More rambling: Los Banos is a college town in the provinces, but it is quite different from the college town in the United States. A good amount of the population, perhaps more than in any other small town in the Philippines, have advanced degrees. There is also a sizable number of international students and expat employees, so there is more non-Filipino / non-Chinese cuisine -- Thai, Indian, Japanese, Middle Eastern -- than most other locations outside of Manila. It isn't cosmopolitan in the same sense as Manila -- and certainly nowhere near as shiny (the better to conceal the grime) -- but I really don't know the latter city very well.
This reminds me of how we drove into Valleverde (it's somewhere off Ortigas, in Quezon City) yesterday to get Izzy, Joy (my sister) and Issa fitted for their bridesmaid and flower girl dresses. (Joy looked smashing, by the way, though frighteningly skinny -- her waistline is only a little smaller than her age; Izzy was absolutely darling in a floor-length dress.) It's a gated community, like some parts of Metro Manila, and it was clear that many people who live in Manila would never have the opportunity to go through its gates. (Some of the easiest shortcuts, to ease traffic congestion on the main highways, would be to cut through these gated subdivisions, but you have to surrender your driver's license -- or rather, your driver would have to surrender his license -- to the security guards at the gate before you can go in.) Add to this the expensive, alternate flyovers that cost more and allow the middle class to drive over the jeepneys and squatter areas, and one can see how the middle class and upper middle class could eat and drive and shop and live in Manila without having to deal with the poor at all, except for the ones who wash their Z3s. (And yes, there was an actual BMW Z3 parked in the designer's driveway. But no, Clarissa's parents are paying for the dresses.)
But back to Los Banos: I passed by Olivares Mall, a somewhat dingy mall in LB in the more heavily-trafficked part of town, across from the gasoline stations. There is nothing much in it: ugly clothes shops with little turnover, an appliance store, a sporting goods place, a record store. But the real reason to go to Olivares -- which, apparently, you can find in most malls in the Philippines -- are the stalls with pirated DVDs, VCDs, CDs full of mp3s, and software.
In one stall one could buy an entire Adobe suite -- Pagemaker, Photoshop, Premiere, Acrobat, you name it -- for a little less than 8 dollars. Or 50 programs, all cracked (or if not, serial numbers were helpfully provided) for CD burning or mp3 creation or anything else music-related. Windows XP Professional? That'll be 8 dollars as well, and you get some change back.
It's sometimes mind-boggling what they have: 4 dollars will get you the complete works of the Beatles, minus the Yellow Submarine album. Or, on two CDs, the complete works of Bob Dylan (minus any bootlegs, or The Basement Tapes, or Biograph).
Most surprising of all were the sheer newness of the DVDs: piled up for way less than the price of a rental (crystal clear too, and apparently region-free) in several stalls were Secretary, Anger Management, Talk To Her, Identity, The Ring (and Ringu and Ringu 2) and the real shocker, The Matrix Reloaded. For 2 dollars each. (VCDs were a buck, but the quality wouldn't be as good.) So I ended up taking home pristine copies of The Jungle Book, Chicago and The Hour [sic] (the latter had "Property of Miramax" running underneath the widescreen bar every now and then). (The funniest DVD was entitled Lord of the Rings 3, which had Frodo and the gang on the cover Photoshopped with Tom Cruise and Mia Sara from Ridley Scott's Legend.)
While one may be tempted to characterize this as Third World capitalist ingenuity, I certainly can't approve of all this piracy: it's still a ridiculous amount of money that isn't going to Renee Zellweger or, to put it in better perspective, some poor Eastern European software designer whose demo program was cracked and being resold in the Philippines.
Posted by the wily filipino at June 1, 2003 02:28 PM