The Unplanned Start
Saturday. I had been in Manila for five months. My original plan for the evening had fallen through — a group of friends who were supposed to go to BGC together had various reasons to cancel. I was left with a free Saturday night and the choice of going alone or staying home. I decided to go to Poblacion. Not with a plan, not with a specific destination. Just to go and see what happened. I arrived at 7 PM. I went to a bar that I had been to perhaps six times and whose bar staff I recognized. Ordered a beer. The bartender asked if I was meeting people. I said no, just out. He nodded and continued. For 45 minutes I drank a beer and watched the neighborhood through the bar's open frontage. This was, in retrospect, the best 45 minutes of the evening — doing nothing specific except being present.
The First Connection and the Group That Formed
At 8 PM a man sat down next to me who turned out to be a Filipino-American photographer who had been living in Manila for two years after spending his 20s in Brooklyn. We talked for an hour and a half about the specific quality of Manila that draws people back after they have been elsewhere. He was meeting friends at another bar at 9:30 and invited me to come along. This is the kind of invitation that a planned evening would have prevented — I would have been elsewhere, doing something specific. I said yes. His friends were a filmmaker, a chef who ran a small restaurant in Quezon City, and a visual artist who did large-scale murals. By 11 PM there were nine of us, two of whom I had not been introduced to but who had somehow accreted to the group in the natural way that Poblacion evenings sometimes accumulate people.
The Unexpected BGC Decision and the Total
Someone suggested going to BGC — specifically to an event night that the filmmaker knew about. The DJ performing was someone three people in the group knew from the music community. We went. The club had a different energy from a standard BGC weekend night: the crowd was more connected to the music specifically. We danced. All nine of us, on the floor together. The social circle of the evening provided what a BGC club visit alone cannot: the group dimension that makes a dance floor make sense. I went home at 3:30 AM. Total spent: approximately 2,800 PHP including the BGC club drinks and Grab fares. Why it was the best: being in the right place with no specific agenda, being open to the conversation that started it, and saying yes to the invitation that expanded it. Every subsequent step of the evening followed from those three things.
