Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere may be dreaming of running away to white sand beaches…but what happens when warm weather doesn’t solve all your problems? Peter Gottlieb found himself alone in a tropical paradise, where “the word for love and the word for expensive are the same.”
We talk so long, she gets in trouble with the manager. She's different from other Filipinas I've met. She's darker than most, and like most of the citizens of the world, Filipinos look down on dark-skinned people. Skin-lightening salons are a common sight in the mega-malls of Manila. Instead of giving in, Sarah flaunts her darkness. She has incipient dreadlocks in her hair and wears colorful beads in them — on the street, she's mistaken for a foreigner. Other Filipinos think she's Jamaican or Cuban. They speak in English to her. She laughs or gets angry when she overhears passersby whispering about her in Tagalog. She tells me she's never had a Filipino boyfriend.
Want to get lost, as well?