I peeked at church today and noticed that Shelly did not take communion as directed by this poster we came across at the Santa Cruz Church in Chinatown yesterday.
Good thing for her that we're not Catholic, because I know she did not, as directed in number 3, "take one step to the side while still facing the altar."
That's because we're Episcopalians. We kneel.
We have become patrons of the arts, buying an original oil painting we have been looking at for the past month. It's the first time either of us have owned an actual oil painting rather than a print. If you have any advice about storing and displaying works like this one, we'd love to hear it.
The photo isn't great. I Photoshopped out as much of the glare from the camera flash as I could.
While much of the U.S. has been suffering through record high temperatures, we've been enjoying relatively cool weather, with highs only in the 80s most days. How does it manage to be cooler in the Philippines than in, say, Iowa? We're in the midst of the rainy season and, frankly, when there's no sunshine for days on end, it tends to cool off.
So it should come as no surprise that I found Shelly leaning over the bed this morning, urging me to get out of bed so we could enjoy the sunshine that had somehow managed to break out of the cloud cover.
After a quick stop at the neighborhood market to pick up some fresh kimchee and other assorted goodies, we headed for Manila's Chinatown, driving under one of three red gates guarding the neighborhood before returning later to walk underneath it.
"There aren't a great many sights in Chinatown," says the Lonely Planet Philippines, "but there is a lively atmosphere of industry and tradition." I'd have to agree with that. Aside from a couple of churches, this dragon sculpture and a bunch of restaurants and jewelry stores, there really isn't much to see, unless you count a horribly polluted creek. We chatted with a few vendors, got caught in a five peso (about 9 U.S. cents) scam and bought a couple of cheap souvenirs for our niece and nephews.
Just how did I get scammed? Well, it went something like this: As I pulled a handkerchief out of my right hand pocket, I heard a coin clattering on the pavement. I rarely keep money in that pocket, but since it did land right next to me, I leaned over, picked it up and asked Shelly if she had dropped it. Meanwhile, a man walked up to us, holding out his coin purse, showing me a few coins, gesturing that he had dropped the five pesos and that it belonged to him. Well, I handed it over without thinking twice. (I'd like to think that, if it had been a significant amount of money, I would have been more reluctant to give it up.) After he walked away, I reached back into my right hand pocket and discovered that I did, after all, have some coins there... But who can really complain about being scammed for less than a dime?
After Chinatown, Shelly wanted to visit a market called Divisoria that she had heard about, so we headed north and started looking for landmarks. We turned right at a mall, which we thought would lead us to the market. Instead, it lead us to an ever-narrowing street:
Suffice it to say, neither of our mothers would haved enjoyed this street. Come to think of it, neither did I. It seems impossible that I didn't hit somebody or run over something but, somehow, I didn't.
To end the day, we stopped by the Chinese Cemetery, which is full of mausoleums featuring crystal chandeliers, air conditioners, kitchen and flushing toilets. And, yes, you read that correctly. Not only are there two chandeliers in this photo, there's also an old Coca-Cola machine in the lower left corner.
We hired a freelance tour guide to take us around to the more interesting sites, including those with the air conditioners. Much as they do in life, Chinese families in Manila often try to stay ahead of their neighbors in death, which has led to larger and larger mausoleums, though some, like this one, are more modest. A number of wealthy dead men have been buried alongside more than one wife or, in at least one case, alongside two wives and a mistress.
We also saw a cremation taking place, or at least the smoke from a creation. The dark smoke seemed to be a fitting ending to our day in Manila: As we drove through the sprawling cemetery towards the exit, it started raining again.
Shelly is back from a Saturday outing with ECW and has brought a few interesting photos for the blog. Among her favorites are this giant grasshopper:
Shelly shot this photo just north of Makati a couple months ago. Ever since, I've been trying to find a few interesting bits of information about the Noah's Ark Sugar Refinery to add to this post, but have had no luck at all. Still, I think it's an interesting photo, even if we don't know anything about the building...
After church on Sunday, we drove over to the Manila American Cemetery, which is on the grounds of Fort Bonifacio, which used to be Fort William McKinley, when it was run by the U.S. Army. A staggering 17,206 Americans and Filipinos are buried there, most of whom died in World War II operations in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea.
The cemetery has a chapel and beautifully-manicured grounds ("Isn't that the first riding mower we've seen in the Philippines?" Shelly asked. "Yeah," I said, "and it's even a John Deere!") It was a remarkable thing to see in a country where most gardening and yard work is done by hand. (On the other hand the cemetery is 152 acres, which would take a long time to groom by hand...)
Carved on the walls of the memorial in the center of the cemetery are the names of 36,285 missing who died in the region. Seals of the states are carved into the floor. The cemetery has a feeling similar to that you get at Arlington National Cemetery in Northern Virginia, with fewer visitors and few memorials. When we arrived, there were only two other cars in the parking lot, which you reached only after passing a guard who recorded our license plate number and information from my driver's license.
After the quiet of cemetery, we hopped back into Makati for a couple of hours at the Red Box karaoke box. As a tribute to our mothers, we made sure to sing both John Denver and Kenny Rogers songs. (Plus, my voice is better suited to guys like that than to Aerosmith and AC/DC. I just can't perfect that hard rock falsetto. Of course, I might have had more luck if we had been there on Saturday night drinking beer instead of Sunday afternoon drinking ice tea...)
Ever wonder what happens to the books your local library no longer needs?
Apparently, they end up in the Philippines.
While I was waiting for Shelly's pedicure to finish, I dropped by our local "PowerBooks" outlet, where I found a large dump-bin full of hardcover books, mostly with the plastic-y library book jackets still attached. Digging through the books, they seem to come from all over the country, plus from U.S. military bases overseas, including one from Camp Zama in Japan, a high school library in Connecticut and a number from the Monterey County Library.
Pricing was great at mostly P75 or P99, or somewhere between $1.50 and $2.00. That doesn't leave much profit for the book store or the wholesaler, much less the library.
Shelly and I did our part, though, bringing 11 books home, which after reading, we'll donate to the church's lending library, which the ECW is currently developing.
Here's one more photo from Sagada. Nothing special here, just a photo of the town that I forgot to post along with the rest of the photos from out weekend trip...
Shell and I spent last weekend in a part of the Philippines that I never guessed existed.
I was cold.
Which isn't to be unexpected, of course, when you're spending the weekend in the mountains at 1,477 meters, or some 4,800 feet.
Our rather spur-of-the-moment trip started at 5:00 Saturday morning. Not sure how long it would take to get to Baguio, and how long it would take to get beyond Baguio, we left without a clear plan in place.
North of Baguio, we came upon the highest point in the Philippine Highway System. I'm sure there is a stunning view from this overlook, but with the typhoon that's currently brewing northeast of the Philippines, we were left buried deep in a cloud, with little to see.
By this time, the roads were starting to deteriorate, partly due to the weather and partly due to the fact that, in developing countries, roads in remote areas almost always deteriorate.
The fog was thick, at times giving us just a few feet of visibility, the heavy rain often made us to keep the windshield wipers running on high, and slow busses and trucks grinding their way up the side of the mountains sometimes forced us to pass when we couldn't see exactly what was in the oncoming lane. Or even in our own lane.
But at least the roads were paved, right?
Right?
Yeah, it was a heck of a drive. I told Shelly later in the day that while it only took 12 hours to get to Sagada (which we had finally decided upon once we realized how slow the going would be north of Baguio), I really should get 
credit for 18 hours of driving, since half of it was in the rain and fog, driving on winding mountain roads. (She didn't buy that argument.)
And, when we weren't fogged in, we saw plenty of cool scenery, including this small bridge.
And, of course, the Mazda had lots of fun playing in the mud. By the time we got home, it was much muddier, but its passengers were too travel-fatigued to take another photo.
Finally, after 12 hours of driving, we arrived in Sagada, a town of 10,500 people stuck between towering mountain cliffs and located in the apty-named Mountain Province. Because there's not a lot to do in Sagada, it's a great place to relax in the cool mountain air, which topped out at about 19°C/66°F during the day and dropped to a delicious 15°C/59°F at night.
Our first order of business was to find a place to stay. Based solely on the name, Shelly picked the George Guest House, named not for her grandfather but for the owner's inlaws. For a little more than nine bucks, we had a clean room in a brand new building. The guest house itself sits atop a small office, liquor store and animal feed store.
It's amazing how tired you can get sitting on your butt driving all day, but we were asleep by 9:00, which meant that Shell felt entirely entitled to wake me up at 6:30 the next morning.
"Still sleeping," I protested.
"You've had nine hours of sleep!" she retorted. "Get up!"
"I drove 18 hours yesterday," I said. "Still sleeping."
"You drove 12 hours yesterday," she said, pulling the blankets off the bed. Plus, she pointed out, it wasn't raining yet, which would make our hiking more enjoyable. I couldn't really argue with that.
After breakfast at the Yoghurt House, we wandered down the main road for our first look at Sagada's famous hanging coffins. Because of its remote location, Sagada was able to able to maintain its ancient burial traditions while the Spanish forced other parts of the Philippines to convert 
to Catholicism. Believing that the souls of their loved ones wouldn't be able to get out of a grave dug into the earth, coffins were instead hung on the sides of mountains.
We walked to the first cave with a local Jehovah's Witness who was on her way to Kingdom Hall in a neighboring town. Our trip back up the hill took us to St. Mary's Episcopal Church. 
Mountain Province is one of the few areas where the Episcopal Church is well-established in the Philippines. We didn't expect an English-language service, so we were surprised when we walked past the church halfway through the 8:30 service and heard the rector's sermon in English. We decided to sneak in, though this was technically impossible since, 1) we were the only white people in the building, and 2) like everywhere, most of the 
parishoners were sitting in the back of the church, forcing us to the front. After church, we continued our hike, through the cemetary and to see more hanging coffins.
The area around Baguio and north of the city is the Philippines' breadbasket. Much of the produce in Manila's grocery stores is 
from Baguio, and everywhere we looked we saw beautifully-terraced rice fields. It's also time for the cabbage harvest, and this pile of cabbages grew throughout the morning.
I'd love to go back -- we definiitely did not spend enough time in Mountain Province compared to the amount of time it took us to get there. And, any time I have the chance to escape the heat and humidity of Manila, if even for just a couple of days, I'll take it.
There must be a hidden feeding station, or oxygen source, or something tempting these fish. I've never seen koi schooling quite like this...
Shelly had a meeting in Makati yesterday, so I tagged along to take some photos of Manila's central business district.
I learned that it is impossible to cross either Makati or Ayala Avenue at their intersection. You can either walk halfway down the block and cross there, or you can walk through a pedestrian tunnel that runs underneath the streets.
While much of the Philippines is poor, with tin-roof covered buildings, Makati's central business district is as tall as any city in the world. According to the city's web site, more than 470,000 people live in Makati, making it the 7th-most populous city in Metro Manila. Makati is well-known for its vigorous enforcement of traffic laws (though not well *enough* known for me to avoid my little traffic misadventure back in March...
And the building continues....as evidenced by this incredibly large pile of rebar spotted near a construction site. When I lived on Guam, I covered the construction industry for a magazine in Honolulu, so construction sites aren't exactly new to me. But I've never seen a pile of rebar quite like this one. Notice the two guys on top of the rebar, kindly posing to add perspective to my photo.
I haven't seen this cookbook for years.
I remember getting our first microwave -- or "Radarange," as Amana called it -- when I was just a kid. It must have been in the mid-1970s. It came with gigantic dials: the top dial for cooking from 0 to 5 minutes, the lower for longer periods. It was noisy, but state-of-the-art for the time, I'm sure.
It either came with, or Mom purchased separately, a Radarange cookbook. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a Radarange cookbook in the used book section of our local supermarket last week. Looking at the inside, it had evidently been sold at a garage sale for $1, somehow made its way to the Philippines, and was on sale for 200 pesos, or around $4.
I'll bet it's still there. I'll bet if I look for it again at Christmas, it will *still* be there.
Here are a few more photos from the past couple of weeks. My goal for next week is to get a few backpacking photos up, in case you're interested.
* On our way home from the beach, we came up on one of the Philippines' many motorized tricycles cruising down the highway. These are the bane of many drivers' existence, as their top speed seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 km/h, while our SUV tends to top out somewhat faster than that. While tricycles are usually used to transport people from one place to another, this one had a different sort of passenger. There are actually two pigs in there, if you look closely. 
*Throughout Asia, it's not uncommon to see a nearly life-sized statue of ol' Colonel Sanders in front of the KFC outlets. (In Kofu, Japan, when I lived in Yamanashi, he tended to end up with a red-and-white Santa hat in December.) This KFC, at a mall in Las Pinas, substitutes a much-larger-than-life-sized chicken for the Colonel. Now, if I can just talk Shelly into going to that mall with me, I can get a picture of my chicken-industry wife posing with a giant chicken, which ought to earn her a promotion at work.
*See? She's proved that she's willing to do the pose, hanging out with Popeye at Green Hills. Now, to get her to visit the chicken...
I'm back.
It's already July and, frankly, I've been back for three weeks. But I've been playing the role of Chief Layabout since my return, to the exclusion of pretty much all productive activity. Something about a long decompression period needed, or something like that.
At any rate, here's a quick update:
* Two days back from Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, I got a nasty dose of food poisoning from the Philippines. It's ironic because:
a. After managing to avoid any serious gastrointestinal issues in Cambodia, I got sick within my first 48 hours at home, where I have never gotten sick. (Though I was under the weather for a few days in Phnom Penh, it was nothing compared to this ugly, ugly dose of nastiness.)
b. Most likely, I got the food poisoning in an upscale mall from a Western restaurant you would all be familiar with. I believe that the bacteria in a leftover hamburger (cooked to medium, of course), which I first carried around the mall for a while, then didn't reheat prior to eating is what did me in.
I figure my illness will excuse me from several days' worth of blogging.
* We spent last weekend at the beach, relaxing and doing not much of anything, although Shelly did eat the single largest hamburger I've ever seen. We ended up at the beach because...
* Our vacation to Guam and Palau was rescheduled due to emergencies at the chicken plant. Postponed is actually a better word, as it hasn't actually been rescheduled yet.
* We saw a friend (and coworker of Shelly's) married in a Wednesday afternoon wedding. Shelly actually got to be part of the wedding party. She is now a godmother, which apparently obligates her to Mary Ann for the rest of their lives. Not only was Shelly the only member of the wedding party not in white, we were the only people at the wedding who didn't speak Tagalog. Needless to say, I didn't understand much. (But it was a very nice wedding.)
* We went to the "Mall of Asia" last night, billed as Asia's largest mall. After dinner and a visit to Australia's Cold Rock Ice Creamery, we checked out the fireworks display sponsored by the U.S. Embassy just up the coast. Really, can't you see the embassy there? Just below that blurry smear of light?
We're off to the mountains this weekend, where rumor has it that the daytime high temperatures are similar to the nighttime low temperatures down in Manila. Can you say cool?
