Off to Manila

Saturday afternoon was a lovely, (relatively) cool day for an outing, which worked out well, since Jim and I had plans to visit downtown Manila with Edwin, operations manager at one of Shelly's plants.

Our first stop was Intramuros -- old Manila, a city-within-a-city, the seat of Spanish colonial government and site of most of Manila's top tourist destinations, including a shrine to medical doctor, writer, revolutionary and national hero José Rizal, who was executed by the Spanish in 1896 for his outspoken criticism of colonialism.

Intramuros

Inside the Rizal Museum

You might say this rings true today in America...

The old walls and crumbling buildings of Intramuros reminded me again of how short history is in America. Work on the walled city was begun in the 1570s and, while buildings inside have been destroyed countless times by fires, typhoons, earthquakes and war, the wall remains.

We took a drive past the U.S. Embassy, and then strolled along Manila Bay, until we found a shady spot to sit and drink a beer or two before having a seafood buffet (with some fantastic squid) and heading home.

Edwin made an excellent driver and tour guide, and I paid close attention to where we were in anticipation of, some day soon, driving downtown myself.

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween. It's a big event here, leading off a couple days of religious holidays, with All Saints' Day on November 1 and All Souls' Day on November 2. Today's a holiday, too, which means it's been a marvelously quiet day in this perpetual construction site.

Our neighborhood sponsors a contest for residents who decorate their homes for Halloween, with a grand prize of P10,000 -- about $185 -- going to best-decorated house.

Some houses have been decorated for weeks, but this one, just a few blocks from our house, sprang up recently. The picture isn't as good as it could have been, but the display is truly impressive. Somebody put a lot of work into this.

Filipinos traditionally head to the cemeteries this time of year to celebrate their ancestors' lives. Apparently, it becomes quite a party, leading at least one of the national newspapers to run an article urging people not to turn the country's cemeteries into garbage dumps this week.

I'm keeping my eyes open for trick-or-treaters tonight, but we're pretty well off the beaten path, so I don't expect to see too many.

(I finally found a work-around to the missing USB cable, so stay tuned for photos!)

UN Says RP's Poorest Provinces "Like Africa"

You could be forgiven for believing, based on this blog, that the Philippines are all drivers and gardeners, shopping malls and supermarkets.

But, of course, it isn't. There's widespread poverty and unemployment in the Philippines and a huge disparity between poor Filipinos and rich Filipinos. (It isn't just expats who go shopping at the malls near our house. In fact, expats make up just a tiny minority of the faces I see at either of them.)

A United Nations-sponsored study released last week indicates that the country's poorest provinces have conditions approximating those in some poor African countries, while the most progressive provinces were on par with Jamaica or Turkmenistan.

The study, with provinces ranked in terms of the UN's Human Development Index (HDI), measures life expectancy, literacy and per capita income. The survey did not rank Metro Manila, where we live, which enjoys a variety of advantages over the provinces, being the seat of the Philippines' political and economic power.

The Top 5 provinces, as ranked by the UN, are Benguet, Laguna, Batanes, Rizal and Cavite. (Two of these provinces are where the plants Shelly works at are located. I learned last week that many of the line workers in these poultry plants are college graduates who simply can't find a job where they can use their college educations. With such an oversupply of labor, it's understandable why the average Filipino laborer makes just a few dollars a day.)

According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the HDI "measures an area's living standard not by its visible 'urbanity' -- the growth of factories or commercial centers in a locality -- but by how much the people enjoy 'public goods' like health or education. ... A province may have a high income level but still have low HDI if it doesn't translate into 'investments in health or education.' "

The lowest-ranking provinces had scores on par with the world's poorest countries, including Niger, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Mali and Chad.

Sick PowerBook

Remember that old PowerBook that I retired in September?
Well, lucky for me, my wife is pretty darn smart. I was preparing to wipe the drive clean and toss it in the garbage when she suggested I take it to the Philippines:

"You should take it with you," she said. "What if you have problems with your new computer?"

It was pure prescience, I tell you. The day the movers came to pack the house, I encountered a strange message that said "You need to restart your computer" in four different languages. It was frustrating to get an error message I had not encountered in my decade of using Macs, but I had no time to figure out what to do about it, and restarting the computer seemed to resolve the issue, at least temporarily.

Things got worse. Using Microsoft Word at LAX and Narita, the PowerBook crashed a few more times. Over the past two weeks, it got worse and worse, to the point Tuesday where it happened four times in 10 minutes.

My research indicated that it was a kernel panic, essentially an error that the operating system cannot recover from. The gray, multi-lingual screen is Apple's version of the Windows Blue Screen of Death.

I uninstalled all the shareware and freeware programs I had downloaded, reinstalled the system software and eliminated, to the best of my ability, any other potential software issues. The hardware tests I ran indicated that I probably had some bad RAM, which meant it was time for a trip to one of Manila's four Apple Centers, where I met Mr. Jeff, who agreed with my diagnosis but wanted to recreate it himself.

(Of course, when I decided that I needed to take the PowerBook to the shop, it stopped acting up, much like your car will when you take it to the mechanic and you're forced to play the "I swear it was making the noise on the way here" game. The Apple Center receptionist was sympathetic, at least. "They always do that, don't they?" she offered.)

Finally, the PowerBook did panic for Jeff, so he replaced the memory on Friday and has had no problems since, with every application up and running, he said when I talked to him today. But, the memory he installed is apparently just one he uses for diagnostic purposes, rather than one that I could, say, take home with me.

"I had to order the chip from Singapore, so it will be next week before it's ready," he told me.

Next week could mean a lot of things. It could mean Monday, it could mean Friday. Unfortunately, next week is a big holiday week in both the Philippines and Singapore, so it means Thursday or Friday rather than Monday or Tuesday.

The truth is, I have everything I need on this old machine I'm using, and it served me perfectly well for three years, so I can't complain too much. It even has the bulk of my iTunes collection on its tiny hard drive. And, it doesn't have kernel panics.

And thanks to Shelly, it's here with me rather than sitting in a landfill at home.

Photos

Several of you have commented on the complete lack of photos since my arrival in the Philippines. Somehow, the cable that connects the camera to the computer got left behind, so I'm unable to liberate any of the photos I've taken from the camera. I'm working on solving this problem, and hope to have some photos online soon.

Chocolate Toothpaste

Now where the heck was this product when I was a kid?

Unilever Philippines has been advertising the heck out of their newest line of toothpastes, the CloseUp "Flavalicious" flavors, which include Luscious Lychee, Tangerine Burst and, yes, Choco Loco.

I haven't tried this chocolate mint-flavored toothpaste yet, and can't imagine I will, but a quick look around the Web gives it a wide variety of reviews. Predictably, kids love it, but to adults, the consensus seems to be that it's just plain wrong to brush your teeth with dessert.

Unfortunately, after digging deep into the Unilever Philippines Web site, I couldn't find any marketing materials for CloseUp, much less anything that would shed some light on the history of chocolate toothpaste.

So if you're having trouble getting your kids -- or your spouse -- to brush their teeth, let me know and I'll ship you some Choco Loco. Of course, once you run out, don't blame me if your kids start brushing their teeth with a Milky Way.

Drug Store Madness

In the States, I hear, many of the states are starting to require, if you want to buy psuedoephedrine, that you buy it at the pharmacy counter, even though it's still an over-the-counter drug. Iowa, actually, has been doing this for at least a year, and Maryland started doing it not long before we left for the Philippines. If it reduces the amount of ice, or crystal meth, produced in home-made drug labs, well, it's probably a good idea.

In the Philippines, there's not much you can buy off the shelf, aside from things like deodorant, toothpaste and shampoo. So imagine my surprise when, on my third or fourth day in the country, I went to buy some Robitussin* ... and found it just sitting there for the taking, no pharmacist intervention required.

"Well, things must be changing in the Philippines, or what I read was just wrong," I thought. "That should make trips to the pharmacy much more convenient for me."

So today, when I headed into a pharmacy to pick up some saline solution for my contact lenses, I naturally looked next to the deodorant, toothpaste and shampoo, only to find that, while Robitussin is available freely off the shelf, saline solution -- that addictive, dangerous saline solution -- has to be purchased directly from the pharmacist.

There's probably something logical about this, but I haven't figured it out yet.

* The Robitussin, at P119, or just over $2, was a welcome change to the $13 bottle I bought at LAX on my way over. The average isn't quite there yet, though, so I'm thinking I might need to develop another nasty cough...

Last Day of Class

It was over almost as soon as it began.

Today marked Day 6 -- the last day -- of Yakitori 101's English component. We spent much of the period working on being persuasive, both in written and spoken English. The way this group of students has opened up has been amazing to me. When the English component began, there were one or two who were confident about their English ability. Everyone could speak well, and most of them could write and read fairly well, but most of them were nowhere near as confident as they were knowledgable.

I asked them, at the end of class, what the most important thing they had learned was. Almost without exception, they said that they now felt comfortable speaking and writing English.

"To me, or to anyone?" I asked.

"To anyone," was the reply.

Class was over, I gave a little "good job during the past six days" pep talk, and then the class surprised me with four sets of performances in my honor: original poems, a great song-and-dance routine, a "letter to Greg" and a short, one-act play about our first class in which, quite hilariously, the star of the show mimicked me perfectly.

Never has any class I've taught, whether English in Japan or taxes in Maryland, paid so much attention to what I was saying.

Here's one of the poems...

Once in my life, i met this guy,
I thought he was just passing by
They said he's our english teacher
I can't help but smile, "i thought he was a jester."

He walks funny as it may seem
But deep inside he is a king.
A king named Greg, that's who he is
For he has a lot of good deeds
He shares to us what he knows
A kind, unselfish heart it shows.

You us what we need to know
Even if it makes our minds blow
Self confidence we never had before
Then you said to us, "speak in english more."

For all the times we shared together
And the knowledge you impart to us
Rest assured that we will always treasure
And forever we are always greatful.

Today you'll be saying goodbye
I hope nobody will cry
For we will surely miss you, Gregory,
And seeing you, we hope this is not the last.

I'll be back for their graduation ceremony next month, I hope.

The Filipino-sniffing cat

I came home from class today, unlocked the front door and out popped Mister Tanaka. This is noteworthy for two reasons: At home (that is to say, in the States), he hasn't expressed any interest in going outside ever since he moved to a house with screened porches, and ever since arriving in the Philippines, he's turned tail and run into the house any time a door has been opened in his presence.

I scooped him up off the front porch and took him to the back yard, which Shelly has very cleverly cat-proofed with chicken wire. He spent a few minutes sniffing around the patio, then the garden until he saw the gardener, when he sprinted back into the house.

At which point I realized that Mister Tanaka hasn't yet met a Filipino he likes.

Tanaka has always been a friendly cat, playing with literally anyone who would give him the time of day, from Mom and Jerry to Nick and Kathy to Brad and Laura to Vivian to Kathy and Ed -- or at least Kathy, as Ed really wanted little to do with Tanaka. We had Jim over dinner last week, and Tanaka took to him like it was the most natural thing in the world, rubbing against Jim's leg and begging for a bite of dinner, but when Bobby came to the door with a vacuum cleaner Shelly had ordered at work, Tanaka headed upstairs.

It seemed as though Tanaka's aversion to Filipinos was based on skin color.

The theory seemed sound until I realized that the vet who saw him in September was black. Tanaka seemed quite happy with her, aside from the poking and prodding she doing to him, which left the skin color theory dead in the water.

Then I remembered that my friends and I used to joke about gaijin-sniffing dogs when I lived in Japan. Dogs, it seemed, would never bark at the mailman, the newspaper man, any sort of delivery man -- or even ax murderers for that matter, provided they were Japanese. As soon as a foreigner wandered down the street, however, the dogs were off and barking, even before they could see us. The theory, then, was that because most of my friends and I tended to eat a fairly Western diet, we smelled different to the dogs than Japanese did which, in turn, caused them to bark at us.

While the typical Japanese diet and the typical Western diet are significantly different, it doesn't seem that the Filipino diet is that much different than what we're used to. Certainly, there are differences, but nothing as pronounced as those between Western and Japanese. The truth is, I have no idea why Tanaka doesn't seem to like any of the Filipinos he has met. I hope he'll get over this soon, though, since he is, well, in the Philippines.

Parting thought: If Tanaka's aversion to Filipinos is diet- and scent-based, I guess you could say that we have a Filipino-sniffing cat.

Just in Time for Christmas

Two observations from the mall today.

1. A sign reading "Countdown to Christmas: 62 Days"

Christmas comes early in the Philippines. October, to be exact. Radio stations and retail stores are already playing Christmas music -- and not just occasionally, but all the freakin' time. Shelly, in fact, has already had her company's first gift exchange. I'm not sure how many more there will be, but the system is set up so that the folks who earn more money spend more on their gifts, so naturally everyone else in the plant is hoping that Shelly will draw their name. She ended up receiving a nice pink (the in color in Manila) sarong for the first exchange.

2. At least a dozen copies of "Go Wolverines: The Insider's Look at University of Michigan Athletics" at National Book Store

Needless to say, I was tempted, as it promised a preview of the Big Ten basketball season. It was wrapped in plastic, or I would have picked it up to see what the preview looked like. I nearly put it in my shopping basket -- it was only P49, or about 90 cents -- until I looked a little closer: The publication date was January 2005.

It LOOKS like ESPN

The "Dream" satellite tells me that we have ESPN. And I believe them, really, I do.

We indeed do have a channel that looks like ESPN. It has SportsCenter. It has the same manly graphics that I'm used to at home. It's on channel 40, which isn't even that far from its Comcast location at home.

But right now, in the middle of Saturday afternoon stateside (and about 2:25 Sunday morning here), when there are more college football games on TV than you could count, ESPN (officially "ESPN International: Pacific Rim") offers a rerun of baseball's National League Championship Series.

I shouldn't complain, right? They could be showing snooker, right? (Nope. The World Snooker Tour kicks off at 1:00. Nothing like a cold beer and a snooker match to while away a Sunday afternoon.)

So, while the ESPN Web site has managed to keep me up-to-date on the Iowa-Michigan score, I don't know that I'll make it through the 4th quarter. On the other hand, Iowa does have a 14-10 lead at the end of the 3rd quarter...

A less-finicky cat?

We've never seen Mister Tanaka as finicky as he's been over the past couple of weeks. Generally, he'll chow down on anything, from pancakes to Doritos to tuna to, well, actual cat food.

So we began to worry about him when he refused to eat the Friskies we bought him.

This is a cat who has eaten Friskies his entire life. The box of Friskies we brought home from ShopWise was made in Australia, but looks pretty much just like his made-in-America Friskies. Except, obviously, it isn't exactly the same, or he'd be eating it, just like he's been eating the few remaining morsels of American-made Friskies we brought from home.

He did finally snarf down several flakes of tuna last Saturday night, straight from Shelly's dinner plate, over her not-so-energetic protests. This was after a nice chunk while I was fixing dinner, along with a few pieces of grated cheese. He hadn't eaten much all week, and was obviously hungry.

So, my Sunday shopping last week included a box of dry Whiskas, which we've never bought before. He didn't get much further with that than he did with the Friskies.

Until this weekend, when he finally started eating both the Friskies and the Whiskas. He's evidently realized that his made-in-America food is gone and that, if he's going to eat, he's going to have to eat the (apparently not-so-delicious) Australian version.

Next? I fully expect that Tanaka will prefer the Australian version by the time we go home.

Premier seating? Why not!

Shelly's in Shanghai this weekend on business, with business elsewhere in China to follow next week, so I went out tonight with Jim.

After being first delayed by traffic then making a massively incorrect left turn and ending up, well, "somewhere we didn't want to be," we finally got to the mall just a few minutes before Lord of War, the latest Nicolas Cage flick, started. Rather than a nice, leisurely dinner, we ended up grabbing burgers at Wendys (how foreign of me, I know) before the show.

And then we got to the ticket window, where we were faced with two classes of ticket prices. For P80, or about $1.45, we could have regular seats. For P100, or about $1.80, we could have "premier" seat. How could we turn down better seats for a mere 35 cents? The last time I saw a first run movie for less than two bucks was, what, 1980-something?

The seats were faux leather, stadium-style seats, and the screen was the largest I've seen since the Uptown in Northwest Washington, so it was definitely a good place to watch a movie. Plus, a Coke set me back about 50 cents. Take that, Regal Cinemas!

First Day of Class

I started my Yakitori 101 English class today by asking students to ask me questions about myself. Lucky me, one of the first was: "What qualifications do you have for your position?" Hmmm. That's a good question.

Well, I taught English for three years. I've taught tax classes the last two falls, and would have taught this year, too, if I wasn't here. Those are both okay, I suppose, but then I realized that, well, I get paid to communicate in English, generally through written English, but sometimes through other means of communcation. Seems like good qualifications to me.

Class was a great pleasure. As much as I enjoyed teaching in Japan, I was frustrated by the difficulty I had actually communicating with my students. There were a couple I could have actual conversations with, but usually there was just too big a gulf between their English and my Japanese abilities.

So to walk into a class of mostly fluent 20-somethings was great. I couldn't ask for a better introduction to Filipino culture. Many of the classroom activities that had failed me in Japan have actually worked very well here.

We're going to review grammar and have some public speaking practice, but I think writing and reading will be what the class really needs. All in all, it's an extremely energetic class, full of bright people who, I think, will teach me as much as I'll teach them.