The quintessential Philippines girlie bar is a shopworn simulacrum of 1970 kitsch, with faux velvet seats, strings of fairy lights, spinning disco balls and a stage at one end where bored and listless dancers in bikinis go through their uninspiring routines to some of the most dreadful pop music ever inflicted on mankind.
The waitresses become more and more persistent as the evening wears on, asking time and time again, if you want another drink, whilst you still have half the remaining one not finished, be careful between your drunken mood and raging hormones its possible to spend a few hundred dollars.
The young woman employed here are called G.R.O.s- guest relation officers,they get no salary and depend on "ladies drinks", for their pay. These drinks, watery mango juice and iced tea are served in the smallest glass you will ever see, and cost around 300 peso (about £3.50).The girl gets 80 peso the bar takes the rest. In most bars, 10 "ladies drinks", give you the right to take the girl home...no-one uses the word prostitution, but it amounts to the same thing.
Most of the woman are uneducated and arrive from the far off provinces, with dreams of making it big in the big city, they come to pay for their education or that of their siblings, or to help their parents. In the darker parts of the bar other services get offered- for a charge of course!!
Most of these girls have a hard luck story to tell, and if you give them the chance, for obvious reasons they will tell you all about their problems, something the management frowns upon, as they want to create an atmosphere of carefree bacchanalia.
Most of the girls stay doing this work as they can earn more money than working in an office or as a secretary
Other places in P.Bugos street are the many money changers, if you visit here...try to stay a little sober.. its very easy to spend a lot of money, and always bring condoms.
MAKATI has a reputation as a yuppie ghetto frequented by office workers from nearby banks and corporate skyscrapers. Much of the nightlife is inside the malls which makes hanging out here a rather antiseptic experience. The best places, along Jupiter and Nicanor Garcia Streets, for instance, are enormously popular with the locals and expats. The Greenbelt mall has some very fashionable bars and restaurants on the upper floors.Try the:-
ICE VODKA BAR
Level 3,Greenbelt3,Makati Ave
Manila has a pathological obsession with glamour and beauty, come here on Wednesday nights, if you can prove your a famous nonentity, when models get unlimited vodkatinis and canapes for around 400 peso... you just have to prove your a model, how?.. in Manila as long as your tall have fair skin and can speak some of the gay patois..everyone will think you cant be anything else.
I stayed at Citadel Inn last night on P Burgos Street. What a hole. I also went to one of the many bars, and had a great chat with one of the waitresses. It's not all a hard luck story, and this girl had used the opportunity of being in Quezon City and Makati to land a job in Greece working as a masseuse. I asked if she was absolutely sure if it's legit, and she said it's working for one of the larger hotel chains out there; so this gilr at least is going to be able to move up in the world and help support the family back in Mindanao even more than she already does. Aside from this encouraging encounter, P Bourgos Street is a sh*thole, and I checked out at 8am this morning and checked into The Legend Villas in Mandaluyong, a much nicer place and where I would have booked in the first place except they didn't have any rooms available until today.
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