A Day in the Life of Chaos

When you visit the Philippines and land in Manila it is often easy to lose sight of what the country really is. Manila is a modest urban nightmare of traffic and concrete.  Towering condominium towers compete with with massive bill boards as they both block out the world outside.  Rivers dark and murky flow through the city filled with pollution.  At times I find the whole thing almost reminiscent of the movie Blade Runner.  Traffic clogs the roads like red blood cells meeting arterial blockage.  The pollution has colored everything with a dirty coating that never seems to wash away. When confronting this concrete jungle it is often easy to forget that it exists in a country filled with beauty, sandy beaches and sun.  It is not the norm, it is the exception.  It seems that progressively there is a move to fly tourists directly to resort destinations avoiding Manila all together.   It is as if the best strategy to deal with the nightmarish urban center is to simply forget it is there.

Trinoma Mall I have traveled around the planet but I have found no place on earth that hosts more massive shopping malls then Manila, Philippines.  Even the names speak of enormity.  Mega Mall, Mall of Asia, Power Plant, Shangri-la, the list goes on and on.  It seems like no matter where you are, there is an enormous mall near by.  They seem to sprout like mushrooms in a lawn sometimes seemingly quite out of place.  Around them areas of extreme poverty cower in their shadows.  Massive parking garages often abut the main buildings typically bursting at the seams with cars.   The garages themselves are virtual palaces with parking floors coated in shiny epoxy and lights over the head of every space turning green when vacant, red when full.  Women dressed in bellhop type uniforms with white gloves spend their days in the elevators pushing the button for you. Everywhere you look in Manila condominiums are rising and the malls all owned by the same development corporations, have isl

The world is abuzz with high speed train travel.  Honestly it has been that way for the last 25 years but only recently with the rapid growth in China have some Americans begun to feel we are being left behind. Honestly it shouldn't just be a feeling, we are being left behind.  While the politicians bicker our aging infrastructure falls apart.  Our bridges fall down, our roads become bumpy.  Our sewer systems leak and our power generation becomes more and more 20th century. We always hear about China this and China that but the only contact that most American's have with China is shopping at Walmart.  We can't really conceive how different things could be.  When I visited my friend in China in 2011 I had a taste of things first hand.  Everywhere you look infrastructure is new.  While this is certainly not representative of all of China, industrial China is linking itself increasingly with modern road, rail and telecommunication networks.  South Korea has some of the great