Philippines, Rod Fleming's World, Page 4

11/08/2024

River ferries, Pasig 2016

Originally posted 2022-08-06 00:30:16.

Pasig River ferries from Maybunga to downtown Manila.

Not many people know about the Pasig River ferries — which are really like floating buses. They’re not very fast but given that Manila road traffic is gridlocked most of the day, the river ferries represent an efficient transport alternative. There are numerous jetties along the river where passengers can alight and the cost was minimal. This journey took just over an hour but I have known the same one take over three in a taxi!

Poor Jelly was suffering. She was recovering from an accident and the seats on the ferries are basic, making her back injury hurt, But as always she just grinned and carried on. Smashing girl. We had a lot of fun.

The Terminus is at Escolta, on the other side of the river from the famous Intramuros, the old walled city. The day was very hot and Jelly was clearly in pain so we took a calesa ride and made like tourists. She had never been to Intramuros before and despite her sore back, really enjoyed herself.

The last ferry back to Pasig was at 1630, because the service only operates in daylight – there are no navigation lights! It was a fine day out though.

11/08/2024

2016-01-04: Arayat National Park, Pampanga

Originally posted 2017-07-22 16:22:39.

A day trip to Arayat in Pampanga with Azumi and Chin. The full story is here.

11/08/2024

A Christening in the Philippines

Originally posted 2018-01-11 10:10:07.

Christmas 2017, Angeles City, Philippines. My girlfriend Sam and I were invited to a Christening and duly trooped along.

This is a gallery of more pictures from the day.

10/05/2024

Not Men: bekis in the Philippines

Originally posted 2017-10-22 19:35:24.

Social division into ‘men’ and ‘not men’ groups, together with a domestic matriarchy, explains why transsexual expressions in SE Asia differ from the West.

Male to Female transsexuals are normally scientifically categorised as homosexual or nonhomosexual with regard to their birth sex. I use the term HSTS for the former. Blanchard explained the latter in terms of autogynephilia, love of oneself as a woman. These we term autogynephiles or AGPs. There is a discrepancy, between the West and Asia, however. Whereas in the West, most AGPs are older and about 60% seek relationships with women, most AGPs in Asia transition much younger and are almost exclusively attracted to men. Why is this happening?

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10/05/2024

Ladyboys and the two-group social model.

Originally posted 2023-02-04 17:28:54.

Over the last eleven years’ I have spent much time in the Philippines and was lucky enough to be invited into the company of Filipino families on many occasions. I was fascinated to observe a two-group social model in full operation. This two-group social model was particularly obvious at large family gatherings.

two-group social model — A family party in the Philippines

Here, the men would congregate around one or more tables — often drinking heavily — while the women and children socialised completely separately. There were never any women or children at the men’s tables. Because I am obviously a man, I was directed to the men’s group and watched from there, as the rising tide of alcohol — in the form of ‘Empi’ or Emperador brandy — rose to my gills.

This separation into two groups, however, was not to do with alcohol. As a foreigner and a guest — a person of important status in a Filipina household — I was also invited to join women’s drinking parties on several occasions and I can attest that Filipina women party just as hard as the men do.

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10/05/2024

Ladyboys at Babe Central

Originally posted 2023-08-10 20:21:34.

There is nothing remarkable about meeting ladyboys here. Sex is on the agenda and ladyboys live for sex.

The area we live, in Balibago, is not a red-light zone; it’s a quiet – well except for the videoke ‘occasions’ – middle-class residential neighbourhood. Most people work outside the sex business, either locally or uptown in Angeles City. There are a few bar-girls who rent houses in the area but they don’t bring it home; that’s not the Filipino way. Here, they’re just ordinary girls with jobs, no matter what the demands of their professional lives might be. On their days off, they sit out in their yards, drink beers and chat with friends, just like women all over the Philippines.

Remember, the Phils is a modern matriarchy; inside the home space, women are in charge, no matter whether they be mothers or whores – and sometimes they are both. You could have a half-dozen bar girls living next door and think your neighbours were bank clerks – which might cause you some surprise, were you to encounter one dancing naked on a bar-top, delicately plucking thousand-peso notes out of beer-bottles with her moistened labia.

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10/05/2024

Ladyboys, Binibaes, Incels and Trannymaxxers

Originally posted 2024-02-14 16:01:40.

In the Anglo-West, we have been bamboozled by what amounts to a pile of nonsense about sex, sexuality and gender, often known as ‘Queer Theory’. This takes most of its foundation from that most rancid and poisonous modern ideology, feminism. Now it’s not that I don’t like women; I do, very much. Great when they have their legs on your shoulders. But most feminists are man-hating lesbians and make no sense. What is okay for one sex is not for the other, it would appear.

After all, if it’s all right for an angry land-whale like Andrea Dworkin (late and unlamented) to call for all men to be raped, why is it not all right to call for all women to be raped? No sane man would advocate this, least of all today, but it illustrates the double-standard at the heart of this toxic ideology. Men never ‘oppressed’ women, in fact the very opposite. But women constantly make demands of men and if men are unwilling or unable to satisfy these, feminists call it ‘oppression’.

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10/05/2024

Travels With A Ladyboy 2: Culture Shock

Originally posted 2013-05-21 22:35:39.

My plan had originally been to make my trip to Asia after Christmas, but Crissy had told me that she was unlikely to be available then. I was in contact with a number of girls, but only she had that spark, and I knew I wanted to meet her. She was lively and enthusiastic, but had an edge about her and a depth too, that I liked. She had a way of just knowing what I was thinking, even before I said it, that always bodes well for a new relationship.

So I rearranged my schedule. In fact, November is the best time to go to southeast Asia in any case. The typhoon season should have come to an end, and the temperatures are relatively low, with lots of sunshine. In addition, flight prices are twenty per cent or so cheaper then, than in March or April. I readily persuaded myself that making the trip sooner was justified on a whole raft of counts; other, of course, than my interest in getting to know Crissy a whole lot better…

10/05/2024

Travels With a Ladyboy: 1. NAIA

Originally posted 2013-04-28 18:07:20.

‘It’s as if a couple of jumbo-jets of Western culture crashed into a container-ship of Asia and the wreckage is still settling.’ These words jump out at me as I read over my notes. And it’s true; the Philippines is a cultural conundrum, a Rubik’s Cube of interlaced and interlocked themes, memes, images and sensations.

It’s not like India, where the veneer of Westernism added by a couple of hundred years of British domination is so thin it seems as flimsy as a bride’s veil, yet definitely attached, as if the bride herself is shy about lifting it, nor Thailand, where Western cultural influences seem grafted on, bizarrely co-exiting with something older and fundamentally opposed. Instead, the Philippines is a genuine melting-pot, a sculptor’s crucible where metallic elements are alloyed to make something completely new. The roots of European culture here go deep, deep into the fertile soil of Asia, and the resulting foliage is strange, at once familiar yet surprising.

10/05/2024

Aswangs: supernatural beasts in the Philippines

Originally posted 2021-02-09 18:22:12.

The Philippines is steeped in folklore and mythology. The very air seems supernatural at times and even today, Filipinos firmly believe in the supernatural creatures which also populate their country. Best known of these are Aswangs and Engkantos.

Many of these beliefs certainly date from the pre-colonial period and before the establishment of Catholicism as the dominant religion. Prior to this, the Philippines was not a unitary polity, but was made up of many small kingdoms and tribal areas. These all seem to have believed in a somewhat similar form of Animism but were all brought together under one faith and one colonial rule, by the Spanish.

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