Waffle Wars

The beginning of the school year in the Philippines heralds many wonderful things on Katipunan Avenue, home to two of the country’s top institutions of higher learning, the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines Diliman.

New businesses are opening up and down the Avenue, bringing with them the chance to add Teriyaki Boy rice bowls and “New York style” Buffalo wings to my meager diet of chicken inasal, rice topped with squid and vegetables and Jollibee deep-fried pork chop meals.

Ask a man in any college town on the globe what the return of students means, and his one-word answer will be “girls.” It’s a universal truth. College women want to start off the semester on the right foot, so they got their wardrobes, their make-up and their accessories all looking right, and that new student glow will last for at least a month.

Starbucks is packed from three in the afternoon. Trios of wobbly women can be spotted group-hugging outside of local bars after closing. The start of classes has breathed life into the neighborhood.

But that breath carries with it a virulent contagion – Belgians!

This ain't Brussells. You're in my world now, pare.

A new school year also means a new crop of Belgian exchange students staying in the Katipunan condominiums and taking classes at Ateneo. There’s no other way to say this but to put it bluntly. Over the past five months, I have grown accustomed to having a monopoly on whiteness in Barangay Loyola Heights.

I’ve got the market on tall white guys cornered out here, and I’d like to keep it that way. But how am I supposed to do that with lanky, floppy haired Belgians invading my turf. On paper, their whiteness is superior to mine. I’m a skuzzy American taking advantage of the post-colonial mess the United States left behind in the Philippines. They’re Belgian; unless the women at the laundromat are students of Congolese history, I think the newcomers are getting a free pass on King Leopold’s vile colonial policies. Sure, the trust U.S. dollar is worth more than 50 Philippine pesos, but those damn Euros can buy roughly three bodyguards for every two I can afford! Worst of all, they’re new! What if the neighborhood is tired of me and my basketball tomfoolery? Everyone will forsake me and flock to the flashy waffle barons.

What am I to do? Should I hand out pamphlets detailing the Belgian government’s role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the help they provided Mobutu Sese Seko to become Zaire’s dictatorial head of state? But America had a hand in that seedy historical episode, too. Could I engage in some tricky arbitrage and manage to sink the Euro? Not a chance.

No clever scheme is going to prove that I am the preeminent foreigner in the neighborhood. So instead, I’m sending out this statement to all Katipunan Belgians:

Non, non et non. Bawal ang Belgian.

Hello, Belgians. You want to sit on the barangay throne, but first, let me ask you: Do you carry 40-pound bags of laundry around on your back, to the delight of everyone on the street? Do you walk home in bare feet on steaming hot pavement after you flip-flops break? Have you mastered the Philippine non-verbal communication, which includes but is not limited to, raising your eyebrows 263 times a day, making the rectangular bill sign in restaurants, sticking your arm out in front of you before passing between two people who are talking to each other and making loud smooching sounds to get the attention of bartenders? Do the street children in the neighborhood call you “kuya?” Do they jump on your back and chase you down the Avenue? Do you buy them siopao and pan de sal on the sly? You’ve got a long way to go, Belgians. Remember that. Go to your classes. Enjoy your high-rise condominiums. Go surfing in Siargao or something. But this strip of pavement we call Katipunan and its din of tricycle engines and jeepney horns, its smells of burning diesel, trash fires and fried chicken, that’s my turf, and I’ll be the one dispensing the white goofiness on it.