PhilFAQS

I’ve been a bit hesitant about writing this post, the concept of it has been percolating in my mind a long time, and I have so far held off.  But not today.  My Filipino friends will take this, I hope, in the spirit of how things look from a Western perspective … it is not meant to be critical or derogatory, but it is just the way things appear to us sometimes weird Westerners.

Left, Right, North, South, East and West.  Directions, as in instructions on how to get someplace, are difficult, sometimes nigh on to impossible here.  Even when you are quite familiar with local names for left and right (kaliwa and kanan in Tagalog), there is some difficulty in perception/translation of thought which I still can’t figure out after nearly three years.  “Go to the next corner and turn left” is something that very seldom translates well, and even folks who have a 100% comprehension of the words in English somehow form a different mental picture than most westerners do.  They are just as liable to go to the corner and turn right instead of left, right and left turns, in my experience, are never better than a50/50 bet.   Actually, the way around this is one of my earliest and funniest stories … as often happens a man who did not at first seem all that smart taught me much more than any college professor.

I went to a big department store and ordered some furniture to be delivered.  As we were filling up all the various forms required, a man who hadn’t said much to me before pushed a piece of paper and a ‘ball pen’ my way and said, “Sir, please draw a picture of your house.”

Being completely taken by surprise by this I resisted the urge to bust out laughing … if this guy had ever seen my drawing skills he’s never ask me to draw anything.  I also, fortunately, resisted the urge to draw this on the paper and hand it back to him .. why I didn’t I’ll never know, I am just that much of a wise ass.  I asked a few questions and finally realized he wanted a little sketch map of the streets between the store and our house.  Easy.  Quick.  Simple to produce. Easy to comprehend in any language.  Unambiguous.  Much better than arguing over left and right in the middle of dense traffic.  Thanks, Mr. Delivery Guy, I never got your name but you taught me something very valuable for getting around the Philippines.

Oh, and the compass directions?  Forget about them.  There are only two common directions I know of .. toward Manila or away from Manila … much like England with all roads going ‘up’ to ‘town’ or ‘down’, away from ‘town’.  If you can keep in mind where Manila is with respect to where you are trying to get, directions are pretty easy.

After the Fact.  When someone does give you directions you are liable to get something like this (actual driving directions I received just a week or two ago).  “Continue on the road until you come to a police outpost checkpoint.  If you stay straight you will go to the district hospital, if you turn you’ll be on the shortcut road to the next town.”

Nothing wrong with that is there?  Nope, not a thing, except when I got to the intersection I at first couldn’t even see the checkpoint, and then it did come into focus, well down the road past the turning point. 

I’ve even seen commercially printed maps in newspapers and such, with diagrams of roads and notations like, “St Xyz School, if you pass this you have gone too far.”  When driving along on a country highway it’s also a very common sight to see a sign that says “XYZ (whatever business), Turn back 200 meters.”  I mean I would have thought it would make sense to put up a sign 200 meters before a business rather than past it, but I guess the advertising rental fee for the sign was cheaper where they put it

There is no sense trying to fight this, it is just the way things work here.  You can ask in advance to make sure landmarks you have been given are before a turn you need to make, and sometimes that helps.  Or you can just drive along calmly and expect to hear, “Oh I thought you were going to turn back there.” from time to time.

Or as happened once with one of my grown nieces directing me to a busy restaurant where we were all supposed to have lunch.  We were traveling a very busy avenue in Quezon City and I saw we were approaching a whole little block of restaurants, signs literally on top of signs.  As I was trying to sort the signs out in my mind, my niece hollered, “Turn now, turn now, right there by the Brown Beans, by the Brown Beans”!

Or at least that’s what I heard.  No matter how hard I looked I didn’t see any restaurant sign that said “Brown Beans”, and furthermore I thought we were going to a barbeque (inihaw) place, not a “beanery” …  I mean I did have lunch on the brain, after all. 

Sailing right past our intended target, I wound up making two U-turns to get back to where we were, when it was explained to me … after the fact, of course … that what the young lady meant to say was to park in the parking slot next to the large, brown, Mercedes-Benz (Beans) van that hid the restaurant’s real sign from view.  Oh well, I know what a Brown Beans is now, don’t I?

Don’t take this wrong, it just comes with the territory, and fortunately, U-turns and pictures of your house are usually pretty easy to make.  But remember, dear reader, you ain’t in Kansas any more

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