Part one today, part two tomorrow.
Friday AM:
Ives and I took off right after work at 4 AM, taking the very early bus to Manila, from there we would take a taxi to the airport, and fly to Cebu, then taxi to the hotel. The bus ride was relatively short, and the scenery kept me awake despite the fact that I was dead tired from work and the stress of worrying about all the arrangements had made me lay awake when I should have been sleeping. I'd also been very ill the past week, and was just recovering, but still sick enough to lack appetite and focus in the way that one does when one is very ill and the world seems to be operating quite independent of you.
The slums of Manila were predictably terrifying, with the occasional palatial house with a hopeful turquoise balcony twinkling over the jumbled mass of tin shacks, and then we were in the station, loading up the taxi to the airport. The airport was the usual chaos, walking barefoot through the scanner, cursing the day you decided to wear complicated buckled shoes (the girl in front of me) or sneakers and socks (Ives), and then on to one of several lines to wait for boarding passes, security again, pay the boarding fee (?- The Phil likes to get your money coming and going with several million of these mysterious little "fees" that you can't avoid), then on the plane.
For me, this was plane ride 9000, having racked up over 100,000 frequent flier miles when my parents were first divorced and I was flying back and forth every other weekend, as jaded and wan as a 50 year old executive with a melting scotch in his hand. For Ives however this was only plane ride number 2, the last time he flew having been in high school. As always, he was admirably stoic without being bored, even reading the safety instructions (something it takes about 10 plane rides to stop doing, the point where you realize "I'm toast if we crash, life vest or no life vest". Thereafter you just white knuckle it or get boozy, or if you're one of those that doesn't mind flying, you do a crossword and listen to your ipod and doze while the plane bounces like a beach ball and rattles like a set of dice in the sky).
On the ground we gathered our bags and had the pleasant surprise of seeing a placard with my name on it and a driver to take us to the hotel. The rolling green hills of Cebu were interspersed with intensely, almost painfully, ugly industrial areas and the sun struggled to illuminate the quiet, but tattered streets. I confess I thought "Oh, shit, we just left this section of town behind! Tell me it's going to be the same damn thing all over the Philippines!" Thankfully it was not.
We tooled up to the hotel and the porter took our bags while the front desk clerk explained that the room was being cleaned and it would be a while. We toddled into the bar, exhausted, and killed three beers and some squid and something else (it escapes me but it was some sort of savory meat thingie) while watching MTV and laughing, planning to eat dinner later after a nap.
We fell asleep in the room (finally!) at 12 ish, in the most beautiful light I have seen outside of the movies. The only comparable light I've ever seen is in Sophia Coppolla movies- liquid gold straight from 1974, pouring through barkcloth drapes and onto the bed, which was kitted out with cotton sheets and not much else. The light was so stunning I stayed awake for a few minutes, just looking around the room and at Ives, who fell asleep as if he had been struck smartly on the head with heavy object.
I recently read a magazine profile of an artist who made a piece of art called David Sleeping, which features the eternally stunning David Beckham sleeping, in sensual black and white. At the time, I thought "and you got PAID for this?"
But looking at Ives, with his face half hidden by the pillow, just the paintbrush edge of his lashes, the steep drop of his cheeks down to that mouth of his, the Rocky Horror Picture show perfect mouth, with the cupid's bow that dips in the top and at the bottom of the upper lip, with that slight overbite that gives those that have it an unconscious sensuality usually quite at odds with their real persona. You are one lucky bitch, I thought. Then I fell asleep and we slept for 14 hours, until 2 AM the next day.
Waking up we admitted the "fail" ( we had done zip that day but travel, eat and sleep, which was not the plan at all) and ate at Jolibee down the street, planning the day.
Ives had woken up about an hour before I did and as usual, was deeply ensconced in a conversation with the guard, the two of them drinking coffee and smoking cigs, kicking back on the patio chairs, as if he had known him his whole life (his usual manner with people is to fall in conversation as if he had just seen them yesterday at the local mah jong game and by the way how's the trick knee?
I'm always in awe of people who are able to chat up the locals everywhere they go and not a little jealous. People do talk to me, but it's usually the "undesirables" who sense an easy mark and then the conversation is usually one sided, with me nodding away as they tell me about the Saga of the Home for the Criminally Insane where they Really Didn't Belong, etc). So he told me that he had checked with the guard about the itinerary (which items were doable and which weren't, being too far away) and had arranged a taxi to drive us around that day for a flat rate.
Now all that remained was to kill time until the breakfast buffet opened. We killed time by fooling around on the internet, showing each other pictures of our family on facebook (he has brother in London, lucky chap!) and then watching TV (in a delightful stroke of luck, Lie to Me was on, followed by Bones, both of which we liked) and then took a shower and toddled off to the buffet.
Sat: The breakfast buffet was pretty good- including the dried fish the region is famous for as a breakfast food, and then after lingering over coffee, we got in the taxi we rented for the day to take us around town.
We saw several "cultural" attractions, including Magellen's cross, the cultural museum, a gorgeous church museum featuring the most intricate doll clothes I've ever seen (people make these incredibly elaborate vestments for the patron saint totem Saint Nino and this museum had them on display. No pictures were allowed, but they were dazzling. Well worth the 10p). We tramped around taking pictures and looking at various glass cases with historical objects in them, stopped for coffee in a diner that had seen it's last customer sometime around 1965 I would think, then we went to the Butterfly Conservatory, which the guide book listed as a "can't MISS!" in TWO different places.
In my mind, the Butterfly conservatory would be a huge white modern building, smelling of alcohol, with vast hallways of framed butterflies, and then a huge topiary garden with thousands of butterflies flitting around in a profusion of color and wings. A staff of young scientists would give us a tour, showing us the different types, answering questions, and then leaving us to marvel over the pretties.
Wellll... suffice to say, it was.... not like that. The taxi pulled over to what looked like someone's house (uh, it was), and despite being asked in English and Tagalog several times if this was the right place, the driver insisted it was.
We stumbled out in a daze and toddled down the steps to what was CLEARLY a private residence with a burned wood sign. A rickety card table with a cashbox on it had a handwritten sign asking for 100p a person was set up to the side of the front door. We were inside an overgrown backyard. A scruffly little grey poddle mix dog got to its feet and hustled over to the screen door to the house, rheumy eyes fixed on us, faithfully guarding the door so we couldn't get in without paying our 100p.
We wandered around the "grounds", which consisted of an outbuilding and an enclosure with about 10 butterflies in it. We spotted what appeared to be the tour guide, a little old lady, leading several antsy, bored children around, and she said she'd be right with us.
In a side building with three walls, some glass fish tanks held caterpillars and pupas and newly hatched butterflies. Some caterpillars were inching along the edge of one cage, which had wooden edges, like cages from 1911. ("Look at this. He's trying to find his way home." Ives noted. "I'll tell the old lady about you." He scolded the fuzzy thing as it inched around, surprisingly fast for a bug. "I bet someone left the cage open", he guessed, which turned out to be the case, actually.)
Finally we stumbled across the owner, an extremely old, frail woman with huge glasses and a halo of fine curls- the same lady that had been leading the "tour" earlier. She gave us the tour, using a wooden teacher's pointer to show us the 10 or so framed butterfly specimens, giving us the *bare minimum* of information about the butterflies inside. "This is the largest butterfly in the Philippines. This is the smallest. This is the most beautiful. No flash photos." Etc.
She was however, full of information about her father, a man who emerged as more and more of a nut the more we heard about him.
A sculptor, who's delicate features and extremely petite frame, combined with his large eyes (perfectly reproduced in his dedicated, dessicated daughter) gave him a distinctly insecticidal look himself, who seemed to have withdrawn from the real world around 1935 or so, he dedicated his life to collecting butterflies and making art with their wings (REALLY!). The outbuilding was a shrine to this dude's Art 203- level drawings in oil and watercolor with the same painting made in butterfly wings. Subjects tended to be nature, with a heavy emphasis on animals or oddly, the celebrities of Science (Darwin was there), with topics like "Werewolf vs. Craken" (REALLY, I know. It's delicious). Ives and I avoided looking at each other as we politely studied the evidence of the Butterfly Nut and His Legacy.
Once in the car Ives, his face a study, was clearly at a loss for words, a problem I've never encountered, so I took the wheel of the conversation that was on both our minds "What the hell was THAT?". We discussed as we planned our next move, laughing over the super oddball lady and her faithful "guard dog".
Then it was on to the mall, to get tee shirts for the friends and ourselves. Three mind numbing hours later we had located the store where you can them made, and in the meantime we had lunch at Red Kimono. It was drizzling the whole day, but the mall was gorgeous, the resto was on a terrace level that overlooked stunningly green gardens and the rain was very relaxing, not enough to create a problem, just enough to give you a feeling of intense well being as we sat and drank our wine and beer and ate enough sushi to choke a horse and people watched.
Coming home we promised ourselves we would just nap and then get up for dinner (you can see it coming, right?).
We went up to the pool, which was on the roof, to take a swim in the rain (something I love). Being, shall we say, more well insulated than the very slender Ives, I jumped in and was frisking around while he shivered, eyes wide at the, for him, freezing cold water. After a valiant attempt, he got out and we drank our beers with me in the pool, and him on the edge, wrapped in a towel that he probably wished was a wool blanket. "My body is trying to keep itself warm" he noted, as his legs knocked together in the, for me, very slightly cool breeze.
The decadence of having the rooftop pool all to ourselves, ordering drinks from room service, the knowledge that a bed with clean pressed sheets and air con was just down the stairs, and a feast of epic proportions was to be had anytime we wanted made the night seem as sweet as any I've ever known.
Life seemed very full, and I knew I had done the right thing in waiting to have someone to bring with me, since memories that only you have are sweet, but even more wonderful are the memories you can laugh over and turn over and over in your hands with someone else.
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