Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

For anyone moving in to the Philippines from any of its Muslim neighbors, the price of moral "sinning" becomes shockingly cheap.  Everywhere you look, there are prostitutes walking around seeking out potential clients , local bars with little restrictions on smoking indoors or televised lingerie models, or customers, both local and expat, mixing together, heartily laughing away at crude sexual jokes, while dancing to the latest hip-pop hits imported from the US.  Fluent English with American accents are sprinkled with Filipino on the streets, giving the place both a familiar and exotic feel simultaneously.

That is the term the real estate agent used when he shows foreign clients around the neighborhood for the first time.  Among the dense skyscraper-filled skyline of Makati, Manila's central business district, a whole new scene unravels on the street-level.  As one cuts into any one of the small side streets leading away from the impeccably maintained, tree lined, wide central boulevards of the country's premier financial district, a whole new world of dodgy entertainment and equally dodgy people hits the casual pedestrians unwittingly passing through, with a force that one simply cannot ignore.

Many a wise traveler met on the road have remarked as such, "every adventure with an abrupt beginning must have an abrupt end."  The wisdom of the words cannot be anymore appropriate for my five-month stay in Kuala Lumpur.  The whole episode started with a directionless grad student frantically seeking any opportunity anywhere in the world as he awaited the inevitably end of his one-year tenure in London .  A couple of 30-min Skype interviews and a few disjointed email communication with a landlord...all the sudden, he found himself on a 12-hour flight across the globe.

When it comes to understanding the everyday social mentality of East Asians, your writer ashamedly bills himself as a leading grassroots expert.  After five years in China, seven years in Japan, half year each in Korea and Malaysia, one would learn to make out some trends and generalizations about people there.  And after ten years in the US, one in UK, and a few months in Australia, one begins to see how such trends and generalizations are continued or discontinued when the Asians move into a Western environment .