Philippines Travel Log 2

Manila in the daytime is much dingier than Manila at night.  Surprisingly there are fewer little kids begging for money, but they are replaced by cabs and motorcycles with side cars begging you to let them to take you someplace.

We cruised around our local area on foot to check out the surrounding scene.  Manius doesn’t arrive for almost a week and I don’t want to spend three hours standing around waiting for him at the airport.  We managed to find a nice hotel that would be known to all cab drivers.  Not for us to stay in, but to sit in the lobby bar, drinking and waiting for Manius to show up, via cab, from the airport.

We found an English style pub, and popped in for a few beers.  Then went back to the room, cleaned up, applied some fresh powder to the balls and hit the town to check out the night life. 

This part of town did not have the little kids begging for money, but it did have a lot of guys trying to sell us what must be the most popular products in the Philippines:  Viagra, Cialis and wrist watches.

Every guy had the exact same sales pitch.  He would quickly walk up on my side and hold out a small blue box and say, “Hey buddy, Viagra?” I would laugh and say, “No thanks, not that old yet.” He would do some slight of hand changing the box to a yellow one saying, “Cialis?” He wanted to make sure he was offering the right brand of sexual enhancement drugs.  I would still say no as we kept walking.  He would pause for a second and then try again.  Blue box, “Viagra?” “NO!” Yellow box, “Cialis?” I would finally exclaim, “I don’t want to buy shit!” Then the other hand would come out with several watches, “You want watch?” At first this seemed like an odd grouping, but when you think about it, once you buy some sexual enhancement drugs, you will need a reliable time piece to determine how long they are working.

After I would decline the watch with great displeasure, he would quickly run around and repeat the entire sales pitch to Chad.  Often during the pitch to Chad a new guy would jump in and start trying to sell to me again.  He was certain that guy number one just did not properly display the boxes or discuss the finer points of his black market watches.

Chad informed me that on his first day he was repeatedly hit up by guys selling sun glasses.  When he went out later wearing his own sunglasses, no one accosted him any further to purchase sunglasses.  My immediate thought was, If having a pair of sunglasses on was the best way to ward off sunglass salesman, it was obvious that the best way to ward of Viagra/Cialis salesman is to walk around with a huge erection. 

This might take some concentration, but I think I can pull it off.

•   Comments(11)    Posted by killer on 08/14 at 12:12 AM
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