Culture Shock Part 1

We are now in our new Home in the Sky as I’ve taken to calling it. For all of the anticipation of this, I see that this too is only part of the journey – there IS no destination in all of this. The place is a mess, there are boxes everywhere, and I’m back into moving mode. So what. This too will pass.

We are up on the 31st floor and I’ve never lived in a place like this. It’s been a very very long time since I’ve lived in an apartment and even then, never this high. The views are extraordinary. We can see all over the south and west part of the city way out over the airport (we can see the planes landing below us in the distance) and out to Manila Bay. The ceilings are very high and the windows are enormous. I’ve set up a couple of new (Filipino-design) chairs at a spot at one of these huge windows that I’m calling the “Cocktail Hour Sunset Viewing” place. This picture shows one of the views of Makati, the golf course and the Polo Club's field.

Last week I attended a day long seminar called “Living in the Philippines”, designed for expats, a cultural “training” thing. Also, I’m going to a weekly Philippine history course organized by the Museum Volunteers of the Philippines – lots of road trips and lectures and guest speakers and so on. Way cool.

And then, there is the on-the-ground cultural training. As our seminar guy told us, how you view another culture has as much to say about you and your own culture as it has to say about the other. This makes so much sense to me.

Living in a hotel and dining in restaurants every night is not a “normal” life and now it’s down to the daily stuff of living and whether you're going to sweat it or not. Now that I have a kitchen and need to stock it and start cooking again, I need to confront the Grocery Store Terrors.

One of the things I'm learning about life here is that Christmas is a Very Big Deal. It starts in September. In the grocery stores and malls Christmas music is now playing and in many cases, playing loudly. I was in the local Price Club equivalent called S&R recently stocking up on all the exciting things for the house - brooms, power bars, water coolers, detergent, oy vay - and all around me was, not just Christmas music but, I'm thinking, CD's of the worst Christmas music ever recorded. Makes the Chipmunks look good. I was in there for a fair amount of time and by the time I reached check-out I was freaking out and texting His Nibs saying "I want to go to a Muslim country for Christmas!".

But even that is fairly minor. I've written earlier about grocery store culture shock. It works in a number of ways. When we lived in Jamaica, it was at a time when the country had severe foreign exchange problems and you really couldn't get imported goods. There was one grocery store where expats used to shop where from time to time you could get all kinds of things, but it was very random. When you saw something you grabbed it. There were one or two types of coffee to buy and that was it. (GREAT Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee by the way). The only foreign magazines available were Time, The Economist and Star Magazine, which explains my to-this-day fondness for the latter publication.

Anyway, after two years of this, we left Jamaica and moved to Ridgewood, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. After we moved into our new house I headed off to the grocery store to buy supplies. All went more or less all right until I was about half way through the store, with half my list accomplished. There, I came face to face with the list item "coffee" and found myself staring at row upon row upon row of coffee choices. Colours and sizes and shapes. Brand after brand after brand. How to decide? That was it, cultural melt down. I couldn't handle it and turned my cart around and headed for the exit, list incomplete, coffee-less, before I started hyper-ventilating.

All relative, no?

So, back to the present, there I was last week, in this very large grocery store doing fairly OK. Tons of choice, familiar brands, I could get just about anything I wanted and some things I didn't know I wanted. I even got mildly interested in the produce department (a place that typically leaves me befuddled) with several different kinds of eggplant, that I thought would be great for Thai Green Curry. Then I reached the back of the store. I could smell it before I got there. The Meat Department. Oh, and just next door to The Fish Department. My stomach lurched, I stopped breathing through my nose and just totally panicked. The meat - chicken, pork, whatever, all different cuts, with some names I'm not familiar with, is in a refrigerated display case, yes, but unwrapped and completely open to the air. Stacks upon foot high stacks of less than cold, smelly, raw meat. I wanted to go back and get a picture but can't do it. For the past five days since, my stomach has been feeling very queasy, coincidentally or not. (Coincidence? - I think not!) Needless to say I hightailed it out of there as fast as I could.

Fortunately, as it turns out, there are alternatives. One place frequented by expats (many of my friends also avoid the larger meat departments in supermarkets for the same reasons), is a deli run by a European who also runs the Bank commissary. There, familiarity reigns. There everything is small scale, wrapped, refrigerated, cosy and Rinso White.

I was telling this story of my meat close encounter to a friend of mine who has been in Manila awhile. There I was, Little Miss Pollyanna, trying to find another point of view, saying "Well maybe we are so used to packaged, sanitized product, that we don't know what meat really smells like!" My friend regarded me with a priceless expression of great skepticism and replied "Or, perhaps that is the smell of meat going bad!" Bingo.

10 Tons of Moldy Meat Seized in Pasay

Officials of the Pasay City Veterinary Office seized at least 10 tons of "hot meat" while it was being unloaded from a 20-foot container van shortly after midnight Wednesday.

"The meat will reportedly be processed as ham to be sold to the public for consumption for the holiday season. However, the meat, which had originated from Davao, already had a bad smell," Bernasor said, adding that the seized meat did not bear a seal of approval by the National Meat Inspection Service (NMIS)...Operatives said they are set to burn the confiscated meat which they suspect could have been smuggled from China.

Businesswoman Susan Co, who claimed to be the owner of the shipment, said the meat smelled bad because it had not yet been processed. She said that the meat could still be sold if the mold is washed off and the meat sliced and cooked.

The NMIS said even if the mold is removed, the toxins produced by the mold would still be in the meat, rendering it unsafe for human consumption. According to reports, the meat shipment was not only full of mold, but was infested with worms as well. The Pasay City government ordered nightly market inspections after officials intercepted contaminated meat at a number of public markets last month.

The Philippine Star, October 4, 2007

Well, I supposed there is always another alternative...