Yes, I’m still in Tacloban. I checked on the navy ship – LC 551 – yesterday, and it was still docked in the harbor. However, no one was able to tell me anything about their departure date or time. The young sailor got on the radio for me, and he even called a senior officer down to talk to me.  This senior officer had nothing to add to the situation except that he suggested I provide them with my contact number. Again. I was about to explain to them that I’d left them my contact number already, but I figured it didn’t matter. I left it with them again, and they dutifully wrote it down on a page in the notebook that was always floating around that desk. There was nothing on the page or the notebook to indicate that it contained a list of evacuees to contact when the ship left, but it was better than nothing.

I had gone there with Mark, and he found the ship intensely interesting. I had been at his house for a birthday lunch for his mother. Unfortunately, I had timed my arrival wrong and the official lunch was just ending when I showed up at the door. This meant that they cleared the table of all the dirty dishes and then set up a single place setting just for me, and I sat there and helped myself to a good meal with Sprite and chocolate cake. I felt bad that I’d arrived late, but it’s impossible to figure out what is going on. And I hope I partially redeemed myself by showing up with two 1.5-liter bottles of cold Coke. I thought the Coke would make a big splash, but it was just taken by one of their two young maids and set on a counter. Then the Coke was drunk by a group of random men that showed up later and also sat down for a meal. They weren’t even family as far as I could tell. It seems that anyone can just show up at their door and be assured of a good meal. As Mark said, his mother is a very generous and kind person.

After I finished my solitary lunch, I was invited by Mark to take a seat in their living room to watch “Resident Evil: Awakening” on their laptop computer with them. He assured me that it was an awesome movie. There wasn’t much point in watching the movie in my opinion. It was difficult to make out anything on the computer screen and the sound was coming out of the computer’s tinny speakers, and I couldn’t understand anything. Perhaps their ears were better than mine and they could understand it. I suppose it hardly matters. The movie consists almost entirely of werewolves fighting vampires. It’s not what you’d call a difficult storyline to follow.

After that, Mark threw in a DVD containing the movie Reds 2. From what I could make out, it was a fairly entertaining film, and I might look it up someday. However, on the laptop, it was hard to tell. For some reason, the picture was structured in such a way that only half of it showed up on the screen. This could be because it was a poor quality bootleg DVD, or they just set up the monitor resolution incorrectly. I couldn’t understand anything that the characters were saying again, but Mark had the idea of turning on the English subtitles. He did so, and I was pleased to see that the subtitles were in very large white letters. However, with the screen being so wonky, only half the subtitles appeared. I could only read the first part of each sentence and then have to guess at the second half. I could guess the second half correctly much of the time from context, but it became a real chore as I had to concentrate so hard, and I eventually gave up. It didn’t matter in the end, because the DVD malfunctioned. The movie kept freezing up, and they couldn’t get it to play properly. Then all the little girls gathered around the laptop and clamoured to watch one of the sequels to “Chucky”. I had to laugh to see how much they enjoyed all the blood and gore on the screen. Between Resident Evil and Chucky, there was enough material for a lifetime of nightmares. But I guess these little Filipino girls are pretty tough. It didn’t faze them in the slightest.

I’d spent the largest part of the morning shooting video in the neighborhood around Mark’s place. When I got back to the pension house later, I went over much of the video as well as the video I’d taken in Anibong, and I found that I enjoyed it a lot. The problem is the size of the video files. They use up a lot of memory, and I blew through an entire 32-gig card in no time. Currently, all of my memory cards are full, so there can be no photography today unless I do some copying over to flash drives.

Not much else to report. Mark went with me when I left his house to go to the harbor. He’s a rare Filipino in that he doesn’t mind long walks. He came back to the pension house with me, and we sat around for a while drinking Coke and chatting. He was pretty impressed with my room here, though mainly from the point of view of it being the perfect kind of place for him. He yearned to have his own place – a private room somewhere. I hadn’t thought about this before, but I guess it is rare for a young person in the Philippines to have their own apartment or even room. I’ve admired the complex family units here (and been confused by them), but I guess for young people they can also be a bit overwhelming. No privacy and no freedom.

I think I had a brand new thought yesterday, and I suppose that is interesting. It’s rare that I think of something that I hadn’t thought of a million times before. This thought came to me when I was watching Resident Evil: Awakening. It struck me when I saw all the different generations watching the movie together. In effect, the young girls and Mark and his brothers and their parents were all part of the same cultural generation. They all knew about the same stuff. And I realized how different that was from my situation growing up. And it made me wonder what difference that made. I’m sure it made a huge difference.

My parents, being immigrants and the children of immigrants, knew nothing. They introduced me to nothing at all, and I learned about everything – books, music, film, art, history, etc. – on my own. I was left to discover an entire world by myself and none of this was ever shared between us except for perhaps in the standard fashion of parents being rather annoyed at the loud rock and roll their child is playing over their stereo system. Our entire cultural relationship consisted of me monitoring the sidewalks and driveways so that when my parents came home, I could run to the stereo and turn off the pounding Led Zeppelin before they came through the door. My mother wasn’t interested in anything, and my father’s reaction to everything unfamiliar was to make fun of it. So I quickly learned to keep everything I did private.

I had always accepted the way I grew up as normal, but I had this idea yesterday that it wasn’t normal at all. Imagine how different it would be for children of parents today – parents who grew up listening to rock and roll, watching movies, watching TV shows, reading books. Would it be nice or really annoying to have a parent who has seen every movie in the world and read every book and listened to all the music and wants to share that with you and experience it with you? Would that be a good thing? Or would it drive the child nuts and force them to hide and put up barriers so that they can do some discovering of life on their own? I suppose on some level it would be nice to have some common ground with your parents. In my case, I have a father who knows about probably one one thousandth of one percent of what makes up my normal day-to-day life and interests. If that much. I just always accepted that as normal. But I can see that it isn’t normal at all. Contrast that with modern young parents and their children. The parents would  know about all of modern culture, and they can enjoy sharing that with their kids. I don’t know that one situation is better than the other, but it does make me wonder at the difference it might make. Perhaps it makes you think of your parents more as people – as people you can relate to. What would my life have been like if my parents were listening to Bob Dylan, watching Casablanca, and reading The Brothers Karamazov? A very weird thought.

Let’s see. Any other thoughts? I’m running out of food. I had my last oatmeal two mornings ago, and there is no more to be had in the stores. I ate my last bowl of soup (though I could buy more from Hayward if I wanted to). But I can get meals in the eateries now. And there is lots of pasta in Kokoy’s now. And I have spaghetti sauce for three meals. I had a terrible headache for most of the day yesterday, and I realized in the afternoon that it was because I hadn’t had any coffee at all. I’d run out and had hot chocolate with breakfast instead. I’m quite addicted to caffeine, it seems. And the longer I stay in post-typhoon Tacloban, the more sugar gets into my diet what with all the Coke and Sprite I’ve been drinking.

 

 

Tags: DVD, music, Philippines Bike Trip 2013, Resident Evil Awakening, Super Typhoon Yolanda, Tacloban