Housemates from hell

August last year was a particularly bad time to be looking for a flat in Singapore. Property prices were going through the roof and, with them, rents. A four-room flat that would’ve cost just S$900 a month in rent a few months back was already going for $1,400.

Still, I was lucky. I went to Singapore with a “live-in” partner in tow – the talented Mr ManF. The company hired us at about the same time and gave us a relocation allowance of S$10,000 each. Between us, we had S$20,000 to spend on finding a flat, furnishing it and generally finding a place to park our assess in after a hard day at the office.

So, we wound up getting a pretty decent five-room flat for $1,700 a month in Woodlands.

The place is just 45 minutes from the office by train, 30 minutes by cab, and five minutes to the nearest MRT station. There’s a small mall across the street that has everything in it: a wet market, a grocery, two 24-hour convenience stores, ATMs, a 24-hour payment centre, two coffeeshops, two salons, an optical shop and a dental office.

Our unit is on the 11th floor and has an unobstructed view of the Seletar expressway. The owners, a retired couple moving to Australia, left most of their furniture with us: sofas, a dining set, a 29-inch TV, air-conditioners, beds and working tables for each of the three rooms, a heavy-duty washing machine and dryer, a stainless steel ref with a big freezer and drapes for the windows. (Pity, the guy took with him his glass-encased scale model of the battleship Yamato; that would’ve have made a really cool divider.)

It was a great deal, we thought. When we began telling people where we lived, though, we got something like this:

“What?” they’d blurt out with the look of incredulity you’d normally see in someone talking to a person who just tore to pieces a winning lottery ticket. “Woodlands? Why so far?”

For someone who’d lived through Manila’s monstrous traffic jams and apocalyptic floods, 45 minutes to anywhere is a walk in the park. Here on the other hand, 45 minutes to anywhere may as well be an eternity. It’s like living in Fairview, Quezon City and working in Amadeo, Cavite.

So, since most of our friends are living on the other side of the island, they’ve been avoiding our place like we had the bubonic plague. We’ve hosted at least two parties where only one or two of the people we invited showed up, even with promises of a lavish feast of adobo, nilagang baka, and a hefty mix of diced manggang hilaw, bagoong, sibuyas and kaunting sili.

Still, I really can’t complain. It could’ve been worse. I get along well with my "mate", although he likes walking around the flat wearing only his skimpy shorts with those preposterous Spongebob Squarepants and Superman prints.

A number of Pinoys working here, on the other hand, have to live with "housemates from hell". These are creatures that spring out naturally from an arrangement inherent in having to share space with someone you really don’t know well but have to get along with. Kailangang makisama.

The arrangement is usually cordial at the beginning. Then, some misunderstandings occur over mundane things like an uncollected tissue paper lying on the floor. These little things pile up as each day goes by into huge mounds of discontent until all those pent-up emotions explode into a full-blown conflict that can only be resolved if one side yields the territory.

It starts out usually as a gentle reminder:

"Uy, mare, paki-tanggal naman ang mga nilabhan mo sa washing machine bago ka lumabas ng bahay. Salamat, ha. Ingat."

After a month and a half, though, it escalates into something like this:

"Eh, letse naman! Tatlong araw nang naka-tengga ang mga damit mo sa washing machine, eh. Hindi na tuloy ako makapaglaba. Ilang beses na kitang sinabihan. Lumayas ka na nga dito at maghanap ng mga kasama na kasing burara mo!

Here’s a list I grabbed from www.pinoysg.com of a few petty things that normally lead to an i'll-never-again-talk-to-you-til-the-day-I-die feud among Pinoy housemates here:

* Strands of black, curly hair gathering on bathroom floors – and even on kitchen sinks – that later manifests itself into a furry, gooey creature;

* Locking oneself up inside the toilet for an eternity and not giving way even when a housemate is clearly in a bowel-busting, poise-threatening predicament;

* “Paranormal” housemates straight from The Sixth Sense who keep insisting they see dead people;

* Swiping someone else’s food from the fridge without asking the person who toiled through the night, investing blood, sweat and tears into his special delicacy of scrambled eggs and bacon;

* Leaving the lights and heater on through the night;

* Leaving the doors open;

* Waiting for the garbage to pile up, hoping perhaps Oscar the Grouch would pop out of it suddenly to spew some expletives; and,

* Using groceries and supplies like they were manna from heaven and not bothering to restock them.

I, of course, realise that these occur not exclusively here. We see these things happening among people who share a dorm in a university or a bedspace in some apartment in Sta. Mesa. The big difference, though, is that for most OFWs like us, it's rarely an option to just pack up our bags and head home to mummy and crash in our old rooms while we find a more suitable place. For most us, it's one more hell we'll just have to live through.

http://pininggapura.wordpress.com/
http://supermouseandtheroborats.blogspot.com/
pininggapura@gmail.com

In my mistress’ bosom

I like trains. They’re like women; trains are, after all, vessels, and they do carry large swathes of humanity in their, well, wombs. So, let me tell you about my mistress.

She is a devoted lover. She keeps her promises, doesn’t give me a bumpy ride and seldom breaks down. When she says she’ll come and see me in five minutes, I see her coming five minutes later. She doesn’t leave me hanging, though we’re technically suspended eight metres from the ground most of the time.

She has this sexy, soothing voice that gives you that feeling everything’ll be all right, even when all hell is breaking loose. Here she is speaking, with the lovely, deep accent of an Englishwoman:

‘Please mind the platform gap.’

‘Doors are closing.’

‘For your safety and convenience, please stand behind the yellow line.’

I am, of course, talking about Singapore’s MRT. It’s not a stretch to say she’s one of the most – if not the most – efficient and reliable transport systems in the world.

Here are some Googable and Wiki-findable facts about her:

* Opened in 1987, the MRT is the second-oldest metro system in southeast Asia, after our very own LRT system. (That’s why she’s just my No. 2.)

* Built at an initial cost of S$5 billion (around P150 billion), the MRT has 64 stations – either aboveground or underground, except for one, which is at ground level – and over 109.4 kilometres of lines. Her coaches carry some 1.5 million passengers each day.

* Most underground stations are deep and hardened enough to withstand conventional aerial bomb attacks, and they do serve as bomb shelters.

She’s not as sleek as Japan’s bullet train or as fast as Shanghai’s maglev, but she does what she’s supposed to. She does, however, have her moods, especially when she’s shabbily treated. In 1993, one train, unable to stop in time because of an oil spill on the track, rammed into another one waiting in one station, injuring 132 passengers.

And she can be, through no fault of hers, a femme fatale. I don’t know what it is that drives people to end their lives by jumping in front of a speeding train – maybe they think it’s romantic, sadistic or very public, as any death on TV or, in our age, YouTube is seldom in vain but is often a macabre form of entertainment – but at least 10 people have committed suicide over the past 20 years by jumping off a platform just when a train is approaching. And there had been loonies who had thrown someone else onto the tracks.

* * *

My home station is the Woodlands MRT station – home because it’s the closest one to my flat. It’s one of the busiest stations along the North-East line, as it is attached to a rather big mall and a bus interchange and because it is a waystation to Johor Bahru, a frontier land in Malaysia I’ve heard so much about that, for Pinoys like me who like scoring cheap cigarettes and alcohol, may as well be part of Singapore.

All stations have these LED and plasma monitors hanging from ceilings that announce just exactly when the next train will arrive, so you’ll know when you have to run like you were Seraph chasing the Trainman or whether you still have time to check your hair in the toilet.

I used to think that the numbers that appeared on those screens were just an approximation; like when it said “1 minute”, it actually meant “1 minute and 30 seconds”. Turns out, when you see “1 minute”, the train will really be at the platform in a minute – even less. The trains are never late. In Gandalf’s words: They are never late or too early; they arrive precisely when they mean to.

They are also very reliable. They will not leave you stuck for an hour in between stations. They carry you from one station to another at exactly the same amount of time they promise. You don’t have to worry about getting late, but don’t bet on reaching your destination ahead of schedule.

I see people normally meeting up this way: One is already on a train tapping in his cell phone where his train is, as the person he’s going to meet makes his way to a platform a few stations ahead. The train’s schedule is so predictable, that people actually set up their little rendezvous right inside the train itself.

The downside with all this predictability, of course, is that it magnifies the drudgery of a monotonous life akin to working in a post office that I think already afflicts and embraces nearly everyone stepping into the trains.

My mistress’ bosom may be warm, but her womb is sadly barren.

You can see it in the hundreds and thousands of souls going in and out of the trains everyday. It is unmistakable. The loneliness. The need to reach out and be touched. The maddening indifference. The need to escape. The insanity of a predictable life.

http://pininggapura.wordpress.com/
http://supermouseandtheroborats.blogspot.com/
rdancel@gmail.com

Tanjong Pagar

It began as an after-work romp, a nightout to cap a long, hard day at the office. There was Geylang, of course, but it was too far from the office, and it was sort of cliché already to be going there. We weren’t tourists anymore, and we were just looking for a place to unwind without getting too bummed out we wouldn’t know how we got home the morning after and where our hard-earned money went. So, heeding the advice of a Pinoy mate who, for 10 years, had explored every nook and cranny of Singapore, we wound up in this district called Tanjong Pagar.

I can bore you here right now with the many things and trivias the place is known for – like how it used to bridge the docks with the old town, or its historic Jinkricksha station (the old main rickshaw depot that now houses one of Jackie Chan’s restaurants), or that it used to be the district represented in Parliament by the man himself, Lee Kuan Yew – but you can already Google these things up.

What makes Tanjong Pagar unique, I think, is this little, quaint restaurant known as Kamayan, its name a reference to the way we Filipinos like to eat our tuyo, with a small plate of kamatis, itlog na pula and sibuyas as sawsawan – with our hands.

The place is open for about 18 hours a day, and it serves dishes that will give Nanay’s adobo and sinigang na baboy a run for their money. The price is a steal – S$4 for a bowl of rice and two ulams, plus a Coke! – and the place’s pretty much the same in layout and feel as those carinderias taxi and jeepney drivers love to troop to in Quiapo and Timog for some things to warm their stomach and feed their tsismoso and usisero minds. But that’s not what makes Kamayan a special place.

As in many places that strike us and leave more than just a good impression, it’s the people who go to Kamayan that makes it one of those special corners of this vast, complicated and suffering world where we feel like we leave a tiny part of ourselves each time we go there.

During most of the day, Kamayan plays host to the regulars: office-weary Pinoys working in the district’s tall, gleaming towers, or Singaporeans egged by their Pinoy mates to try out some Filipino delicacies. It pretty much looks like any regular kopitian – Singapore’s version of our carinderia – through most of the day.

When it hits 3am, however, they start coming, first in trickles – in pairs or in small groups. Then by 4am, the taps open and they pour in – a horde of exhausted, hungry, young women coming out of those glitzy bars tucked inside Tanjong Pagar’s and Duxton Hill’s rows of shophouses, exploding into a cacophony of boisterous banter in a language all their own and transforming Kamayan into a noisy family reunion, a mini barrio fiesta.

Uy, Be, naka-quota ka ba?

Ay, naku, puro buraog!

Kailan ka naman e-exit sa JB?

Di ko nga alam, eh. Kulang pa nga pambayad ko sa Dragon kay kuya Robin. Hay, naku, Be…

There, they are stripped of all that’s superficial that goes with their “trabaho” – make-up rinsed, their micro-minis, tank tops, halters, high-heel shoes and faux jewellerey tucked neatly inside plastic bags. They are a noisy, raucuous bunch, making tsismis about who went out with who or made a scene at the club, laughing, checking out the competition, spying warily at the crowd for trouble.

There, reality catches up with them. They are no longer these pretty young things providing company to testosterone-laden young men, manic depressive middle-aged men and senility-fighting old men. At Kamayan, they are someone’s mother, wife, sister or daughter.

http://pininggapura.wordpress.com/
http://supermouseandtheroborats.blogspot.com/
rdancel@gmail.com