One of the things which fascinates me, and sometimes keeps me guessing here in the Philippines are street names.  Like many other things familiar to Americans, they often follow methods we are used to from "home", but at other times they can get you confused, or at least bring a smile to your face.

In general I am not one of those guys who bemoans the fact that the Philippines was all neatly laid out and administered by the Americans and then "screwed it all up" after independence.  I do think, though, there are a few cases where they threw the baby out with the bath water, and the road network is one of them.  When roads were built during possession or commonwealth days there was a system of highway numbed put in place, exactly as we are used to in the US.  In many cases these road numbers still exist, but they are never shown on signs, or even most maps any more.  It’s not the same as the fiasco of Boston, where they have been trying to do away with "Route 128" for 20 years now … it’s just that the road numbers disappeared.  This makes driving outside cities as it is in Japan, you have to know a., the name of the very next town you want to pass through and b., the name of the large city which generally is in the direction you want to head.  Baguio, for example, becomes very important, even when only a few miles north of Manila, because the signs for Baguio are telling you which way is north on MacArthur Highway which runs the whole length of the country (and also goes by a dozen different names, kind of like El Camino Real in California).

Major street names in Manila have been changed a number of times … either to get rid of former US hero’s who aren’t too much in favor of the Filipino (ex. Dewey Blvd became Roxas Blvd.) or just ‘because" .. Brenda Ave is now actually Senator Gil Puyat Ave., but listen close when you ask directions, because people are going to tell you to take a right at Buendia … obviously Senator Puyat was not a popular guy with taxi drivers and other ‘men of the streets’.

In residential areas, as it is in the US, nearly anything goes.  A good friend lives on a street named after a gem stone and his whole subdivision has many "gem" streets.  This is very common from one end of the country to the other.

In the immediate area around my house are several subdivisions which all join near our home.  One major section of the largest subdivision (Phase I) is a "gem stone" area, where everyone lives on Diamond or Ruby or Sapphire street.  Another section of that same subdivision (Phase II I believe) is the "bird" zone .. most of the birds from Albatross to Pelican seem to be covered, I don’t know them all.  In the particular subdivision we live in the street "namer" was a reader of the classics, street names range from Apollo to Zeus with many Greek god names I never heard of tin between.  My in-laws live in a different phase of the same subdivision, which was originally marketed to employees and retirees of the BSP (Philippine Central Bank), so, you might guess, the streets have names like Dollar, Lire, franc, Pound and Peso to name a few.

The one I like best is yet another subdivision which was originally built for employees of MERALCO, formerly the Manila Electric Company.  They start with Ampere and continue with Ballast, Current, Dynamo. Electric, Fuse, Generator, Hertz, Insulator, Joule, Kilowatt, Lamp, Meter, Network (the central main road) on through Ohm and up through at least Transmission … I forget them all and you are bored hearing about them, anyway.  What can I say, I’m a geek, and I love noticing little things like this about living here in the Philippines.

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