I knew my wife online for a year before I physically met her… my biggest culture shock was when I went to the Philippines the first 2 times (for different reasons).
When I got off the plane the first time (after a flight of around 22 hours including layovers). It was around midnight when I landed. I was in an airport full of people and I think I could have counted the white people. I heard people talking… but nobody is talking in English. English is a NATIONAL LANGUAGE but it’s functionally only USED in school and for talking to foreigners. They do not talk to family and friends in English. We stayed in Manila the first trip… still at the airport… what am I there for? To meet my soon to be wife who I have seen pictures of but have never actually met. I need to find her in an airport full of Filipinos. Good… I found her.
Now what? How do we leave the airport? EASY my tour book told me that… you take an airport taxi and you will pay a determined price… if you take another type of taxi they will rip you off…. As far as meter rates go they have the cheapest cab fairs in all of Asia, but they ALSO have the most crooked cabbies in all of Asia…and if you have white skin and only speak English you are in a terrible bargaining position…you might not even be safe… you could get robbed and/or killed (per tour book). It turned out that my soon to be wife had not read the tour book…she felt with her negotiating skills she could do a whole lot better than airport facilities rates AND we would be safe. I was in really good hands, but I wasn’t feeling really convinced yet.
OK so we leave the airport… I knew Metro Manila was a big and crowded… but I couldn’t comprehend it. Metro Manila is the 4th most highly populated metropolitan area in the world with the 2nd highest density…and NUMBER ONE when using an equation which considers population and density together… the 3 cities with more people also take up more space so they are less crowded…the one city that is more crowded has less space so Manila is physically bigger…when you factor population together with space Manila comes to the top.
Something I relate to: I live Tennessee (population 6.7 million) bordered by Kentucky (4.4 million) on north and Georgia (10.4 million) on the south (3 whole states plus another 3 million people make up the population of Metro Manila). The most highly populated metro area in USA is New York City… but I have never been there… for those who can relate to that… it’s about 3 times as many people but only twice the area…. hardly any of them are white and you don’t hear much English… it is VERY crowded and it has bad air pollution.
OK we are in the taxi…. where do we go? My soon to be wife who I just physically met wants to go pick up a friend… fine… no problem. We stop in a dark alley and she wants me to wait in the taxi while she goes up to her friend’s apartment. I don’t know how long she was gone probably only 5–10 minutes but it felt like an hour. Go through some more traffic and maybe less than an hour later we finally get to the hotel, go to bed and get laid (maybe 2–3 hours after we physically met). It was all downhill from there… but the first couple hours was kind of a culture shock.
Looking forward to the next trip? Before I got laid I would have “no”… but I was looking forward to coming back before I left. So around a month later I went back…and what happened? Well the first thing we did after landing in Manila was get out of Manila… and go to Cebu City.
I was looking forward to Cebu. My soon to be wife said she really liked it there she went to college there and lived there for more than 10 years.… she has a lot of friends there and even a sister…my tour book said it was “Like Manila without the Mayhem” it sounded so promising… So what did I see that first day? THIRD WORLD POVERTY…to be fair, the nice things ARE THERE…I just didn’t notice them because I was overwhelmed by the poverty. I am not even going to TRY to explain…just say it made me really very sad…Manila has its share of poverty also, but I didn’t notice the first trip…I was focused on other things the first trip.
Next day we leave Cebu City and go to Dumaguete… is it better? NO… it’s worse…probably about the same actually… the BIG problem is when you leave Dumaguete and go into the rural areas. Go out into the rural area and the poverty rate is around 40%. That sounds really very bad right? Turns out the way they define the poverty level is INSANE. Poverty level is a little more than $1 (one US dollar) per person per day. If you have a family of 5 and make around $7 per DAY you are ABOVE the poverty level.
How can 40% of people in that area live on LESS than THAT? You MIGHT THINK you want to know the answer to that question….but I don’t think you REALLY want to…. you ONLY want to know BECAUSE you don’t know… after you do know, you will wish that you did’t. Just say Cebu City REALLY IS NICE… it’s just that I didn’t have the right thing to compare it to before.
Is there any silver lining to the cloud? There WAS… it wasn’t all bad… if nothing else at least I can say that in all of my other trips I never saw anything worse. There WAS one BIG bright side… we met Ken there… the first person who I saw on BOTH sides of the Pacific Ocean… and it was nice to see a familiar face…. who was KEN? I didn’t tell you about Ken yet…he was a short term missionary…he went there once per year for a couple weeks…his full time job was about a half hour from where I lived in Minnesota. How did I meet him in Minnesota?
Well my soon to be wife has connections. She has NEVER BEEN in the USA, I have been there my whole life and turns out my soon to be wife knows more people in more places in the USA than I do. She hooked me up with someone SHE KNEW a half hour from where I lived BEFORE I WENT THERE THE FIRST TIME and more than a year before she would ever step foot in this country.
I met Ken for lunch once and he told me the story about how he knew her… (footnote: I actually met him before I met her and this trip was coordinated to be there at the same time and place as him). All downhill from there but the first 2–3 days was serious culture shock (foot note: first trip the bad cuture shock was 2–3 HOURS second trip was 2–3 DAYS). I thought I had an idea what to expect the second time…but I didn’t know what to expect the second time ANY more than I did the first time. Metro Manila and the rural area outside of Dumaguete might as well be in different WORLDS.
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