A Day In the Life Of Me

My unique cultural experience begins at 6 am, when I go for a jog at the lagoon. It is about 300 m around the provincial lagoon, and I like to do this ten times. I practice my rugby league sidestep with Pinoys walking at a slower pace. Often five abreast and traveling at a speed surpassed even by the rate of progress of the Philippine economy, this is always a challenge. Add a stray child to the mix, who is making haphazard progress from the lagoon to grass, grass to lagoon, grass to whoops grass to lagoon, and you’ve got an instant play station scenario.

Whenever I trip people over I assume an American accent.

After my jog I sometimes engage in idle chit-chat with locals. The conversation will usually proceed along the lines of: “Hey ma’am, I saw you come out of your house yesterday afternoon. Then I saw you at the shopping mall, ma’am, before you went to see that movie where you yawned and left early before having dinner at Café Bobs with your friend. Then you went home and turned your lights out at 11.06 pm. Excuse me ma’am what’s your name? And can I have your number?”

So much for privacy/anti-stalking laws. The activities of white people are constantly monitored, since we glow in the hot Filipino sun like white hot magnesium strips in a bunsen burner. My activities are particularly scrutinised because everyone knows my routines. I also accidentally once let slip the fact that I don’t have a guapo (good looking man) back home in Australia. Since that oversight, I’ve made every effort to drag an imaginary husband into the conversation whenever I can.

For breakfast I’ll have a buko (baby coconut) purchased from my buko man, who is a perennial smiler. I’m a suki (loyal customer) and we have a credit system operating whenever either of us is short of change. It costs 10 pesos for your very own coconut, which used to be around 25 c Australian, but is now closer to 30 c. If the Aussie dollar gets any weaker I’m afraid I’ll have to switch to mangoes which are a dime a dozen. Some fruit shops will even pay you to take them away.

Walking down the street is always challenging. There are often wires dangling from telegraph poles, which themselves lean at precarious angles and occasionally collapse onto the road. Rusty barbed wire, strategically placed at eye level, is another endemic feature of the Bacoleno urban environment. These features would create a war-zone ambience if not for the trees planted everywhere, a product of ongoing “clean ‘n’ green” campaigns. As a result, lush median strips are protected with hidden trip wires and spikes, vines wrap themselves artistically around electrical equipment and occasionally, shrubs are even positioned in the middle of the footpath, forcing hapless pedestrians onto the road.

While I have become an expert at negotiating the occupational health and safety nightmare that is Bacolod’s footpaths, one thing I will never become accustomed to is the state of the roads. Crossing requires you to shut both eyes and run at full tilt to the other side (watch the trip wire in the median strip). If you hesitate for too long you will attract a convoy of taxis and jeepneys, beeping madly and causing the traffic to become even more unpredictable.

As for security, there’s no danger of being mugged, since without fail there are always at least twenty pairs of eyes trained on my every move. Some days I would actually prefer mugging to the bitter feeling that my life has turned into Big Brother without the celebrity or cash-gains. On bad mornings, when my hair is matted into last night’s sleep-do and I have alcohol induced rings under my eyes, it’s next to impossible to take the perpetual:

“Gud morning ma’am, hey guapa wowee, hi hallo ma’am, gud afternoon ma’am, yes ma’am, yes yes no good afternoon miss, no ma’am, sorry ma’am? HEY BEWTIFUL YOU VERY GUAPA MISS, WANT TO MAKE HALO-HALO?”
(The last comment from a gentleman in a truck on the other side of the road, traveling at one hundred kilometers an hour in the opposite direction, is sure to leave you pondering if true love could really be so fleeting and cruel.)

I work in a City Government Office with about twenty others. They are all lovely and friendly people who have looked out for me in every way. Ilongglish is spoken in the office, which was off-putting at first. It sounds like English but it’s actually something else entirely. The other day, to my delight, I realized I had somehow acquired the ability to be understood. I delivered an hour long presentation and was greeted by nods of understanding and even a couple of Ilongglish questions. “Nice one ma’am,” said a miga afterwards, “you are speaking Ilonggo na.”

Outside of work I’ve acquired several hobbies to fill in the spare hours. I’ve been learning the guitar and had my first public performance at the Panaad Festival recently, playing “Under the Milky Way”. I’m not brilliant but I did get an inexplicable round of applause when I started singing, which felt very Eric Clapton “Leyla” unplugged (you know, the bit where they figure out what song it is). I have some other engagements lined up. I’m also a belly dancer, jewellery maker, occasional francophone and sometimes even get up to a bit of yoga.

More than playing the guitar, I actually just enjoy posing with it (see planned album cover for my break-through musical debut "Crooning on a Cannon in Cebu: Elizabeth rocks harder than Nana M." at left.)

One weekend I went shooting and discovered that I actually have a talent for pumping cardboard targets full of lead. Since then I've taken up with the local fiesta circuit and cheated a number of pinoy carnies out of lollies and cheap stuffed animals. Unfortunately, the excess baggage limit on Singapore airlines and various Australian customs laws prohibiting the use of asbestos in childrens toys means that I'll have to leave most of my winnings on home turf.



When I am bored I like to go out and make a spectacle of myself. On many a Saturday night (well actually, one only) I’ve stolen the microphone off a band and rendered my own version of some random Tagalog song. The old fall-back is Pinoy Ako, delivered in a thick bogan accent with plenty of "I love you guys" and "no seriously, I really do."

I also very much enjoy doing hataw in public. Hataw is the pinoy version of health hustles, which some of you may be familiar with from primary school. It’s basically public aerobics, with a few back jerking movements that engender strange twitches in your extremities for days afterwards. There is such a strong following for the activity here that it has been raised to a kind of cult status, with people hatawing themselves into a deep trance to the dulcet sounds of Fame and We Built This City every morning at the public lagoon. More than just jazzercise, Hataw is a philosophy to live and die by.

On a weekend when I was particularly bored I visited the fortune teller, who told me that I will have a wildly exciting life and be a young widow. Thus my new motto: live fast, ensure your husband dies young. The last piece of news has given me a great “sorry, not interested” line in bars that actually works.

My other hobby is eating cake. The specimens here are huge, sweet and delicious. Bacolod is famous for its desserts and the coffees aren’t half bad either. Ironically, the one sustainable change to arise from my assignment will most likely be an unsustainable cholesterol reading, and a raging caffeine addiction.

Tales of an Australian Bacoleno

I am an Australian lass living in Bacolod City, which is on Negros Island, one of the 7,100 islands comprising the amazing Philippines. I have been here for seven months, and in that time have only met one other Australian who lives in this city. She’s another Youth Ambassador for Development who arrived a few weeks ago.

Never heard of Bacolod? Well, it’s not the largest city in the Philippines, but nevertheless it is slightly difficult to be lonely here. With an official population of 429,076 in the year 2000, Bacolod is approximately twice the size of Australia’s capital city, Canberra. It’s also about 40 degrees warmer here in the summertime.

Bacolod is the capital city of Negros Occidental, a province in the western part of Negros Island, which is in the Visayas (the middle bit of the Philippines). The middle bit of the Philippines is often overlooked in world events. Without the glamour of Manila, or the unrest in Mindanao, the Visayas carry on their business without putting on too much of a song and dance, suffering continual power shortages and appalling traffic conditions with a “well at least we don’t live in that hole of a national capital”, happy-go-lucky, entirely charming “let’s eat more chicken and talk about the teevee in the dark” kinda attitude.

While Bacolod has been almost entirely reforested with eucalyptus trees, Australia does not figure much in the perceptions that locals have of the world. I am often asked what part of the states I am from. Usually, after telling people that I am from Australia, I will then be asked whether Australia is on the east coast or the west coast, and whether it’s very close to New York.

Those who know Australia are instant friends. Unfortunately, many seem to have had their hearts broken by Australians. More than once I’ve seen a local touch their chest, sigh and echo “Australia”, with a mysterious wistfulness. Then they’ll write a name on a piece of paper and instruct me to tell so-and-so that they’re still waiting here. The strangest experience I ever had was at an airport counter where a clerk had to wipe a tear from his eye upon seeing my passport.

“Oh,” he sighed delicately, “you’re from Australia.”

In truth, most days I feel as if I am from a parallel universe. Many things are the same: the smell of eucalypts, the sunshine, the beach and most of the time, the language. I say “most of the time” because the last can be misleading. Having been a wordy person all my life, I have noticed that the use of English here is really quite strange. I often find myself thinking I am on common ground in conversation when in actual fact our understandings are worlds apart. It tends to be disorienting and even nauseating to a mild degree.

The confusion arises when locals mix the local dialect, called Ilonggo, with a liberal dash of English, so it sounds like any old idiot Anglophone should be able to fathom it. This hybrid mixture is then blurted out in a jumble of sighs, melodies and sing-song whoopsadies that is actually quite soothing when dropped on the ears at full throttle. In actual fact, Ilonggo English (or Ilongglish, as I like to call it), is a false friend to Anglophones everywhere.

I have had to learn Ilonggo, since it is spoken in the office in which I work. All my friends here speak it also, along with Tagalog which is the national tongue. It has been a complicated process, only made more difficult by the fact that no one was able to give me formal lessons. The general consensus was that I would pick it up just by hearing it spoken over and over again. Sometimes, my Filipino migs would try to speak slower and louder for their Ilonggo-second-language friend, with confusing gestures and smatterings of English thrown in for good measure. Invariably they would soon tire of this and lapse into a form imbued with short-cuts, leaving me to squeak at the end:

“English palihog. Indi ko ka intiyende.” (English please. I can’t understand you.)

To complicate the matter, Ilonggo dictionaries are not readily available. There was one on the internet a little while back, but it seems to have disappeared. I have a print-out from a previous Australian who was here, but it is rat-nibbled, coffee stained and invariably wrong. The dictionary also goes one-way only: English to Ilonggo. If you want to actually work out what someone is saying to you, it’s next to useless.

Another complication has been that no one will write anything down for me, since Ilonggo is not so much a written as a spoken language. When I have managed to get something on paper from a helpful local, somebody else will tell me it’s wrong. It also seems that regardless of what I say, no one will ever actually believe that a westerner is trying to speak Ilongglish anyway. Most westerners here are American tourists who don’t stay long enough to learn the local dialect. As a result, I am often laughed at, even though my Ilongglish is technically correct.