Over the course of a 1-hour bus ride on the national highway near my home in Albay I saw:
A pig
Rice being dried spread out on the road while cars zoom past
Old men sitting in front of small convenience stores staring at nothing in particular
A giant concrete pencil
Terraced rice fields in all stages of growth and planting
Fighting cocks being tested against one another
Both broken and working wells
Boys and girls holding hands indiscriminately
Trees used as lampposts/power poles
A truck with a giant picture of Jesus on the hood and the silhouette of a naked lady on the door
Men and women chopping things with large machetes
Concrete being mixed in the middle of the roadway
Painted school buildings with no books, chairs, teachers or students
A sign advertising a newly completed road where the name of the senator who funded the road is larger and more visible than anything else
A motorcycle with 5 people on it, none wearing helmets
Smiles with no teeth
Small stores (“sari-sari”) advertising Coca Cola and local beer at prices lower than bottled water
A dump truck that was welded together in someone’s backyard
“Decorative” (read: not functional) concrete columns painted baby blue and hot pink
Cigarettes with names like “Champion” and “Hope”
A female yogurt cart vendor taking a shit in a drainage canal
45 pound children fetching 5 gallon water jugs
Teens in school uniform clearing weeds with their hands
Stacks of cinder blocks weak enough to break with my fingers
Government-subsidized rice (people can’t afford it if it is more than $1/lb)
A cell-phone tower than has been recently rebuilt after being blown up by rebels; any company that refuses to pay their so-called “revoluntionary tax” gets attacked.
New water supply pipelines funded by the World Bank
Road signs sponsored by a local Chinese restaurant
People showering on the roadside wearing shorts
Naked babies
A woman carrying a 10lb+ roll of vegetables on her head
Vehicles with no mirrors, turn-signals, headlights or brake lights
Burning piles of trash
People hand-making fans from Abaca fibers
A group of men without shirts on getting drunk at a wake on $1/liter brandy
Dogs “stuck together” after having sex
$1.25/liter gasoline
The entrance to the city dump, flanked by people with sacks waiting to pick through the next delivery of trash
Hand-painted movie posters
Rotisserie chickens
Nursing students dressed in white pants, shirts and shoes without so much as a SPECK of dirt on them
Banks and pawn shops offering 15% APR interest rates
A giant Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) with the nicest basketball court in the province (that’s how they get new converts)
A statue in the fenced-in courtyard of the local church “Iglesia ni Christo” of an aborted fetus with painted blood on it and a sign that says “in memory of the unborn”
