Penman for Monday, March 31, 2008
BEFORE ANYTHING else, here’s an announcement on behalf of my friends in the Volkswagen Club of the Philippines. The VWCP is spearheading an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest motorcade of Volkswagen vehicles. The event will take place next Sunday, April 6, at the Quezon Memorial Circle, with the assembly time set for 6 am at the Quezon City Hall. Free registration, a certificate of participation, and a commemorative sticker await all participants. So haul that Beetle, Scirocco, or Kombi over to the big parade—all VWs welcome (especially my old friend Lisa Araneta’s priceless Hebmuller)! (Alas, I’ll be on my way to Baguio for the Writers Workshop at that same hour!)
IT'S 10:15 am and we should’ve landed in Hong Kong half an hour ago; Beng and I should be making our way to the downtown shuttle just about now. Instead, we’re still inside the plane, on the ground, at the airport—the wrong one, in Manila. We actually took off on time at 8:00 am. We’d just risen above the horrible smog that’s become to Manila what a morning cough is to smokers, winging our way north for the westward turn into the South China Sea, when the pilot made a most unusual announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. I’m sorry to say that we have to return to Manila, because of a problem with pressurization. Please fasten your seatbelts.”
And so we made a great arc in the air, and I leaned over to look out the window so I could pick out landmarks we’d passed earlier. I’ve never quite lost my boyhood fascination with takeoffs and landings, eager to see the city as God—or some hapless soon-to-be crash victim screaming to his death—might see it, a patchwork of rusty roofs and manicured lawns and straight-edged factories and ribbony highways. Everything, I’m sure, is ten times uglier up close, but up there it’s easy to be seduced by the comforting fiction of patterns. You begin believing that everything’s been planned, that someone actually took the trouble of putting all the people here and the cows there and the fish elsewhere. As I’d jotted down in my notebook years ago, on another flight, “Cities are never prettier than when you’re leaving them.” I can’t remember now what city that was, but it could have been Manila, caught in a moment of ethereal beauty, in a mood of anticipated longing.
Right now all I want to be is somewhere else. The plane’s been parked on the tarmac for more than an hour and they’ve served the breakfast we were just about to have when we turned around, and there’s a busy to-and-fro of technicians attending to something in the plane’s midsection, but nobody can tell me for sure when or if we’re taking off again. I’m reminded of the “Trip to the Galaxies” an aluminum company sponsored in my childhood; my father clipped out and saved enough coupons from the newspaper to get tickets for the whole family, and—led by a lumbering attendant in an aluminum space suit—we boarded this fat fuselage, sitting like a big toothpaste tube on Aurora Boulevard—and strapped ourselves into our seats for our “intergalactic flight,” which happened when the windows opened and we began zooming past Jupiter, Saturn, and whatever else the universe offered in lieu of newspaper coupons. I was mesmerized, and bought into the fantasy completely.
I have claustrophobia, which is one reason I turn up four hours before every long flight and buy bus tickets a week in advance, so I can choose my seat, the closer to the front door the better. Not only will it get me to my destination sooner than almost everybody else; I can’t stand being cooped up in a cramped seat in the back, sandwiched between a sumo wrestler and a crying baby. I usually take the aisle seat in planes, but this time I’ve chosen the window, so I can take pictures; I know Beng will be seated beside me, so that’ll mitigate the claustrophobia. Sometimes I come very close to panicking in literally tight situations. I like bus rides with lots of pit stops, and plane rides with multiple stopovers (I like airports, besides, if only to gawk at the local food and the curios in the shops); the businessmen may be very happy with the non-stop trans-Pacific flights that now take you from Manila to the West Coast, but as far as I’m concerned I got cheated out of my stop in Narita or Seoul or Honolulu.
I suppose I got my transit time this time—except that it’s in Manila, I’m stuck in my window seat, and the passenger in front of me has reclined his backrest all the way to my knees, and I can’t even get up to take a stroll because the passenger in the aisle seat has fallen asleep and I’m too nice and timid to wake her up. Beng’s busy reading Ian McEwan’s
Atonement—a copy I brought home from another trip, which I haven’t even touched yet; for some reason Beng tells me, “You won’t like this.”
So instead I pull out my laptop from the backpack at my feet—an unscheduled road test for the wafer-thin MacBook Air. It weighs next to nothing on my lap, but it’s not easy to type when the screen’s tilted toward you, thanks to my front neighbor. I peck away at the novel I’ve been promising my publisher and my agent for ages; it’s a sex scene, but I’m finding it hard to focus on creative copulation, and soon enough, intent on making the most of a bad situation, I start filling out a column for Monday, having vaguely to do with being trapped in unmoving planes.
At 11:00 the gods of aviation take pity on us and wave our three-hours-late flight through. I feel like cursing, but then I remember the first and only other time I took a plane that was sent home before it could land—back in the late ‘70s, going to Tacloban in the middle of a typhoon; a private plane tried forcing its way through the same storm, and never reached its destination. I’ve learned to be happy for small graces—and maybe anything having to do with a big bad plane can’t be such a small one.
I TRAVEL often enough, but I’m a notorious cheapskate when it comes to eating out at my own expense. That’s all right, because I hate fine dining (defined by me as anything you can’t find in Ma Mon Luk, Tokyo Tokyo, KFC, or Barrio Fiesta). This means I’m a slave to street food, junk food, and whatever you can scrounge up in a 7-11. (Unfortunately, the same bondage applies—unwillingly—to Beng, whenever she travels with me. A few years ago, coming off a month of ravioli in an Italian villa, I took Beng on a budget tour of Paris and three straight days of Chinese food. When she finally expressed a wistful desire for a taste of what the locals ate, I said, “Here’s ten euros, go splurge on ratatouille,” or something to that effect.
Well, Beng’s with me now in Hong Kong, and this isn’t France, so she has absolutely no excuse to pine for non-Chinese cuisine. We stepped into a noodle place in a Kowloon sidestreet for lunch today, and she gamely ordered noodles with shredded chicken—an eminently sensible choice, if you ask me (I had duck soup and rice). The servings were huge; but I finished mine, while Beng nibbled through a third of hers before giving up.
We saved the remainder in a styrofoam box which I stowed away in my backpack, and when it was close to dinner time, I asked Beng graciously and obligatorily, as we marched up Nathan Road from the Star Ferry terminal, “What would you like for dinner?” Thankfully, she knew me well enough not to say, “Whatever’s cooking at the Peninsula.” Instead, she smiled and said, “Oh, I’ll get something light at the 7-11.” I beamed; we’d picked out our dinner from the same 7-11 across our hotel the night before, so I knew what an excellent selection of takeout dinners they had, such as the shrink-wrapped salmon sushi, for just HK$18. “In fact I’ll probably have the salmon sushi,” she said, “but what will you have?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, “I can’t let these fine noodles go to waste. I’ll just get a bottle of Coke and I’ll be okay.” And that’s what we did—achieving new lows in budget travel. Back at our two-and-a-half-star hotel, we laid our humble fare out on the wooden strip that passed for a table, with a lamp at one end and the TV on the other. Her salmon sushi looked scrumptious, but the leftover noodles had become impacted from our walking tour of Wan Chai. Then a bulb lit up above my head and I remembered a technique I’d used at the Edsa Shangri-La, one New Year’s Day, on a similarly recalcitrant bundle of noodles (another long story, so never mind).
I got the hotel’s hair dryer, put it on HIGH, then began blowdrying the cold noodles as if they’d been on the head of Posh Spice herself. I tell you, the noodles soften, fly away, and curl just like human hair. “Take a picture, Beng!” I said. “People should know about this—just in case they ever need to warm up their noodles in their hotel rooms!” And now you do.
I know, I really am such a loser.