Sweaty State of Mind

Are you laughing at my parasol, fellas? If you lived here, you'd carry one too.

How do you know you live in the tropics? When you haven’t taken a hot shower in nine weeks–and there’s no problem with that.

To call the heat here a “climate” is almost an insult to the towering, malevolent presence that lurks inside every day, waiting to waylay any careless biped who makes the mistake of inadvertent sun exposure, quick movement, or excess clothing. As with its counterpart the rain (the only time when it’s not hot), the heat is respected and accounted for by all but the foolhardy, the ignorant, and the dying.

How to put it in context? Here’s a brief bulleted list for the businesslike or attention-deprived.

Possible non-sweat-inducing activities:

• standing or sitting in the shade
• sleeping in a basement
• being in a coma

Sweat-inducing activities:

• washing dishes
• walking sans umbrella
• toweling off too briskly after a cold shower
• thinking too hard

To illustrate, early in our stay here, I made the mistake of being the fastest-walking person on the street (hurrying to work)–but by the time I realized my mistake, I had sweat dripping down into the waistband of my pants after five minutes. It was more sweat than I excrete during a ten-mile trail run back home. And if you forget deodorant, woe to your co-workers and neighboring riders on public transportation! At first I puzzled over the women and men walking under umbrellas on sunny days, but it soon became clear to us that portable shade for that 100 yards between jeepney and trike can be the difference between spritzing and soaking your shirt.

What astounds us is how Manileños seem to be acclimated.  I’ll be panting, doglike, in dri-fit t-shirt, shorts, and tsinelas (Tagalog for flip-flops), while all around on the jeepney are locals rocking dress pants, jeans, and sometimes (cerebellum-smasher) long-sleeved shirts!

Oh, and apparently we missed the really hot time of year. Great.

* So where does everyone hang out in metro Manila, where people don’t want to be tan and there are few parks anyway? Malls. Why? They’re the only free public spaces with air conditioning.  Before we came to Manila, we did our best to stay away from shopping malls, and could never imagine why Filipinos would hang out there; now we understand.

*As a footnote for those of you who have lived in or traveled to some toasty places, according to BBC World Weather, Manila has a more uncomfortable climate than Houston, New Orleans, or Phoenix in the US, or than Cairo, Mexico City, or Mumbai. After a pretty thorough search of said BBC site (why is quantifying suffering satisfying?), I found only 7 major cities wordlwide (out of hundreds listed) with more months ranked “extreme” discomfort: Bangkok, Thailand; Calcutta, India; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Karachi, Pakistan; Kuwait City; Muscat, Oman, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia–although only Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh have every other month ranked “high” discomfort like Manila.