Congratulations, It's A Girl

For those men who have never been on the MRT, you gotta know: THE FIRST TRAIN IS FOR SENIOR CITIZENS, WOMEN AND CHILDREN. I feel slightly Babylonian as I say that, but I can’t help it, that’s the law. So you guys out there, don’t even try, because there’s a guard on an elevated chariot-looking contraption there by the first train platform ready to verbally whip (or maybe even physically club) any man who dares cross the sacred train. And he means business – he’s pharaoh to the whole 20 feet of platform he guards. So men, beware.

The first train, or the girl train (sorry lolos and kiddies, you’re special people in a train that’s 98% female) is usually roomy. Coming from the horrible experience of having to squeeze into a morning train brimful of human carcasses, I can say that this is a relief. The men, I don’t pity. We coldhearted b*tches believe that men can fend for themselves, as the cavemen did in prehistoric times. But women, women are delicate beings. They need to be pampered, lavished, and thus be given their own train. And having your own sacred place makes you feel like the goddess Isis.

Ok, so maybe not so sacred. In the tradition of MRTs the train is still dingy, unstable, and hazardous. It’s still at the mercy of power shortages. Sometimes the aircon is low, and therefore you sweat. Otherwise, it’s pretty fine. The main purpose of the train is to provide public transport to people, not luxury. Luxury, you get from Rustan’s. But getting to one place to another without traffic, that’s the train.

And besides, the female train smells so much nicer than the homogenous trains. And that already adds so much pleasure to the train experience (or I’m just so inexorably tied to my olfactory nerves).

Female train-riders can still ride the other trains, but this I cannot understand. Once you’ve experienced the comfort of the girl train, how can you go back? I mean, it’s understandable how some girls can rush to the male trains because the train just arrived and it’s the nearest door to them once they’ve arrived on the platform and they are desperate to get on the train but the femme train’s just so far so they’d have to settle for another train (*breathe*), but not waiting for the girl train? It is, for me, unthinkable. The government is doing you a service, ladies, won’t you take advantage of these few rare privileges? Aside from the physical comfort, there’s a world of psychological ease in the girl train. Your sexual harassment red lights are minimized, if not completely gone. You feel more relaxed. It’s more comfortable, and there are higher chances for you to get a seat. Now you tell me: ain’t that nice?

Ok, it’s not all nice. Some fellow stranger b*tches stare at you like they have a vendetta. Some kids, their tiny-ness leaving them to toy around with the floor, associate feet with playthings and mercilessly step on them (paging, parents, your children, please. It’s a pain). Some oldies have as many bags are there were Jews killed in the Holocaust, and they take up legroom. And they take so slow to board the train they create traffic. But the senior citizens and kids, you understand, it’s age. But the b*tches? Hell.

And the girl train is a perpetual motion machine of gab. It’s always noisy. Some are marathoner gabbers, and they don’t stop talking. Gossip. Stories. Tall tales. Small talk. ANYTHING AT ALL. At times you hear stuff that you’re sure are supposed to be private, but just because it’s said so loudly you’re able to know stranger’s secret lives. Oh well. It’s not shamelessness. It’s just volume.

Still, I love the girl train. I don’t have to wait too long because there’s always enough space, I don’t worry about getting felt up by some random maniac. Whoever made this rule deserves a huge hug and a shower of kisses by all the femmes boarding the girl train. And the kiddies. And the grandmas. And grandpas.

Stored Value

Since I ride the trains very frequently, the Stored Value Ticket (SVT) is very handy for me. The tiny, floppy 3.25 x 2” card saves me the hassle of lining up for tickets, which is an additional 5-15mins (depending on the scenario) to my commute time. And for someone who thinks every second counts, that’s valuable time poorly spent (come on, I don’t even buy from the 5 convenience stores I pass through every morning, with their tempting fare of C2, ciggies, and assorted lip-smacking morning munchies). It is available in a P100 denomination, which means it averages 8 rides. That’s around 40 – 120 minutes saved. Not bad, really. The SVT is a savior.

There are times, though, when the SVT unavailable. The ticket drought brings me misery, and THIS PISSES ME OFF BIG TIME.

The demand exceeds the supply, so you see why SVTs are, from time to time, unavailable. Why the demand is high, it’s obvious for very practical, sensible reasons. Why the supply is low, I don’t know. You can’t even get them in bulk. You can’t stash those things – you have two expiry dates/times to think about. First is that they have a strict window from the time purchase from the first use, and if you don’t use it within that time frame the ticket gets expired. Second, the ticket is good for only 6 months from first use. These limitations make it unrealistic to bulk up on tickets for future use. It’s a “the present” thing, no hoarding for the future. Was it a wrong forecast with the number of passengers that would purchase the STV? Is it inefficiency with card collection from the card machines, since all the maxed-out SVTs are all unproductively stockpiled there? Is there an unequal distribution for the SVTs per station, since ideally the number of SVTs should ratio the number of SVT-buying passengers per station? And while I’m doing the ranting questions drama, can I just ask why can’t they produce a SVT in a higher denomination? It won’t save me money, but it will save me the hassle of repeatedly buying tickets every so often (or so very often).

I hate lines and I hate waiting. The train ticket line is a horrible combo of both – throw in ventilation problems, sweat stench, and nasty people just to boot. Plus you’re stuck with the helpless feeling that you have no choice but to wait – that’s the worst. For the daily commuters, if you take the bus, it’s going to take much longer, since buses are slower and are subject to traffic and passenger stops. If you take the cab, you’ll end up spending something like 1500% of what you originally intended to spend for transportation (I’m serious about this percentage, but this is relative you your pick-up and drop-off station). If you’re doing a one shot deal and have a lot of either time or moolah, you have the said options to pick from. But to the daily toilers, there’s little to no choice. Just paranoid thoughts, mostly about getting fired because you came in too late for work, or missing something so major in the office that they had to fire you. Egad.

Template characters in a ticket line:
Ladies fanning furiously
Dudes scanning the area for chicks
People chilling to their music players
Noisy people
Nosy people
Men profusely sweating


“Bakit hindi pa nila tayo binebentahan? Ayaw ba nila ng pera?” (“Why are they not selling? Don’t they want money?”), asks a sweaty, swear-y little teener beside me. To you dear, I have no answers. Inasmuch as I hate it, I’m sure there’s a reason behind the SVT drought, a reason so simple that if we knew about it, we’d uproar in the mere pettiness of the problem, but at the same time be dumbstruck when tasked with a solution. I cannot defend the train. I can only wait to finally get into that magical platform and board.

I have been a witness to many incidents in the train, being a train regular in two lines (the MRT, and the LRT line2). Why do I start this blog with this particularly nauseating one? Hmmm. It’s because after this incident happened I promised someone I would, so true to my word, I did.

So here’s my first tale among many about my insane train rides.

I was on my way home after having dinner and a couple of drinks with my officemates. I got to the Ayala train station just in the nick of time, so I hurriedly got my prepaid train ticket, inserted it into the machine, breezed through the short walk down to the platform, waited for the train, and boarded once it got there.

There was nothing different in the train, save for the drunk man beside me.

He looked a bit pasty as he swayed to the movement of the train, and after three stations was breaking out in what appeared to be cold sweat. Before we hit the fourth station (Guadalupe), IT happened. In an act only preceded by maybe, I don’t know, to me maybe the worldwide outbreak of the Ebola virus, the man puked. Right inside the train. Right there beside me. On the floor. On my knapsack. On my sandals. On the exposed part of my Bahama pants-clad gams. On my foot. There were gross amounts of masticated and half-digested bits of what obviously was Barfboy’s dinner all over me.

Barfboy was quite good-looking. In fact, he was very good looking. He had a boyish air about him, and he was fairly tall (I calculated this from the puke projectile – he was tall enough to hit the protruding front pocket of my backpack, but not my hair. Goodie). He looked like he was old enough to drive, but not drive his kid to school. Dressed in a tee, denims, and sneaks, he looked like an altogether pretty cool guy.

So what did I do. Actually, I could have prepared for the sordid disaster. I already heard him mutter under his breath, “I don’t feel so well”. That should have been my green light to emergency mode, which meant I could have reacted in two ways, both of which are fairly good solutions when a pasty drunk man was beside you in cramped train mumbles stuff like that.

1. Look for a barf bag – anything would do, as long as it is big enough to accommodate a fair amount of puke and will not dissolve upon the reception of colloidal food substances.
2. Leave.

During that evening, thought, it seemed that my early warning devices were kaput. So what did I do. What I did, for me can only be comparable to Mother Teresa’s work in Calcutta. I helped Barfboy. I held Barfboy steady as he puked, then escorted him out the train while pacifying him, repeatedly saying, “It’s okay, I’m here, kaya ‘yan, ok lang yan”. I supported him as he staggered out into the Guadalupe platform, where he hurled again near the doorway of the train. I steadied him as he blew once more by the escalators a couple of feet away from the trains. On normal days he must be a real gentleman, as he woozily took out a hanky from his bag and wiped some of the not-quite digested scraps of gunk away from my bag, after which he proceeded to clean his own messed up sneakers. After that, the worst was over.

We rested for a while. There were no available benches, so I sat him by the stairs, where he seemed to regain a bit of color. He leaned on the wall, trying to salvage whatever dignity he had left, while I mulled around aimlessly, icking at the barf bits still sticking to my skin, trying to figure out how to clean my still kinda gloop-topped bag, but mostly waiting for him to be sober enough to board the train again.

My sweet readers (yes, all three of you) who I thank dearly for prodding on, by now you’re probably sarcastic. “You got this in a movie – this is sooo My Sassy Girl” “Stuff like this never happens to me, and I ride the train everyday too!” “You’re making this up, it’s just not possible, it’s too surreal” yada yada… but I tell you, with the honesty that the Boy Who Cried Wolf can never muster: this is a firsthand account. Do not doubt my veracity. Puke isn’t nice. Ask the evening shift janitors of the train. They know what I’m talking about.

So what maotivated me to do what I did.

It was definitely not kindness. I’m not a kind person – I bump strangers, I stare, I very rarely offer my chair to the elderly (in fairness to me, when it seems like the senior citizen has a real bad case of osteoporosis, I give way, and I always give way to pregnant women, but only if their tummies are big enough), I disrupt people by putting the volume so high on my player that it sounds more like a monster boombox than an itty-bitty mp3 player, I talk loudly on my phone when I get calls in the train. I don’t think it was sympathy, either. Unkind people don’t feel sympathy. Maybe occasionally we feel a deep pang down in the gut, but most of the time we confuse it with either hunger or a profound need for nicer shoes.

I think it was because I was a bit drunk too, and my alcohol-muddled brain thought that two drunks were better than one. Especially if the other one looked like a clammy half-twit (oh but a good-looking clammy half-twit!) who has a weak stomach and on an apparent motion sickness trip, but who nonetheless was obviously in need of some help. Help, which I felt, no one sober would offer.

I dunno. I don’t think I can trace it. There’s a lot of factors. But that’s the train – it’s a crazy ride. Things happen.

By the time the third train from the one we left in stench rolled by, he felt well enough to ride. So we did. It was pretty quiet. At 10pm trains normally are. Barfboy behaved like a gentleman. We sat down beside each other and didn’t try to do anything funny or vulgar or disgusting (thank heavens, I had enough of disgusting for one night).

Barfboy and I both went down Cubao. He could have had a soda or two at GoNuts Donuts to recuperate, took the bus home, stared at his grimy shoes, met the girl of his dreams. Hmmmm. Could have. Me? I went home – a jeep ride and a tricycle away and I’m nestled in my place of wrest. When I got there, I took a look at my bag, shook my head, sighed, got a tissue and wiped my gloopy bag and my grubby calves clean.

Tomorrow will be another insane train day.