Don’t go to places where they refuse to see your value, where your work gets no credit, where your thoughts are not unheard. You’ll constantly feel the need to prove your worth, only to be consumed by a vicious cycle that will cause your soul.
So go elsewhere. To places where you’re invited to do things better.
I’ve seen such places. They exist,
and so is your worth.
TAKEAWAY
Partly the reason why I got myself Philippine credit cards while in Indonesia was to review them for public service purposes. The main reason is they’re far safer to bring around compared to debit cards. Four of my Philippine ATM cards were lost in the past few months, and requesting a new card is a hassle. You’ll have to travel back to the Philippines to process it. It happened to me once five years ago when a BCA ATM swallowed my BPI debit card. In case you asked, I forgot to pull my card out of the machine after taking my cash. (Take note: many Indonesian ATMs dispense your cash before the card).
On the other hand, banks have a dedicated set of customer service agents that handle lost and stolen credit cards. Once you’ve confirmed your situation, they’ll immediately send a new one. I’m speaking from my own experience as I also lost a Metrobank credit card here. So much for stupidity, but credits to credit card issuers.
Anyway, back to the main topic: Philippine credit cards on Indonesian apps. Do they work? The short answer is yes. But not all cards are the same.
Below is a table of some Philippine cards that I tested on Indonesian apps. The cards are Metrobank Vantage Visa, Security Bank Platinum Mastercard, Citibank Rewards Mastercard, and RCBC Bankard JCB Platinum; while the receiving apps are divided into two categories: e-commerce (Blibli, Bukalapak, Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada, and Sephora) and ride-hailing services (Gojek and Grab).
| Blibli | Bukalapak | Tokopedia | Shopee | Lazada | Sephora | |
| Metrobank Vantage Visa | X | X | X | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Security Bank Platinum Mastercard | X | X | X | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Citibank Rewards Mastercard | X | X | X | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| RCBC Bankard JCB Platinum | X | X | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gojek | Grab | |
| Metrobank Visa | X | ✓ |
| Security Bank Mastercard | X | ✓ |
| Citibank Mastercard | X | ✓ |
| RCBC Bankard JCB Platinum | X | ✓ |
Unfortunately, Gojek doesn’t seem to accept Philippine credit cards at this point. But let’s hope that they will, someday.
My thoughts so far? RCBC’s JCB Bankard Platinum is the most useful Philippine credit card when using Indonesian apps, when compared with the other three. Its edge is that it can be used for Tokopedia transactions. In my opinion, Tokopedia has a great inventory compared to Shopee and Lazada. What’s more, you can convert these purchases into 0% instalment for three months via the RCBC Online Banking App. (This is not an endorsement, but a statement of fact. The rest of the compared banks in this post don’t offer this).
By Pablo Neruda, translated from Spanish to Bahasa Indonesia
Dalam sehari kita akan menemukan satu sama lain.
Namun, dalam sehari, hal-hal bertumbuh
buah anggur dijual di jalan,
tomat-tomat mengganti kulitnya
gadis yang kau inginkan itu
tak pernah kembali ke kantor.
Tukang pos tiba-tiba diganti
Surat-suratnya tidak lagi sama
Beberapa lembar daun emas dan satu lagi:
Pohon ini sekarang menjadi kaya
Siapa yang akan mengatakan bahwa bumi
dengan kulit kononnya ia banyak berubah?
Ia memiliki lebih banyak gunung berapi dari kemarin,
langit memiliki awan baru
sungai-sungai mengganti alirannya.
Selain itu, sudah banyak yang dibangun
Aku telah meresmikan ratusan
jalan raya dan gedung,
jembatan sempurna dan mulus,
seperti kapal atau biola.
Maka, ketika ku menyapamu
dan mencium mulut berbungamu
ciuman kita adalah ciuman lain,
mulut kita adalah mulut lainnya.
Berbahagialah, sayangku, berbahagialah dalam segala hal
dalam apa yang jatuh dan berkembang.
Berbahagialah hari ini dan kemarin,
sehari sebelumnya dan esok.
Berbahagialah untuk roti dan batu
Berbahagialah untuk api dan hujan
Sesuatu yang berubah, lahir, tumbuh,
menghancurkan dirinya sendiri, dan menjadi sebuah ciuman lagi
Berbahagialah untuk udara yang kita miliki
dan untuk apa yang kita milik di bumi.
Saat hidup kita telah mengering,
tinggal akar yang tersisa bagi kita,
dan angin itu sesejuk benci.
Maka gantilah kulit kita,
Kuku kita, darah kita, tatapan kita,
dan kau menciumku, dan aku keluar
untuk menjual cahaya di jalan.
Berbahagialah untuk malam dan pagi hari
dan atas empat musim jiwa kita ini.
Cuanto pasa en du dia
Dento de un día nos veremos
Pero en un día crecen cosas,
se venden uvas en la calle,
cambia la piel de los tomates,
la muchacha que te gustaba
no volvió más a la oficina.
Cambiaron de pronto el cartero.
Las cartas ya no son las mismas.
Varias hojas de oro y es otro:
este árbol es ahora un rico.
Quién nos diría que la tierra
con su vieja piel cambia tanto?
Tiene más volcanes que ayer,
el cielo tiene nuevas nubes,
los ríos van de otra manera.
Además cuánto se construye!
Yo he inaugurado centenares
de carretas, de edificios,
de puentes puros y delgados
como navíos violines.
Por eso cuando te saludo
y beso tu boca florida
nuestros besos son otros besos
y nuestras bocas otras bocas.
Salud, amor, salud por todo
lo que cae y lo que florece.
Salud por ayer y por hoy,
por anteayer y por mañana.
Salud por el pan y la piedra,
salud por el fuego y la lluvia.
Por lo que cambia, nace, crece,
se consume y vuelve a ser beso.
Salud por lo que tenemos de aire
y lo que tenemos de tierra.
Cuando se seca nuestra vida
nos quedan sólo las raíces
y el viento es frīo como el odio.
Entonces cambiamos de piel,
de uñas, de sangre, de mirada,
y tú me besas y yo salgo
a vender luz por los caminos.
Salud por la noche y el día
y las cuatro estaciones del alma.
TAKEAWAYS
tree is not a plant. tree was the seed of memories i buried deep down in time, thinking it could ease the weight i have carried many years now since we last talked; it now stands tall as the banyans at the alun-alun, where bystanders sit at nearby benches, clueless of how many generations they’ve been there. maybe i should call myself an accidental gardener, but that would be another bad idea, besides reaching out to you in july, wondering whether there was a chance i could see you in jakarta again. now i wonder what curse could fall on me again – if i decide to uproot everything about you in me. of course i haven’t found the way yet, and i’m too afraid to go that far.
It resembled the many sunsets, the sky bathed in red. A new page that began with the story’s end. That was how the day broke in Banten, when I left.
The first sentence which I wanted to place here slipped somewhere into the clouds of my mind. But few days ago, as I walked down a hotel lobby in Ortigas, I was greeted by a familiar view of what used to be my neighbourhood nearly a decade ago. This was home, I once told a former professor in a farewell letter few weeks before graduation. “Of all places, why does it have to be Manila?” I no longer recall what was my followup to that e-mail. But eventually I would learn what she meant by that. The daily grind of waking up at least 4 hours early so you have an hour for shower and breakfast, the rest would be for travel. Once during rainy season when Shaw Boulevard was flooded, I came to work with my pants dripping wet, save for my shoes that was dry because I placed them inside my bag. Long story short, the home I called turned out to be hell. For that I returned home again and found myself happy for some four years, until it felt like home had to be another city. So I moved from one city to another, soon realising I may have made a fool out of myself by calling too many places my home. That morning, Jon may have thought of something when I was telling to a hotel staff how I missed Pasig, and that I remember those days when it was home. “Diba taga Davao ka?”
who I lost contact when I returned to the Philippines where I took so many jobs that I rarely have the chance to sit down and read all their messages on Whatsapp. I wish you can all forgive me.
I couldn’t help but pluck what probably was the remaining fruit of the mango tree this season. It had been swinging in the midst of a legion of leaves, while its cheek constantly being licked by the sun, whose heat has been the source of my agony since I went home. It gets so hot that I take midday showers when I’m working from my desk in Bago Aplaya. And each time I do, the bathroom’s window perfectly frames that hanging mangga, as if it were a picture sent by Tri, telling me that the kids are at it again, knocking at the gate, asking if it were alright to take some. I decided to pluck it, not because it didn’t deserve to be in that picturesque frame. But I just needed to turn it into rujak manis. It was the perfect time to make one because Bunda Tiwi got me bumbu kacang from Madiun, and there was ketimun, apel, and nanas in the fridge. She knew I have been in terrible shape since I went home, even long before I began to realise that my Indonesianised appetite would become a problem. A trivial problem I kept as a secret because on the same island where I now live people are being killed — so what makes mine a humanitarian crisis? But each day food without sambel or at least bumbu kacang felt like my rights were violated. So each time I went somewhere, grabbing food for lunch or dinner was tough. I didn’t want to go near a carinderia who knew nothing about sego pecel. So I picked only those food vendors whose goods I can associate with Java. Ginanggang is close enough to pisang bakar, and Coffee Americano to kopi tubruk. At night, I’d run to Mandarin for fish curry and jasmine tea — both remind me of that warung nasi padang along Jalan Raya Sengkaling which Latif says served bad rice. I would turn down requests from my friends who ask to meet after work, because everytime I do, my tongue suffers a lot. Always, when I want to speak in Filipino or Cebuano, my mouth blurts out Javanese words, that now, to save myself from embarrassment, I would rather not throw questions at a press conference broadcasted live. Because even if I spoke in English, surely someone would accuse me of faking a cable TV accent (yes, someone rubbed this in my face). Now I regret rolling my eyes when I could not believe Robin told me he had a lidah pecel when I took the whole gang to Pizza Hut a day after I arrived from Jakarta. I thought he was faking it when he said pizza wasn’t his thing. I never understood that until I returned to a Filipino home where a mango tree fulfills a rujak nostalgia, and where someone has been cursed with lidah pecel. Jancuk.
Durian Writer 