Saturday, January 5, 2008: Chinatown	Return to Journal TOC >>
We pass over a stone bridge covering the incredibly polluted Pasig River, cross through an archway, and we’re in Manila’s Chinatown, called Ongpin for one of its main streets. We get off the jeepney, and Ro points out the places where her mother used to work (no longer standing) and the restaurant where her father died (right across the street from us). Manila’s Chinatown has several large streets with sunken sidewalks (below the level of traffic), bisected by a number of tiny alleys filled with food vendors. The most prominent of those alleys is Carvajal, which I actually pass by without noticing the first time, because the opening is so narrow. But inside there are all sorts of fruits and fresh fish for sale on open tables, as well as random doors into the side wall of the alley that open into surprisingly large shops, mostly selling sweets prepared food. There are a surprising number of cats, both in the alley and elsewhere in Ongpin. We see a kitten tied to post to keep it from running into street, while bored street vendors play with it between customers, and a wide-eyed catlet waiting for someone to take their eyes off the trays of raw fish in Carvajal. Other streets in Ongpin include mostly wholesalers, dealers in paper goods, and what we’re here to look for - rows and rows of jewelers. There are beggars in clumps all around the neighborhood - children, or parents with children mostly. We do have to shed one particularly aggressive adult male beggar who follows us around for several blocks before finding another target. Once we are beggar-free, we need to do some wedding ring shopping, and we start working our way along the row of jewelers - some of them enclosed stores with air-conditioning, while others are open shops. Most of the staff is female with a few token males, the opposite of what you’d find in a comparable neighborhood in the U.S., where that would be seen as an invitation to theft. (Unlike the neighborhood we’re staying in, guards are scarce in Ongpin, in front of the larger businesses but not most of the stores.) Several of the first rings we look at seem to be fake, or at least misrepresented in karat weight; their weight feels wrong to my hand. (Luckily, some instincts linger from my long-ago jewelry store days.) There’s a lot of variation in stores as well. Some are very friendly, while others seem not to want to sell to me. I had expected to have the prices jacked up to ridiculous levels and have to haggle down by a huge amount. Instead, many of the prices I was given were lower than I expected, but with less willingness to haggle. After going to a lot of stores and trying on a lot of rings, we eventually find the white gold pair we’re looking for at the price we want, and pay about half of what a comparable set would go for in America. While we’re waiting for them to find a ring that fits my American-sized hands, and then waiting for the rings to be engraved, Ro jokes with the shopgirls about the little bit of Tagalog I know. (I’ve been teasing her with phrases such as “Masarap ang aso mo,” meaning “Your dog tastes delicious.”) I can follow simple conversations in Tagalog - which contains a fair amount of English and Spanish that I know - but I can’t really speak it yet, beyond a few key phrases. With rings in hand (but not on hand until August), we take a jeepney back to the pensionne, stopping briefly (we’re starving, although we have dinner plans later) for the first really street vendorish food I’ve had in Manila, a jumbo cheezy bacon burger at Burger Machine for p37 (just under $1). The burger is small and underwhelming, but I enjoy it nonetheless, perhaps because of the element of risk that an American eating street food in Manila may be taking. Hoping for the best from my digestion, we walk back to the room to take a brief nap before dinner. (There are far riskier street vendors around, like the ones selling fried-intestines-on-a-stick that we pass frequently.)
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