by Rowan Foggit
It is natural for a person, when living in a country other than the one in which they were brought up, to make comparisons between the two. Prices, for example: ‘Blimey, the train from Liverpool St to Newcastle is now 55 quid – the bus from Baclaran to Baguio is only P105.’ Or, ‘You know darling, that amazingly camp queenish tomboy thing that cuts my hair down Pasay Rd only charges me the equivalent of £2 for a trim that’d cost a minimum of £25 in Cambridge now…daren’t ask him for a blow-dry though in case my request is misconstrued.’
Of course, the economic realities of the countries being compared necessitate wildly differing prices: the cost of labour, for example. And quality of service and customer satisfaction often differ wildlyÊ such as at the cinema.
I still marvel at paying around P70 to watch a film in the country’s best theatres (not, you note, the movies to take in a flick. I remain staunchly and stubbornly a communicator in Queen’s English, not the tainted Americano version of our fine language). Humankind loves a bargain and P70 when exchanged into pennies is up there with the Mother of All Bargains.
Yet my first visit to a Philippine cinemaÊ at the Greenbelt mall, Makati, one of the most centrally located and owned by the esteemed Ayala Group – was a consumer experience I was unprepared for. Theatres i’ve visited in Hong Kong, the US, Malaysia etc. all provided similar levels of entertainment and left me a satisfied customerÊ although the size of food and beverage portions served in the US were of sufficient size to halt a ravenous wooly mammoth for several weeks.
Queuing for a ticket at Greenbelt was harmless enough but then came the unfamiliar reply from the girl behind the counter that there were no reserved tickets available for this particular show. I smiled, obviously confused, and advised we simply wanted 2 tickets.
Still a little baffled, tickets were purchased, the girl breathed a sigh of relief, and through we wentÉÉto be met by masses, literally a hundred or more, of people loitering around the top of the aisles. They had nowhere to sit. All seats were taken. And more to the point, we had nowhere to sit. And there were people coming in behind us still. And the film had already started despite us being on time. Or perhaps it hadn’t yet finished.
I was perplexed, dumfounded and starting to sweat. Everyone else seemed to be calmly taking up positions with the intention to stand. ‘What on earth is going on darling?’ said I. My wife quickly explained the film, Rizal and his Filibuster thing, had recently opened, hence the crowds.
I’m told that at this point I began grunting various threats and complaints, such as ‘not bloody good enough, where’s the manager?’ to nobody in particular. The manager was located allowing me to ineloquently, due to being in close to a frenzy, detail my abject disquiet and unhappiness with the situation and demand a refund. My wife dragged me away, accepting their decent apology and equitable offer of 2 tickets to another show some other time, averting a shameful scene, and for me an apoplexy.
So, Philippine theatres allow more people in than it has seats to accommodate. A novel idea. I was enlightened. Perhaps such a system would catch on in the UK? Nah.
Even having the odd rodent scurry across one’s feet with discarded hot-dogs can be withstood. But what is it with the persistent noise and general lack of concern shown by fellow cinemagoers? Phones ring: not only this, they are often answered. Texting and its infernal incoming message beeping continues. Fast food is eaten with accompanying irksome plastic bag and wrapping rustling. Conversations are held in the seats. From the back near the lavatories one can always hear the ushers being chatted up by the security guards. What I understand the least however is the amount of people who wander in, or leave, half way through a film. I’ve seen old couples sitting chatting near the aisle, barely taking interest in proceedings on the screen, being collected by younger relatives and removed mid-film. Most odd.
Yes, I know UK cinemas can have their faults: an X rated film coming replete with dirty old men in flasher raincoats and teenage fornicators pre-booking the back row; extortionate prices; and mangy old seating. But UK cinemagoers, be they perverts or film-buffs, remain, more often than not, quiet.
But what do I expect for P70? This must be always be asked of oneself. And I must add that things have improvedÊ only though in the sense of one person per seat.
It has always been refreshing to see the impressive audience turn-outs for British films here. The gist of most films must be fairly easy for Filipinos to follow but much of the vernacular used in certain UK productions is obviously difficult to understand. Take Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, the premiere to which I went with a friend who’d been enjoying happy hour earlier that evening and most of the late afternoon. The heavy cockney slang employed made it fantastically realistic, but lines such as ‘Keep your Alans on’ left the local audience none the wiser as to what had been said. (Alan Whicker = knickers).
Imagine their bemusement and multiply it by one thousand and you get me sat watching, without much of a clue as to what is going on, Isusumbong Kita Sa Tatay Ko, Magkapatid and other such marvels of the Philippine film industry. But it’s great viewing, particularly the comedies. And you know what – the audience is much better behaved. Sure, they make a noise but it seems to fit in with the general hubbub of the soundtrack and dialogue. And I enjoy it more this way. And I don’t care if someone’s phone goes off or munches noisily through 17 pieces of chicken behind me as the overall experience, not just the quality of acting, cinematography and production of the film, is preferable.
So we now don’t go to watch UK releases like About a Boy and hope to sit in stony silence, we go to Mana-Mana Tiba-Tiba, eat copious amounts of crap, make a bit of noise, send texts for the hell of it and come out smiling. ‘And it cost £5 for 2 seats and a feast! That would have cost £50 in Bristol with food and parking.’

by Rowan Foggit
The proud owners of this website have kindly allowed me to fill a few hours of my life each month, and therefore a few minutes of yours, writing a column about the Philippines, Filipinos, Fillipinas, EDSA’s traffic, whether or not bagoong is fit for mankind to consume, and whatever else this Brit abroad decides is life-shatteringly relevant or irreverent.
I will endeavour to say as little about myself as possible when I write these columns, but allow me a little introduction first as this will hopefully enable you to see how I see things the way I do.
Born in North Yorkshire, I was whisked down to sunny Suffolk before my accent became irreparably ‘northern’. A few years at school came and went without me leaving my mark on academia and its institutions. I even failed to turn-up at one exam as there was a titanic game of cricket, a sport few Philippine-based Filipinos know exists, on the telly between Essex and Gloucestershire.
Fast forward to 1994, when during a 7-year stay in Hong Kong, I met a ravishingly beautiful, vivacious and wonderfully feisty girl named Betty.
I have an Aunt in Yorkshire called Betty and to me this quintessential English old-ladies name conjured up images of, well, old English ladies. Add to that those flesh-coloured stockings to which they are partial and never-ending "fancy a cuppa tea, love?" probes and you get the picture.
But this Betty looked nothing like a stereotypical, handbag-wielding granny to me which is not surprising as she hails from Nueva Vizcaya. Home for Betty when she was small was a barangay near a funny little town called Bambang (more of which another time as I can tell a tale or two about her relatives, carabaos, ginebra gin, a gun and a hasty escape).
We got on well despite her knowledge of English football being non-existent. And we holidayed together in the Philippines as often as we could which was great as I no longer had to put up with all the other San Miguel-addled foreigners in Boracay and Puerto Galera. Off we went to the Camotes islands where the children’s smiles and nervous laughs were a joy to behold. Little villages and tilapia farms of La Union were explored on foot, such as Agoo (try get an Englishman to pronounce Agoo correctly first time he reads it…); Bantayan’s perfectly flat egg-carrying roads and beaches were hiked; Bohol’s ubiquitous mud and Chocolate Hills were stickily traversed on motorbikes; Mount Apo was climbed; the lake inside the crater of Taal volcano was urinated in (sorry, but we’d had a lot of Beer-na-Beer for lunch; and somewhere, probably Malapascua island off the northern tip of Cebu, our first mestizo was conceived.
A number of other places of my wish-list remain to this day unvisited. Unravelling a map of the country one day, I picked certain places that I’d like see, among them being: Siquior, Batanes and Sulu/Tawi Tawi islands. Betty was none to keen on the first of these due to the fact there were witches, vampires and all sorts of unidentified ghouls running amok all over the place. Batanes seems to get blown away by a typhoon each week so this was put on hold. And the latter, which are possibly the most beautiful picture-postcard islands in the entire archipelago, remain out of reach for any foreigner who values his life, head and bank balance.
We were married of course by the time we’d been to these places and I’d become quite proud of my Tagalog proficiency. I fancied spending more time in the Philippines but Betty, perhaps like some of you reading this, had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time looking for a brighter or at least alternative future outside of the country, was quite happy living in Hong Kong. However, I dragged her kicking and screaming back from whence she came and we lived for a while in a small Makati apartment before number one son popped out, before removing to Paranaque.
Mestizo number two arrived 2 years ago during a period back in Hong Kong and we now split our time between a house we keep in Laguna, and the former British colony on China’s southern shores
I suppose by telling you this I am trying to say I have integrated myself a little into Philippine way of life, that I have become a little piece of the fabric that makes up your wonderful, manic and often mad country. For a Filipino to write convincingly about the British, their peculiar rituals, personal idiosyncrasies and the inherent madness of a good number of its inhabitants, I’d expect that person to have lived not only in the same country as them, but as one of them.
For clarity, I’ll take this a little further. When I jump inside a cramped jeepney on its way down Pasong Tamo, I don’t just see brown faces smiling back at me. I see the daily struggle they have to make ends meet, the mouths they have to feed and their sense of despair at the injustices and corruption they suffer from. When boarding a Philippine Airlines flight, I observe not only the domestic helpers bound for life with a foreign family in Hong Kong, Taiwan or the Middle East, but the sacrifices they make and the families left behind, their menfolk consuming remittances on tanduay and bingo, and the way they themselves are often maltreated and misunderstood by their employers.
And when I get stuck in traffic on EDSA on a Friday night and it takes me 2 hours to get from the South-not-so-Super Highway to Ortigas, I see yet again that I must be completely deranged to have even attempted to traverse such a route on a Friday night when it’s raining, and it’s pay-day, and it’s midnight madness sale night in Glorietta, and I’ve been stuck in the same place before and sworn never, ever to let it happen again.
So although I may be able to see what goes on in the Philippines and read between the lines, I am still a foreigner (or a "Joe" as we get called in the provinces), albeit with a Filipina asawa and Eurasian anaks. And being a foreigner means I still pull my hair out when the traffic snarls, yet Betty shrugs her shoulders. And I still have 95% of taxi drivers trying to extort double the actual fare from me due to the colour of my skin and assumed weight of wallet (reverse racial financial discrimination we can call this phenomenon which I think is a fine and equitable system of wealth re-distribution).
And I have taste-buds that grew-up loving Sunday’s roast beef with Yorkshire puddings, gravy and soggy vegetables, chicken tikka masala from the Indian down the road, and No. 36 with chips from the local Chinese takeaway. I did not grow-up on balut, bagoong, caldereta or aroz caldo.
I am now researching material for a work of fiction. It’s in its infancy as a project but is coming on nicely. The subject matter being the Moros and their long claim to land, mixed in with a drunkard British naturalist, Spanish aggressors, a pretty Muslim girl and a fanatical Jesuit priest.
That’s enough about me. It’s Friday night and I’m off down the pub. Okay, it’s not really a pub but a bar in Makati that allows me to drink as much San Miguel as I wish between the hours of 5 and 9pm for about P150. This is a scandalously small amount to pay for the destruction of my liver and brain. My mates in the UK have to pay a high multiple of this amount to inebriate and damage themselves. But perhaps it will not take them 2 hours to get to the pub!