice porridge from chipped ceramic bowls and drank lukewarm water out of cold metallic cups, sweat pouring off our faces as the heat of the sun bore down upon our backs like a man with a whip and a sadistic temperament.
I was fishing trip out of the bowl like a pro, slurping down tenderized cow stomach like a local while the lady at the counter made vague comments about the color of my hair and the size of my waist, not knowing I spoke Tagalog like my brother spoke English. Which is to say fluently but with an exaggerated accent.
On the way home we bought a bottle of gin, a Pinoy brand, that tastes exactly like cat piss but kicks like a mule, taking tentative puffs out of my American Spirits as we dodged kamikaze motorcycles and vans with drivers on a mission; possibly to eradicate all pedestrians.
I was hyper then, fresh from a flight, sweat making my make up run in an attractive sex worker fashion, hair a delightful red mess bundled at the base of my skull. We discussed what we wanted to do that day, how surreal it felt that I was there, here, in Pasig City Philippines, bright eyed and bushy tailed and eager to spiral into a mighty mess of alcohol and prescription drugs as we explored places my brother was about to become reacquainted with. We spent the morning drinking, or rather, I spent the morning drinking while my brother unpacked all of my stuff like the good little soldier that he is. Eager to get his hands on a brand new tablet that I brought back all the way from the states. I almost got excited for him if it weren't for my need to have a chat with my chef friend online, who I promised a call to. Or it could have been a call, I might have promised him one of my kidneys and sexual favors for a year. I honestly don't remember much of our conversations, as most of them turn into a concert of food and porn.
Eventually, after failing out at getting contact with the outside world and my brother ripping boxes to shreds we got bored and decided to go to the mall. In my defense all I wanted was working internet and fancy new fine tipped pens like the one I'm writing the first draft of this blog entry with.
I didn't expect to the fucking mall to be step two in what I hope to be a long series of culinary adventures.
We rode a tricycle to the mall. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a motorcycle strapped to a metal chassis with only the barest minimal of welding work and MacGuyvering to run like a taxi service, ferrying people from one point to another; carrying up to five people at a time not counting the driver.
We sat on the back of the motorcycle, me clutching my hip-flask like a religious object, and my brother, more used to dangers such as this, calmly holding onto the roof with what looked to me like fucking duct tape turned into a handle bar of some sort.
"Fuck me," said I to no one in particular, as we raced down narrow streets; sharing the road with hundreds of other similar vehicles and a fucking horse drawn carriage pulling a cart stacked with propane tanks. "Seriously, fuck me."
Like this we rode on, barely clinging to metal death trap to metal death trap as we traversed the nasty snarl of traffic Pasig city calls a transport system. It's better than Six Flags on the terror scale, humidity clinging to our clothes and our skin like a love lorn teenager, smog mixing with god knows what that festering scent was, I dearly hope it isn't rotting pig corpses, but it smelled so similar.
Am I painting a glamorous enough picture of my adventures yet?
WE reach the mall, narrowly avoiding death, myself deeply within the throes of half a handle of gin and my brother, sober as a saint.
We make a quick stop at a drug store where I buy 14 vicodin without a prescription and pop two straight out of the child proof bubble wrapping and dry swallow like House would if he were there to see me and be proud.
We bought clove cigarettes with real motherfucking cloves at a cigarette stall manned by a woman that at my great and terrible height of five five only reached my shoulder and we continued on in our search for internet and caffeine.
One thing I can say about the Philippines is that they know how to treat their smokers right, as we shut the door to the walk in cold smoking area and into a cloud of cigarette smoke London fog thick.
"I change my mind," I said to my brother, "I fucking love this country."
"Damn straight, sis." He says, impressing me by blowing a perfect 'o' out of his mouth.
From there we got valuable information from the rest of the smokers, that there is an all you can drink buffet in the atrium of the mall, my liver protested but my upstairs brain said "oh yes please, daddy." And thus, off we went, to a tiny little spot called Tong Yang, where I immediately hit on the female security guard and almost got hot broth in the lap by staring blankly at the waitress as she laid out our options. Seriously, I was just there for the never ending flow of beer in actual facts beer steins like we have in the states.
Dear me, was I in for a surprise.
At the table where they sat us were to fire pits embedded into the top, one for steaming hot broth of varying levels of spiciness separated into two by a partition at the center and a French-top style grill where you could cook tougher meat. On the buffet line next to us was a man in a chef's coat doing unspeakably dirty things to a still twitching mackerel, sliding his knife through pulsing flesh to separate them out into largish bite sized pieces. Among the other choices were lapu lapu head, a carp relative with jowls practically white with fat and collagen, squid that curled inwards to the touch and fish paste balls of varying levels of seasoning, all in glass plates over ice, gleaming like gems in a jewelers and just as tempting.
Oh yeah, I had some fun over there.
Sated and barely moving I began pleading with my brother to relay the news of my find to my chef friend who would no doubt be envious, so it was back to the smoker's heaven of a coffee shop and to the internet where I was thwarted once again by the slow moving bandwidth and a distance many thousands of miles wide. But no matter, nothing could have blunted the sharp blade of my optimism and it was back home, off again in one of those death traps I spent such a long time moaning about, back to Pasig City and out of Manila proper, where little did we know that another feast awaited us.
My little brother, trained from birth, or possibly through association with me, imprints onto people who are cooks and instead of taking me home where I can have some more gin and another dose of vicodin, he took me instead to another stall. A quaint little bar of some type, growing out of a residential house like mushrooms growing out of a tree.
There the chef greeted us by first asking how our day went, the proceeded to grill chicken intestines, chicken feet, bright red sausages bursting with pork and dark blood, and of course, since my liver probably did something terrible in the past life, two (for each of us) largish pint bottles of beer that tasted like Bud but kicked like Arrogant Bastard.
And then, since we hadn't eaten our body weight in grilled offal yet; he gave us a dessert of sticky rice risotto (is the only word I can use to describe it) peppered with little bits of sweet corn and long butter smooth pieces of jack fruit.
My body protested by my pride got in the way, and I ate and drank till the plates were cleared and the bottles were emptied.
"Oh god," I said, resting in as close to the fetal position as possible without actively throwing up, "Bourdain missed a whole bunch of shit in his run through the Philippines. I aim to fucking fix that."
Which is when the chef rolled out a cigar the literal length of my face and took a puff.
"Who's this Bourdain?"