On Our Own Interesting City

When I last visited Vietnam, I like any other budget-conscious adventurer stayed in the aptly named backpacker district of Saigon. I instantly fell in love with the locale, waxing poetic about its compact semi-grungy charm, and how amazingly tasty street food was available at every corner, at a price cheaper than your budget McDonald's meal back home. For the two to three weeks that I was there I subsisted mostly on Banh Mi, Pho and iced coffee and loving every moment of it. I'd think to myself, why do we not have all these romantic little conveniences back home? What did we do differently?

Flash forward to about a year later, I'm walking along Makati Avenue headed toward a meeting. I cross Buendia which to me seems like a borderline between two totally different cities. There is a marked difference between the size, style and even nature of the buildings and establishments on either side. Whereas on one side, majestic glass-walled edifices rise, the opposite's are notably stockier and stunted. One is full of corporate offices and shopping centers, the other caters to restaurants, bars and...other entertainment-oriented businesses.

When travelling along this road I normally am in a car, so I pause for a moment to take in the scenery. I immediately get a slight tingling of deja vu. Where could I have seen this before? I blink my eyes twice, and suddenly it hits me. The whole scene was more than vaguely reminiscent of last year! The main difference was instead of iced coffee for P10, there was buko juice for P10. Instead of Banh Mi and liver pate, I saw fishballs and kikiam. Instead of thin two-star hotels with disguised prostitutes milling about, I saw...well pretty much the same thing.

What I had enjoyed as a tourist all throughout Southeast Asia, I had somehow overlooked as a local in my own country. I had been reveling in the small conveniences of others when those same delights had been available to me all along, albeit in a flavor much more familiar to me.

It's not that I live for cheap buko juice and disguised prostitutes (well, maybe for the cheap buko juice), but this whole episode really reminded me how much of my community I have yet to discover. Going through life can be a routine, and with all the unknowing repetition we do in terms of our daily tasks it is very easy to miss out on really getting to know one's society, much like being familiar with an officemate for years only to realize one day that you know almost nothing about him outside work. Sometimes we do break our routines but that is usually for a vacation, and as a result it is our vacation spots with which we get intimate. It's not that we need to be the most knowledgeable about it all but really more of that we need to take a look around - we may just live in a much more interesting place than we've realized.