Settling In

Tylenol P.M. does wonders for the out-of-sync body. A good night’s sleep a couple nights ago, and I’m almost good as new. I’m still getting sleepy much too early in the evening, but I’m managing to stay up an additional 30 minutes or so each night. Before long, I’ll be completely on Philippines time.

I was offered a job today – part time and temporary, but a great opportunity to jump into the local culture. I’ll be teaching English to a class of future line leaders at the “Yakitori 101” class at one of the plants Shelly works at. There’s no syllabus and no text, so not only will I be teaching, I’ll be creating the class, too. I’m going to spend some time on Monday observing “Hot Dog 101” at a different plant to give me an idea of how the classes are run.

Both the satellite TV folks and the broadband Internet folks showed up yesterday, so we’re online and watching CNN again. Getting the Internet set up was no problem, but I can’t get the wireless router we brought to reach much beyond the room where it’s set up. I suspect there’s too much steel and sandstone in the house and that the signal just can’t get through. I’m trying to come up with a good solution to this, but so far have not. I may end up doing my surfing from the living room rather than my office, as I had hoped.

I’ve taken over the cooking duties, for the most part, playing housewife to Shelly’s hard-working salaryman. With a miniature refrigerator (about half the size of an American fridge), that puts me at the grocery store every few days. For the most part, it’s a familiar trip: I don’t think there’s anything I’ve looked for that can’t be had, for a price. But it’s incredibly cheap to eat local produce: We had a fantastic fresh pineapple, a bunch of fresh beets and some tasty dalandan (oranges), all for less than a dollar. The grocery stores I’ve been to have all been at rather high-end shopping malls, crammed full of every kind of luxury good imaginable, along with a wide variety of American and Asian fast food joints. Certainly things aren’t always so rosy out in the provinces, and the disparity between the rich and the middle class, not to mention the poor, is something I may never adjust to.