walkin' like larry

When I first went to the Philippines, I had "open zipper syndrome." That is to say so many people stared at me when I walked down the street, I kept looking down to see if my fly was open.

It was just that sometimes I forgot I was a walking freak show, a white guy strolling through neighborhoods that tourists never visited. I tried to act normal, act like a local, but like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinnie, I just didn't blend.

So my mental coping mechanism, in this nation crazy for basketball, was to imagine I was Larry Bird. My thinking was that Larry Bird always stood out in a crowd, literally because he was 6'9", and because of his fame. But he didn't seem to let it bother him. I figured if I took this same attitude, I would keep my composure. This worked a little bit. And sometimes it didn't, like the time I came across the duck ladies.

Please don't shoot me in the face

On my recent trip to Manila, I grabbed a couple drinks with a Dutch AIESEC trainee, just to see if his life was as crazy as mine had been. My earlier posts detail the AIESEC organization that sent me to the Philippines for my one-year assignment. Our merry band of international students and recent grads got into all sorts of trouble back then, and I imagined it probably wasn't too different nowadays.

Sure enough, the latest news is that several trainees had been arrested, one for urinating in public, a couple others for taking a swim in the fountain in front of the Peninsula hotel. While I can't imagine getting arrested in the Philippines can be a good experience, it probably beats getting shot in the face, a fate I narrowly avoided during one of my AIESEC goofs back in the day: Read The Wrong Wall

The photo above is I believe of a Bushmaster automatic submachine gun, it was sitting in the backseat of a town mayor's landcruiser when I hitched a ride during my recent trip. Just a subtle reminder that hijinks can go bad in a hurry in the Philippines.