Textiles!

Call me textile man.

Or the fabric man, or the cloth man, or whatever you like. We found our way back to the textile market after church on Sunday with no problems at all, except for the short amount of time that I was driving the wrong way down a one-way road. Fabric shopping-wise, we were golden.

As I noted on Friday, Shelly finds my taste in shirts particularly bad, so I let her "help" me pick out fabric that would be appropriate for me to take to a tailor. She doesn't hate all my shirts, just the ones that I picked out myself. There were a couple of fabrics we agreed to disagree on, though I still think she was wrong...

The market wasn't just for fabric. There were loads of clothes and shoes and rugs and anything else you can think of. And, I learned something about fabric: Did you know that it might come with a 45-inch width, or that it might come with a 60-inch width? Of course you did, but I didn't.

I ended up spending about $40 on fabric for seven shirts, which will each cost around $12 to make, which means I'm getting a great deal when compared to buying new shirts at home. Plus, I'll be relatively sure that, when walking down the street in Salisbury, I won't run into anyone wearing the same shirt as I am.

The Economics of an Expat

Another busy day today, which led to this long and rambling post....

Shelly and Bobby showed up at the house about 11:00 this morning. The plan was to take Shelly to the church, where she would go on a women's retreat to Antipolo City northeast of Manila, then head to Divisoria where we would visit the textile markets and try to track down a tailor or seamstress.

But first, we took Bobby out for lunch for his birthday, which had been earlier in the week. We went to an inexpensive Mongolian barbecue place that we visit fairly often. A bowl of stir fried meat, vegetables and rice runs less than four dollars and is big enough to fill you up for the rest of the day. We all enjoyed lunch, I think, and Bobby always makes good company.

Bobby and I dropped Shelly off at Holy Trinity, then headed across town to the textile markets. I didn't actually be buying anything today, but Bobby showed me the route to take so I can go back with Shelly at a later date. After all, every time I pick out a shirt, she hates it, so why would buying fabric to have shirts made be any different?

On our way back home, Bobby told me that he surprised how much money we had spent on his lunch. I told him it was because he's always been a good driver for us, because he's taught me a lot about driving in Manila and because he's a friend, if also an employee.

"I just hope you're satisfied with my services, Sir," he said.

I told him that if we weren't satisfied, we wouldn't have celebrated his birthday with him, so he didn't have anything to worry about. At that point, we hit a traffic jam and we started talking about boxing instead.

And what's the connection between a traffic jam and boxing?

If it seemed like we were driving on a parade route, it's because we were. Manny Pacquiao was returning home a national hero after beating Erik Morales in Las Vegas last weekend, and we happened to be on the route his motorcade was taking on his victory tour of Manila. As crowds thronged towards the car, I resisted the urge to roll down my window and wave.

But it wasn't until later that the meaning of that birthday lunch hit home. I was telling Shelly about the conversation I had with Bobby, when she succinctly summed up the difference between having money and not having money:

"Isn't it interesting," she said, "that a restaurant we consider to be inexpensive, Bobby considers to be very expensive?"

Dealing with that difference has been the hardest part of living in the Philippines. I expected it, but I didn't have any idea how difficult it could be at times. Bobby works long hours. Our gardener works long hours. The customer service guy I've gotten to know at the bank works long hours. None of them are destitute, but I doubt any of them have a lot of extra money sitting around, either. I'd guess they each make less than $10 a day.

I don't exactly feel guilty about having so much more than the people I know here, but it's hard to reconcile the differences in our economic lives sometimes.

Here's one thing I do realize after living here: It's only through (what--luck, the lottery, the grace of God?) that I'm sitting in a big house, typing on my expensive laptop and driving an expensive SUV. So much of what I take for granted at home simply doesn't exist in many people's lives here. And there's not much I can do about it.

Sunny -- Make that Chilly -- L.A.

Shelly's back from sunny, chilly Los Angeles. It sounds like all went well with her meeting, and she ended up with a couple of days to spend with her mom, who flew in to spend the weekend.

The weather in southern California seems to have been a bit chillier than here in Manila.

But, despite the chill in the air, Shell and Kathy apparently enjoyed their convertible. Did they need to be reminded that it was only January, and possibly too cold to have the top down??

I may just have the best mother-in-law ever, as she managed to pick up a copy of the Washington Post for me in Denver before flying out to Los Angeles. Yeah, the news is old by the time it gets from Washington to Denver to Los Angeles to Manila, but there's something about reading the dead tree edition that you just can't get from the Internet. Thanks, Kathy!

At 38, I'm right on the great divide of the newspaper-reading generation and the non-newspaper-reading generation. I grew up with parents who read the paper every morning -- in fact, it was part of our breakfast table ritual, passing various sections of the paper back and forth. Shelly's parents are also avid newspaper readers (her father is, at least), but Shelly, at 34, rarely picks up the paper unless she's traveling, prefering to get her news online. If you've ever studied the demographics of newspaper readers, you'll know that I'm the odd one, and that Shell fits in perfectly with our age group.

Manual Labor

One of the things that always reminds me that I'm in the Philippines is the amount of physical labor workers go through here.

Our gardener is here for 9 hours every Tuesday. I don't believe I've ever heard him use a single power tool. Lawn has to be mowed? He might use a push mower, but he might clip it all by hand with a pair of grass trimmers.

When you live in a country where unemployment is more than 10 percent, labor is cheap, which is probably why so many businesses employ security guards to open doors for their customers, and why so much of the labor is done by hand.

We watched this kid, along with three or four others his age and several more who probably in their mid-teens, at Aninuan last weekend as they first floated two dozen bamboo poles from one end of the beach to the other, and then drag them all up onto the beach. It wasn't back-breaking work by any means, especially since there were so many of them, but I couldn't help thinking that, in America, we would have loaded the poles into a pickup truck and driven from one end of the beach to the other. No way most Americans, myself included, would have gone to the effort these kids had to go through to move the poles from one end to the other.

A Relaxing Weekend, with Tattoos

In preparation for Shelly's trip to L.A., we spent an incredibly relaxing three days last weekend at Aninuan Beach, in Oriental Mindoro province, the northern part of which is littered with more white sand beaches than you could ever visit.

The difficulty with visiting Aninuan Beach, or even the more popular beaches in Puerto Galera or White Beach, is that there is very little information online, aside from a couple of top-end resorts. So, armed with two guidebooks and Bobby's minimal knowledge of Batangas and Mindoro, we headed off on Saturday morning for the Batangas pier, an easy two hour drive from our house.

We had an old -- and, as it turned out, completely inaccurate -- print out of ferry times from Batangas to Puerto Galera. I had called around to a couple of the high-end resorts Friday night, but they were both booked for the weekend. We decided we would try our luck and see where we ended up, though we agreed that low key and quiet would be preferable to a party atmosphere. With that in mind, we planned on taking a ferry to Puerto Galera, then a jeepney west to White Beach or Aninuan Beach where, we had read, the crowds would be significantly less than in Puerto Galera.

The downside, I pointed out to Shelly, is that there would be less to do.

"What is it you really want to do this weekend?" she asked me. "I was thinking about swimming, sleeping and reading."

"And?" I asked.

"And nothing. I really want to swim, sleep and read, and that's it."

I was floored -- and thrilled. A favorite vacation that I have fantastic memories of was my trip to Nepal in 1995. After bugging out of India early, I had a couple of weeks in Kathmandu, so slept late, went sightseeing midday, and read and drank beer in the afternoons and evenings. It was a great vacation, but not of the style Shelly typically prefers, where things are usually more active and structured.

I agreed that swimming, sleeping and reading sounded good, and I did it quickly -- before Shell could change her mind.

After Bobby dropped us off at the pier, we hustled inside, intent on making the 10:00 departure we had listed on our out-of-date timetable. Instead, we found a boat direct to White Beach for just 130 pesos. It would save us time and a jeepney ride from Puerto Galera, and probably save us money, too. Without a second thought, we bought our tickets and headed to the boat.

Most of the boats we had read about were ferries or high speed, twin-hulled catamarans. I was, then, somewhat surprised to see the outrigger that would take us from Batangas to White Beach. It was, well, smaller than I had anticipated.

Not only was our boat small, it rode relatively low in the water. As the outriggers tended to kick up a fair amount of spray, the boatmen rolled a thick plastic sheeting down over the sides of the boat, effectively locking us all in.

There were probably enough life jackets if we capsized, but I doubt most of us would have made it past the sheets of plastic. Fortunately, the water was smooth and an hour later we landed on the beach.

I had been chatting with a White Beach resident on the boat. She was on her way home for the weekend, and was nice enough to confirm that our guidebooks were correct, and that we could easily walk five minutes around the rocky point to the quieter Aninuan Beach.

It wasn't high season, so White Beach was, in truth, neither busy nor noisy, but it was more commercialized than Aninuan. We decided to go back across the rocks for another look on Sunday.

We easily found a room at the Tamaraw Beach Resort, which features little huts not far from the water and soon, unfortunately, a big concrete hotel. I'm sure the family who owns the resort will appreciate the money from the additional rooms when they open up, but it's probably a step towards making Aninuan Beach more like White Beach, which is to say, not as nice as it is now. The staff was incredibly friendly, they have a good cook in the kitchen, and the views and price couldn't be beat, and both of us would stay at the Tamaraw Beach Resort again, I think. Soon after arriving, we went for a swim, then decided that this beach dog had the right idea:

And thus began our 24-hour cycle of swim-sleep-read-eat-sleep-swim-sleep-read-eat, etc.

On Sunday, we did head back around the point to White Beach. Shelly had a mischevious gleam in her eye, and I followed reluctantly.

"Let's get tattoos," she said.

"Really?" Shelly had teased me once that she had gotten a tattoo while she was in the Peace Corps. I had never thought of her tattooed before, but had decided, then and there, that I liked the idea of Shelly having some ink. I was skeptical that there was a tattoo in her future, and knew there wasn't one in my future. Too much pain, I think.

"Henna tattoos, not real ones," she explained. "They last about two weeks. It'll be a bonding experience. Don't worry -- there won't be any needles."

There were two different tattoo shops on the beach, so we headed to the one that looked more prosperous. Once there, we picked out designs, and the tattoo artist began to sketch them, with a blue ball point pen, on our skin, before filling them in with a dark black ink.

We had to head back before sun down, as neither of us wanted to negotiate the rock pile in the dark, so after a couple of beers and a big bottle of water, we headed back to Aninuan Beach for the night.

The next morning, we had to go back to White Beach to catch our outrigger back to Batangas, so we had breakfast there rather than at the Tamaraw Beach Resort, which was probably a mistake, as it wasn't as good as what we'd had at the Tamaraw. Soon after, it was time to board our outrigger. The water didn't seem rough until we got out of the protected area near Mindoro. Once we were in the channel, it was a different matter entirely.

The thick plastic sheets once again came down. Because the front of the boat is higher than the back of the boat and the captain steers from the back, he can't really see anything once the sheets are covering the sides of the boat, so a lookout rides on the bow, acting as the captain's eyes.

Shortly after I took this picture, the waves picked up -- the swells were probably only four or five feet, but this was not a large boat, so we felt each of those four or five feet -- and two more boatmen headed to bow. I began to regret forgetting my Dramamine. I wasn't the only one. Once we were in the channel fighting the waves, which we hitting us mostly broadside, the lookouts not only helped the captain steer, but also signaled to him when to accelerate and when to put the engine into idle in order to minimize the effects of the waves. I managed to take a short video of our ride. It was taken with my phone, so the quality isn't very good.






The captain steered cheerfully through the whole thing, the expression on his face never changing, probably happy for the chance to show off his sailing skills.

Me? I was glad to be back on shore.

Tanaka and Shelly, Both Catching Birds

I knew something was up when I heard Shelly shrieking in the hallway. Sorry to use that word, Shell, but that's a sound that I know is reserved for the discovery of things like roaches and other nasty surprises.

I was still sleeping, it being early and all, when she flung the bedroom door open and said, "Tanaka caught a bird. It was in the hallway. It was in the hallway. You have to get up now and make sure it's gone. I think it flew out the door, but I'm not sure."

In fairness to my wife, no, she wasn't scared by the bird, but I think the situation unnerved her, seeing Mister Tanaka waiting patiently for someone to come by and praise him for catching his first live prey. He was, apparently, holding the bird in his mouth very gently. The only evidence I saw that a bird was even in the house was the three gray feathers I picked up off the floor.

Yes, we promote catch-and-release birding here. Good job, Boy!

***

It was just as well that I was up, as I had to drive to Paranaque today to pick up a loaner cell phone for Shelly, who is catching a bird of a different sort, as she's off to Los Angeles via Hong Kong this evening. We were going to pick up the phone, which will temporarily replace her malfunctioning BlackBerry, on our way to the airport, where I would drop her off for her flight this evening, until Bobby and I realized that, due to Manila's pollution- and traffic-reduction scheme, I couldn't drive the car into the city during rush hour, which is when I needed to be there to drop her off. One day a week, based on the last digit of your license plate, you're forbidden from driving in the city. On Monday, you can't drive in the city if your tag ends in 1 or 2, on Tuesday if it ends in 3 or 4, on Wednesday if it ends in 5 or 6, etc. Ours ends in 5, so she'll get a ride to the airport, and I'll pick up the phone during non-rush hours.

Her trip will be short -- she'll be back on Monday after a one day meeting and a couple of days with her mom, who is flying in to see her for the weekend.

I'll be at home with the bird catcher.

Macs Are For Everybody

I've been saying this since becoming a Mac Evangelist in 1994, buying my first one just before moving to Japan. Now, a billboard on the South Luzon Expressway confirms it:

Saturday afternoon at the park

Here are those long-promised photos of our Saturday afternoon in Rizal Park, in downtown Manila.

Armed with parking advice from Bobby, we somehow managed to find free parking directly next to the park. (Of course, this led to, at the end of the day, an enterprising young man "helping" me back the car out of the spot and telling me it was "pay parking.")

Rizal Park, named for turn-of-the-20th-century Filipino revolutionary Jose Rizal, is a favorite spot for families to spend a lazy weekend day. The centerpiece of the park is a monument honoring Rizal.

On a trip past Rizal Park earlier in the week, Bobby and I were talking about the monument's specifics.

"There are three gold stars at the top of the monument," Bobby told me. "And two guards at the base."

"They're there to honor Rizal? Like an honor guard?" I asked.

"No, I think they're there to protect the gold," Bobby said. "So it doesn't get stolen."

The gold stars, hard to see, are marked with the black arrow, and one of the guards is marked with the white arrow. You can see a larger version of this (or any photo on this blog) by clicking on the photo.

After strolling around the monument, we stopped by the Chinese and Japanese parks, established by the China-Philippines and Japan-Philippines Friendship Associations. Admission: 5 pesos, or about 10 cents. Can't beat that! None of my photos came out particularly well, but I think that's more a reflection on the general unphotoworthiness of the two parks than on my photography skills. After all, with a 5 peso admission charge, there's not much money to spend on beautification...

Which left us to wander over to the "Orchidarium" which, complete with a 100 peso admission charge and corporate sponsorship, was a far better place to take photos. For example, do you know what young bananas look like?

The banana flowers are gorgeous. I tried to get a shot with flower, bees and bananas, but settled for two different pictures, either one of which is better than the flower-bees-bananas shots I took.

Another great shot came in the Orchidarium's butterfly pavillion. I posted that photo last week.

After our strenous touring, we stopped at a small refreshment stand to fortify ourselves before moving on to the National Museum, which is full of history -- including a ton of Philippine headhunter regalia -- that was all off-limits to photography. (Although, photography could, perhaps, be arranged for the payment of a "photography fee.") Shelly decided to cool off with a cup of nice, natural, from-the-Philippines coconut juice, while I decided that a cold bottle of man-made, full-0f-chemicals Pepsi would be a better choice.

And, as it turned out, it was a better choice, because it led to this photo:

I'd never had Pepsi from a bag before. Many of the bottled softdrinks here are in reusable glass bottles, much like we had in Iowa when I was growing up. And, just like we had when I was growing up, there's a hefty deposit on those bottles. The refreshment stand's owner opened my Pepsi, poured it into the plastic bag, offered me a straw and sent us on our way. (This photo also shows off my thinning hair quite nicely, I think.)

After the National Museum, we headed to Intramuros to an apparently non-existent restaurant that Shelly remembers visiting once-upon-a-time, before finally ending up eating lunch at the Manila Hotel. I like to think that I ate lunch in the very seat that Gen. Douglas MacArthur ate his lunch in. Shelly points out this isn't possibly true, that the hotel must have been much more of the dark wood interior decorating style than the chairs-upholstered-with-bright-green-fabric style present in the Cafe Ilang-Ilang today. However, you could rent the MacArthur suite -- which comes complete with 24-hour butler service -- for about $275. Surprisingly, this is actually one of the cheapest suites the hotel offers.

(MacArthur, it should be noted, made the Manila Hotel his home in Manila before and during World War II. Apparently, the MacArthur suite has been re-created to look much like it did while he lived there, but I have not been able to find any photos of the suite to link to.)

Steven Spielberg, Your Job is Safe

It's Friday the 13th, and that means bad luck ... for Shelly.

Why bad luck? In my trolling of other blogs, I found a post mentioning that video can now be uploaded to Google, then put on your blog or other Web site.

And, it just so happens that I had some raw video footage of Shelly just waiting to go online.

While the subject matter is fascinating -- it *is* Shelly, after all -- I should warn you that production values are poor, and that you will never get these 53 seconds of your life back. If you decide to go ahead and watch, you should look for Shelly's annoyance with my little video project. It starts to show itself at 24 seconds, and then again at 36 seconds.




The coolest part of this whole thing is that video was taken with cell phone. It should be stated here that my cell phone is far too complicated for me to fully understand how to use it. My phone in the States could store phone number and then call them. My phone here has all sorts of multimedia options, most of which go sadly unused, which is apparently a sign that technology has moved on and left me behind. *sigh*

But, I have figured out the camera function and, even better, how to use Bluetooth to move the photos and videos wirelessly to my Bluetooth-equipped Mac.

I made the video of Shelly using Apple's iMovie software. The following masterpiece, I made using my Nokia cell phone's movie templates, in this case stitching together two supermarket photos into a rather catchy themed 9-second movie. These photos were taken for two different purposes at two different times. I realized their co-starring potential while stuck in traffic, browsing through my phone's photo gallery.





It's safe to say that directing big budget feature films is not in my future.

I Keep Missing Out...

As if missing out on the Arrovo bill wasn't enough, I'm now left wondering how I didn't come up with a brilliant idea I read about in The Washington Post today.

A 21-year-old student from Wiltshire, England, made a million bucks on the Internet in just five months, with an amazingly simple idea, says the Post:

Worried about paying his college tuition last August, Tew chanced upon one of those rare original money-making ideas. How about creating an Internet Web page out of 1 million blank pixels? And then selling those pinhead-size digital picture elements that make up a computer screen for a dollar apiece, or $100 per 10-by-10-pixel block, to advertisers who turn them into colorful tiny billboards and micro logos linked to their own Web sites?

And why not call this new marketing monstrosity "The Million Dollar Homepage" -- since Tew stood to make a million bucks?

At exactly 1:42:28 p.m. EST [Tuesday, I think -- gg], Tew can post a "sold out" sign on the Million Dollar Homepage. The spiky-haired Brit put the last thousand pixels up for auction on eBay 10 days ago with a $1 starting bid for the lot. With 24 hours to go, yesterday's bidding reached $152,300, putting him over the million-dollar mark.

The Post story says Tew's initial investment was less than $100. In addition to his million bucks, he's now sorting through a variety of job offers and business propositions.

You can visit his site here, and read the Post story here. The Post requires you to register, but it's free, and I don't think it goes much beyond a few demographics questions.

Butterflies at the "Orchidarium"

We did make it to downtown Manila on Sunday, but I don't have the photos quite sorted out. Here's a photo of a butterfly at the "Orchidarium," in Rizal Park.

More photos and a few details about our trip should be online in a day or two.

"I Blew It," says Jim

The New Year brought an e-mail from Jim, Shelly's colleague who has recently returned to North Carolina.
Remember those 100 peso notes with the President's last name spelled Arrovo rather than Arroyo? Well, Jim had managed to snag a couple of those bills from the front desk of his hotel, though he didn't realize they were anything special until the story made the news.

His e-mail also had a Reuters news story attached, noting that by the end of December, the bills were going for more than US$20 each on eBay.

"The girl that sold them to me had a whole stack of 50," Jim wrote. "They had doubled in value the next day."

They're still fetching more than US$12, which is pretty good when you consider their face value is little under two bucks. There's one optimistic eBay seller who says he's selling an Arrovo bill with the serial number AL999999. His opening bid was set at US$189.50.

Makes me wish I had one or two of those...

Fotos from the Falls

As promised, here are some photos of Pagsanjan Falls, courtesy of John on Saipan.

The water around the falls themselves was too deep for the banceros to wade through, so we stopped just a few meters shy of the falls. However, you could appreciate them from a nearby "rest area," or for a few pesos, walk under and behind the falls. Having been under waterfalls on Pohnpei, I elected to stay dry from the waist up. (Water in the boat had taken care of the waist down...)

Here's a shot just as we turned the bend from the calm, wide river to the narrow, rocky river. Yes, that's my bald spot. Yes, it's getting bigger. No, I didn't wear a hat, Mom.

And here we are at the "rest area" near the falls, complete with a life vest made for Filipino-sized tourists. I doubt it would have helped me float very much, but I paid the mandatory 50 pesos anyway.

We're heading to the Rizal Park neighborhood later today, so there will certainly be some photos up later in the week.

I'm Back. For Good This Time.

I'm back. It's been a busy couple of weeks, with Christmas and the new year, and this week has kept me busy with college football. That's not a good excuse, I realize, but all of that together adds to me not posting much. Today, I've put up a bunch of backdated posts to catch everyone up.

And from here on out, I promise to try to do a better job of posting.

Need a Ride?

Is the jeepney going your way full?
Don't want to wait for the next one?
Hop aboard!

She's Got Legs. Er, Make That Toes.

Shelly shows off her biweekly pedicure
and her oh-so-Filipina shoes.

Go Hawks!

I can't believe my luck...ESPN International will suspend its steady stream of snooker and cricket coverage for the next few days, giving me a chance to watch some college football. All of the Bowl Championship Series games will be on. More importantly, so will the Iowa-Florida Outback Bowl.

The BCS games will be great to watch: they'll be on live, at 9:00 in the morning. The Outback Bowl will be a little more of a challenge. That game kicks off at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time, which puts kick off here at midnight, Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. If it's a good game, I'll be up all night.

Who am I kidding? I'll be up all night, no matter what.

Happy New Year!

I went to bed early last night.

My wife has trouble staying up after ten or eleven p.m. We have exactly zero ringing-in-the-new-year stories, because at least one of us is always in bed long before midnight.

This year, I decided to join her.

This year, I made a big mistake.

When we arrived home from dinner around 9:00, our neighborhood was quiet. Sure, there was the neighbor behind us who was shooting off fireworks every 15 minutes, but the air conditioner, fan and white noise machine kept most of that sound out.

(Hiding from the noise was easier for our "brave" cat. When we got home, we found him cowering in a closet. When we went to bed, he immediately crawled under the bed.)

So we went to bed around 10:00. I must have fallen asleep around 11:00, only to be woken up abruptly at midnight, wondering if I were in a war zone.

Fireworks were, literally, everywhere. This is no doubt a hard concept for Americans to grasp, because when I say "fireworks were, literally, everywhere," most readers of this blog will think of firecrackers and bottle rockets.

But what I'm saying is this: Fireworks were everywhere. Fireworks, like the kind you drive to the park to see on the Fourth of July, were everywhere, shot from backyards and streets and rooftops. The acrid smell of gunpowder was in the whole house, including the air conditioned bedroom.

This incredible display of firepower -- including, I'm sure, more than a bit of gunfire -- went on for at least ten minutes. In the few oddly quiet moments in our neighborhood, I could hear, in the distance, fireworks across Manila. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to describe the sound. The best I can come up with, without trivializing the real gunfire of wartime, is this: Imagine a huge urban area where all the buildings have tin roofs. Then imagine giant hailstones, or frozen turkeys, or bowling balls, falling on those tin roofs, continually, for an extended period of time.

By 12:30, everything had pretty much settled down, and I wandered back to bed, where I found Shelly sound asleep. I wondered if my wife, who is at most times the lightest sleeper I've ever known, heard any of it.

Sugarcane

Our trip to Matabungkay took us through sugarcane country, right at the height of the sugarcane harvest. We saw dozens and dozens of these trucks, many of them piled much higher than this one.