Catching the floating bookstore

I worked in Port Area for three years, and, as much as I enjoyed working in a space so different from what I considered to be my dreary suburban village, not once did I ever step beyond the grimy roads I passed through to get to my jeepney stop or have a cheap meal. (No, that’s not right. I did go deeper into Port Area once—to a nearby police station that I didn’t even know was there—but that’s a story better told by my editor and long-time friend, Nathalie Tomada.) For all my sense of adventure, only necessity would pull me out of my safety bubble.

This fact, I mulled over, as I made my way across the sticky asphalt of Pier 13 of the Manila South Harbor Sunday evening, excited two-year-old niece in tow. We were to experience another first together: getting onboard the floating bookstore MV Doulos. I’d been waiting for this opportunity for a long time.

MV Doulos, for those who don’t know, holds two distinctions: it is the world’s oldest ocean-faring passenger ship (it was built in 1914) and it is the biggest floating library in the world (it is supposed to have half a million books in the hold and 3,000 to 5,000 books on the shelves at any given time). It is owned by the German charity Gute Bücher für Alle (Good Books for All) and is manned by volunteers from different countries as it visits over 500 sea-ports all over the world. It was in Cebu from January 8 to February 11, then Bacolod from February 12 to March 13. The Manila stop-over, which will end on March 31, is the last in the Philippines before the ship sails for Taiwan. 

The ship had been docked in Manila while I was still working full-time for The Philippine Star. Nina, a co-writer, invited us to go, but I had little dispensable income back then, and book-buying had to take a holiday. Five or so years later, I’m better off financially, I have a little girl to spoil, and I really can’t say no to good books, especially if they cost a little over what I normally spend for a quick lunch.

I’ve been looking for more ways to entertain Keona these past few months, because the small city I live in being, well, the small city I live in, we don’t have any interesting parks to visit. Her favorite spots are SM (she can sing the jingle too, which bugs her mother, who works for the Ayala Malls) and the front yard of the house a block down, because it is decorated by some cement storks and little colorful dwarves. A trip to MV Doulos was one of the brilliant ideas I came across, thanks to e-mail forwards and micro-blogs posted by many of my book-loving friends.

For serious bibliophiles, MV Doulos isn’t exactly paradise. However, for those with kids (even borrowed ones) and those who remain kids at heart, it is a wing flap away from heaven. My mother, sister and I probably bought five thousand pesos worth of children’s books—mostly Dora the Explorer activity books that sold for P50 each; some Disney books; and Dr. Seuss book puzzles that cost me P150 each. Not bad, considering I scratched out several names in my Christmas 2009 list too.

My best buy for myself: reprints of the original editions of two of the Disney books I grew up on, Bambi and Alice in Wonderland. I’m saving them for Keona, for when she can finally read. Then I will tell her about a time the precocious girl that was her mother forced her grandmother Mamu’s eyes open with her pudgy little fingers, because Mamu had fallen asleep while reading about the adventures of another little precocious girl named Alice.

After the quick trip to MV Doulos—and a taste of the ice cream everybody’s been raving about—I looked the ship up online and read that it is actually on its final world tour, as it will be decommissioned in 2010—which is quite amazing, for a ship that was built in the same era as the RMS Titanic. I was happy, then, that I finally went.

I just hope Gute Bücher für Alle finds a way to continue its mission to bring, well, good books for all.

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