On a recent whirlwind trip to Taiwan with a few selected media personalities, one slice of life cannot slip by unnoticed because of its sheer uniqueness to that country -- the sight of young scantily-clad Taiwanese girls selling betel nuts.
It is hard to miss the girls inside glass-walled booths lining many Taiwanese highways. For in the unlikely event that their skimpy clothing fail to catch your attention, the whirling lights on top of the booths similar to what you see on the roofs of emergency vehicles will.
It is hard to reconcile the sight of a semi-naked girl and the items she is selling, which are in fact misnomers, or terminologies all screwed up. For there is no such thing as a betel nut. What is being sold is an arica nut wrapped in a betel leaf for chewing.
The practice of chewing arica nuts in betel leaves is widespread in Asia, including the Philippines, although not among the young ones. If somebody smiles at you with rusty-red teeth, or spits out what you mistake for blood on the pavement, that one is chewing "betel nuts."
Chewing "betel nuts" is believed to induce alertness, hence its popularity among truck drivers in Taiwan who go on long overland trips delivering goods from one end of the island to the other.
But since one "betel nut" is no different from the other, it becomes necessary as a marketing strategy to employ extraordinary means to draw one customer away from the other seller. Thus was born the sexy "betel nut" wars.
The strategy is not exactly alien to anybody. It is just a packaging ploy resorted to by anyone who has ever tried to engage in some commercial endeavor. The only uniqueness here being the seeming incongruity between bare skin and a wrapped nut.
Packaging, it seems, is everything. Items that are exactly the same are differentiated by packaging. Eventually, it is also packaging that determines the success and predominance of one over the other.
Clothing, for instance, are all the same. They provide insulation from the cold or ward off sunlight from the skin. They cover our nudity as a matter of prudence. But with packaging, they provide the added values of looking good and feeling confident.
It is in this same manner that I look at people and how they are packaged depending on whether they reside in cities or in municipalities. I veer now toward cities and municipalities because the Philippines is right now all screwed up over the difference.
A few days ago, the Philippine Supreme Court declared that 16 newly-created cities in the country, including three right here in my own Cebu, changed their status illegally, meaning there were some requirements for them to become cities that were not met.
This has skewed up the organizational setups in their newly transformed governments, as all have already made the transition from municipality to city. Even the lives of ordinary citizens have been disrupted because of the sudden reversal of status.
Now, mark that word -- status -- because that is the operative one. I mean people will still be the way they are despite flitting from town to city and back to town again. They still eat the same food and sleep the same sleep after eating.
The people of Bogo or Naga or Carcar in Cebu will still be from Bogo, Naga or Carcar regardless of whether these places are towns or cities. It is just their status of being called either as townfolk or cityfolk that gets to be a little jeopardized.
For townhood and cityhood are just packaging. It is people that matter. If the people work hard, keep their peace, and pray to God, that place will progress regardless of whether it is a city or not. If they don't, no amount of cityhood can save them from rotting.