Pace

As in many parts of the world, things happen slowly here. I’ve noticed that people walking on the sidewalk move at the slow pace of the person in front of them. I’m still trying to get used to it and usually find myself trying to squeeze through any space I can find in order to walk at my usual speed. Sometimes I try to slow down and follow along with the people around me but it doesn’t take long before I find myself accelerating. My brain knows it makes sense to walk slowly in this heat but my body, strangely enough, hasn’t made that connection yet.

The sidewalk isn’t the only thing that moves slowly. Some people have decided to consider the slow work pace here a problem. The Cebu provincial government is trying to apply productivity pressure on their employees. Three times a day (morning, lunch and home-time) the Provincial Capitol Building sounds a smooth yet startling bomb-raid siren to indicate when people have to be in their offices and when they’re allowed to go out. I wonder how they monitor what people do while they’re in their offices.

McRice Burger Revealed

As with many things in life, the McRice Burger is better left as a fantasy. I wish I could still have the childlike innocence of wondering what it tastes like, and I wish I didn’t know what it feels like to hold it in my fingers. When I ordered it I had to wait a whole five minutes for them to bring it out with smiles on their faces because someone actually wanted it. That was a bad sign.

It comes in a box. There are bits of iceberg lettuce and red cabbage stuffed between the rice “bun” and the burger patty. The patty isn’t the usual McDonald’s patty; it’s the kind of patty you expect to find in a bad-quality freezer-section box, not that the usual is much better. To top it all off, there’s a mysterious sauce glazed all over the patty and coated all over the lettuce mixture. My fingers got stupidly sticky from the first moment I touched the thing as I tried to get it out of the box. The taste wasn’t any better. Truth be told I really just don’t want to talk about it anymore.

No, I guess I didn’t really expect it to be great, but I did expect it to be fun and interesting. Instead, it was a big disappointment. I won’t be missing it when I’m back in Canada. I won’t be missing it tomorrow.

Coco Mall

The other morning I was walking through the courtyard of the building where I work and I got dripped on. I wasn’t under a cloud or an air-conditioner. I was under a dentist’s office (not Rolex Omega’s, but now that I mention it there is a dentist here named Rolex Omega) and the ceiling above me was dripping with water. Upstairs I couldn’t see what would be causing the water problem because above the leaking area was just a desk and a bench, no dentist equipment to be seen. Maybe the equipment in the next room was leaking and the water was traveling to the side before pooling and forming the drip. Who knows? Suffice it to say, this building is falling apart.

There’s a large and beautiful tree in the middle of the courtyard that has grown so much since the building went up that now one of its enormous branches is weighing down on the roof, creating a rushing waterfall whenever it rains. The waterfall pours out over the ramp that leads to the second level of the building.

Tucked under a staircase on the other side of the building there is a small popcorn vendor. The man who works there pops corn all day and into the night with only a small desk-fan to cool him. He, like many other people here, wears a cloth around his face to cover his nose and mouth in order to protect his lungs from the fumes that stick to the humidity in the air. I’m not sure if the cloth helps or just makes you feel hotter. I keep meaning to carry a damp cloth around with me for air quality emergencies but so far I always forget.

In one of the other suites in the building they are refinishing the floor boards with what smells like the most toxic urethane coating in the world. It’s so bad that every time I have to walk past, which means every time I go to the toilet, I try to hold my breath and walk very fast so that I don’t have to inhale the fumes. I’ve peered in occasionally on my sprint by to see a woman working at her desk and a man coating the floorboards with a paintbrush. They both wear simple cloth over their faces, nothing more. The door is kept open so that they don’t die in there, but other than that there is no extra ventilation. Air moves here like a thick, gelatinous soup; I can’t imagine spending a day inside that toxic office.