I Feel Like I'm Back in Japan

I feel like I'm back in Japan.

We had these nasty centipedes in Japan that were able to climb just about any wall and seemed to take great delight in dropping onto unsuspecting gaijin as they opened the closet door. They were also good at biting. Though I was never bitten, my friend Phil from Australia was bitten one night when he was visiting Yamanashi.

Last night, I had called Tanaka to come to bed. Although he's not a dog, he knows the routine and usually sprints to the bedroom to spend the night with us. Last night, however, I could not get his attention, no matter how hard I tried.

So I went downstairs to see what was up and found that he had cornered a very evil-looking centipede in the dining room.

Not wanting any of us to get bitten, I had to take Tanaka's new plaything away from him. After scooping it up in some tupperware, I stored it for the night in order to photograph it in the daylight. Plus, I wanted to find out what it was and would need to see it while looking for it on the Internet.

It seems to be a member of the scolopendromorpha family. Here's a blurb from the Emporia (Kan.) State University Web site:

Order Scolopendromorpha (3 families) - "epimorphic" forms with 21 or 23 pairs of legs and pedal segments, with a low degree of tergite "heteronomy" [segments are more-or-less uniform]. Includes the largest centipedes - the aggressive, intimidating species known to the general public. Occurrence: Worldwide.

After spending a night in tupperware, he seemed sluggish in the morning. I shot a couple of photos in the tupperware and then, going for a better view, dumped him and the nickel onto a piece of white paper. He took off at a mile a minute, forcing me to recapture him, as I really didn't want him wandering back into the house.

I hesitate to post this photo, as it may dash any hopes we have of anyone coming to visit. So, let me post it while reminding you: We have a cat. He caught a centipede last night. He'll get the next one, too.

I Can't Believe We Missed It

Digging through a backlog of newspapers this morning, I see that we missed the Fifth Annual Baguio Province Tossed Salad Festival on Sunday.

According to a story in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, this year's Tossed Salad Festival was dominated by thousands of children "enjoying their greens" at the Baguio Convention Center.

Their Styrofor bowls were filled with slices of carrot, lettuce, cucumber, tomato and bell pepper.

A woman said her three grandchildren quickly consumed two bowls each. A bowl cost P20 (40 cents).

Organizers earlier announced that this year's festival would try to break the record by feeding 30,000 people. But only 10,000 servings had been offered to the public as of 3:00 p.m.

Yes. There's an actual record for this. According to the Inquirer, the first giant salad broke a record previously set in Utah by feeding 5,000 people. The second fed 12,800 people, the third 29,000. (Only 9,000 people showed up in 2004 when the Tossed Salad Festival was held on the heels of a meningococcemia outbreak in the city.)

If any province is going to hold a tossed salad festival, Baguio would be the one. Much of the produce in the Philippines is grown in Baguio, which has cooler weather and better growing conditions than much of the southern part of the country. We often buy string beans, strawberries and lettuce labeled as being from Baguio.

Still, who would have thought that a tossed salad festival would be so popular?

Subic Bay, Baby

My alarm went off much too early this morning. 5:15 is too early just about any day.

But it was worthwhile, as I spent the day at Subic Bay with a couple of Shelly's colleagues who were headed there on business and invited me along for the ride.

Subic Bay is a natural deep-water port that was once home to the U.S. Navy and, before that, the Spanish fleet. Today the former navy base has been turned into a free trade zone and tourist destination.

When the Navy moved out, it left behind hundreds upon hundreds of old buildings, most of which remain in use today, and the infrastructure to support a small city.

This sign from the Public Works Commission just has to be a Navy remnant. Mr. Kool is affixed firmly to a huge air conditioning unit that appears to be in dire need of a visit from, well, Mr. Kool.

One of the largest tenants at Subic is FedEx, which hubs at least part of its Asian traffic here. The FedEx presence was of particular interest to me because, when I bought my computer, the shipping details showed that it was sent from China, where it was built, to Subic Bay, and then on to the U.S. I tried to take a photo of the tail of a FedEx plane to illustrate this paragraph, but a guard hustled over and told me that photography was "not authorized." So we drove around the corner and shot this one instead, which is all the better for being taken in front of a sign indicating that photography is, indeed, forbidden.

Part of the tourism development includes Ocean World, a small-but-informative Sea-World-like park though with, I think, more emphasis on education than Sea World. Walking through the aquarium, I discovered that while our digital camera was just not hacking it when it came to taking pictures of the fish, the camera on Rose's cell phone was taking good shots. Though I have yet to figure out how to use most of my phone, I have mastered the camera function.

As we wandered through the aquarium, we were met by Jeff, a park guide who explained each of the different tanks on display to us, and then invited us to come see the park's sea lion-painting show. Not a show where sea lions were painted, he explained, but a show where the sea lions did the painting.

"What kind of paintings do the sea lions make?" Elmer asked, quite reasonably.

"Abstract," Jeff joked.

Actually, Colby's painting was not nearly so abstract, as here he is shown painting the "L" in his name. We were told that the sea lions at Ocean World are South American sea lions, "the dumbest of all sea lions."

"Yet they can paint," Rose pointed out.

"Yes, but we have to feed them after each trick," Jeff said. "The California sea lions like you'd see at Sea World will perform without being fed after each trick."

"Sounds to me like it's the South American sea lion that's the smart one," Elmer said.

Subic is also home to thousands of macaque monkeys which live in the dense tropical forest. Ocean World has a rescued animals exhibit which includes a new family of macaques, which are actually a group of rescued individuals from which a new clan is before formed after the monkeys are nursed back to health. If released individually, a guide explained, they would be shunned by other groups; by releasing them as a family, they should survive in the wild.

A Little Bureaucracy

The Philippines is a receipt-mad nation. I end up with a receipt in my pocket for practically everything.

Of course, I end up with cash register receipts, just like anywhere, but how many times have you bought a whopping 12 dollars worth of household cleaning supplies and had your receipt checked not once, but twice? The cashier rang my purchases up, the bagger stamped it with the "checked" stamp on the right hand side, and the door guard stamped it with the "released" stamp on the top, but only after checking -- and circling -- the number of items purchase. (You can always click on these photos to see a larger version if you want to see the detail.)

Just about anywhere you park your car, you'll receive a receipt when you enter the parking lot. Some of them are single-use,

and some of them are used over and over again.

Whether parking is free or not, you'll more often than not get a receipt. Bobby explained to me why there are so many parking receipts: they're intended to keep vehicle theft to a minimum, the theory being that, without a receipt, you won't be able to exit the parking lot. In fact, your license plate number is usually scrawled on the receipt in generally unreadable script by a guy who has been scrawling tag numbers on little pieces of paper for the last seven hours. I'm thinking, however, that if I were intent on stealing a car, I wouldn't stop and get out of the car just because a lone receipt-taker told me to.

But the Granddaddy of All Receipts has to be the "gate pass" Jim brought with him to Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday. But first, the backstory: we needed a cooler for the party, and didn't really want to buy one we'd either have to leave behind or ship home, so we asked Jim to borrow one from the hotel he's staying at. He's been there for a couple months, they have his credit card number, they all know him and, most importantly, they were willing to loan him a cooler, so it seemed like a good deal all the way around.

Then he showed up at the house on Sunday with this:

There were, no kidding, TEN signatures required to loan Jim a cooler that couldn't cost more than fifty bucks.

Numbers 1 and 2 weren't signatures so much as the names of two hotel employees who would be responsible for the cooler if Jim didn't bring it back in time. It reads "Please allow the bearer: Mr/Ms ________ of _____ to bring out of the hotel premises the following item/s temporarily/permanently.

Number 3 is the signature of the person who prepared the form.

Number 4 is the department head who "noted" the preparation of the form.

Number 5 is the cost control office representative, who also "noted" the preparation of the form.

Number 6 is the signature of approval from the Financial Controller/Treasury Manager, and Number 7 is the signature of approval from the general manager.

Number 8 is the signature of the security officer on duty, who witnessed the changing hands of the cooler, while Number 9 is the initials of the security manager on duty who acknowledged the witnessing by his security officer. Note that, if more people had been on duty that day, there are spaces below Number 8 and Number 9 for their signatures and initials, too.

Finally, Number 10 is Jim.

What a paper trail! But I think, perhaps because of all the effort put into borrowing the cooler, that the beer was colder and better tasting than any beer I've had since arriving in October.

Or at least that's what I'll tell Jim.

Three Day Weekend

We're celebrating Bonifacio Day today, in honor of one of the founding fathers of the Philippine Revolution for independence in the late 1890s. The actual holiday is November 30 but, like the Americans, Filipinos have moved this holiday to Monday to create a three-day weekend. No complaints there!

To celebrate, Shelly rousted me out of bed to make pancakes. In retribution for waking me up early on a holiday, I shall post this series of photos of Shelly eating her pancakes, topped with her tightly-guarded stash of George and Esther's limited batch, Northern California applesauce.

Thanksgiving Rehash

It's over.

As the host, I probably shouldn't say so, but I think our housewarming/Thanksgiving/pool party was a success. We ended up having 15 or 16 people over, which was a good number. A few of the recipes didn't taste quite right, but they were all good.

First, the pumpkin pie. I don't think any of the Filipinos had ever had pumpkin pie before today. They seemed, generally to like it, and it passed muster with the Americans, so it must have been okay. I could have used a food processor, as the texture was occasionally a bit chunky, but the flavor was good. And, when it came to the pie I overfilled and, therefore, had to bake for 90 minutes instead of 60, the pumpkin chunks that weren't quite mashed were soft enough not to notice. Granny Esther's pie crust recipe turned out great, as usual, even with my much less-skilled hands making it.

The stuffing also turned out well and, because of a last-minute stumble into a health food store at the mall last night, were made with actual dried cranberries rather than blueberries or cranberry-flavored cherries. The only weird part of the stuffing was the longanisa sausage, which is sweeter than what I would use at home ... and redder than what I would use at home.

It was packaged in red plastic, but when I opened it up, all the sausages were red, too. I hoped some of the redness was due to being raw and that it would turn brown as it cooked, but the sausage stayed the same red color. If that was my biggest problem, well, that's not much of a problem at all.

You want to hear about a problem? No, Shelly isn't putting on a synchronized swimming demonstration for our guests, she's cleaning dead earthworms out of the pool. The earthworms have, recently, been making nocturnal journeys into the pool, only to be unable to get out once they get in. Mary Ann and Maricel showed up three hours early after misunderstanding our starting time, so Shelly ended up putting on an earthworm removal demonstration for them.

We ate, we drank, Jim collapsed on the couch after eating and drinking...it turned out to be a pretty accurate portrayal of Thanksgiving. Now, if we had just had some snow...

Hot, Hot Kitchen

You know, today would be a great day for it to be cold. By mid-morning, the kitchen was stifling hot, and the oven will be on almost non-stop until tomorrow afternoon.

In the oven today:
Baking pumpkins, for pumpkin pie
Baking pie shells
Roasting two chickens, to serve cold tomorrow

In the oven tomorrow:
Roasting a turkey, from about 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m.
Baking two pumpkin pies (separately, as they won't fit at the same time)
Baking a dish of stuffing

There have been a few, um, substitutions necessary. In addition to giving our dinner a nod to the Philippines with some noodles and rice, I'm baking pumpkin pies from scratch. After scouring the area supermarkets for canned pumpkin, I started to think about using fresh pumpkin.

"Do you think it'll be worth the effort?" I asked.

"Probably not," Shelly said. But she doesn't eat pumpkin pie, anyway, so I don't know why I bothered asking her. She's baking chocolate chip cookies, instead.

I sought a second opinion. Mom has been good at suggestion time-saving substitutions for dinner, most of which I rejected. Using a frozen pie crust, for example, would actually be a great idea if I was using pumpkin from a can. But I can't make the filling from scratch and cheat on the crust.

"I wouldn't see why using fresh pumpkin would be much more work than using canned pumpkin," Mom said. "When you read the side of the pumpkin can, all it lists for ingredients is pumpkin."

So I was off to the market to make what might have been the store's largest-ever single purchase of pumpkin. These aren't the big, orange pumpkins I grew up, but actually a much tastier, much smaller green pumpkin that I first ate in Japan but have started to see in the supermarkets at home.

Pumpkins, fresh from the oven

Mashed pumpkins, soon to become pie

I'll let you know how it goes. Brad's stuffing recipe will be getting a work-out, too, substituting dried blueberries for dried cranberries (my other choices of dried fruit seem to be mangos or bananas, neither of which would be any better than blueberries), walnuts for pecans and Filipino longanisa sausage for pork sausage. But, like I said to Jim yesterday, the Americans at the party will just be glad for the Thanksgiving dinner, and the Filipinos at the party probably won't realize anything's wrong if the taste isn't quite right.

Garbage

The garbage man, er, men just left. And it was quite a production.

Where else has the detritus of my life been attended to by eight garbage men?

Not at Mom and Jerry's house, where there's two plus the driver.

Not in Yamanashi, where I burned my own trash in a barrel in the backyard.

Not in Salisbury, where a single truck driver would extend a robot arm from the side of the truck to lift and empty the garbage can.

But in Manila? Yes. Seven men came to our house each and every Friday to haul away our refuse.

I have to do some sorting of our recyclables ... aluminum in the green bin, paper in the orange bin, plastic in the yellow bin, that kind of thing. Then, dry trash is put into a green plastic bag and it's all put out on the curb for Friday collection.

It's a well-choreographed operation. Two guys walk alongside the truck, tossing trash bags and recycling containers onto the truck bed, where five guys sort and re-sort everything into appropriate piles...cardboard here, newspaper there, aluminum cans and plastic bottles in a plastic bag hanging off the back end of the truck. And, if you happen to accidentally put something that could be recycled into your trash bag, don't worry: They'll rip the bag open and make sure it's all in the right pile before heading down the street to the next house.

At the end, just to make sure the garbage collectors aren't missing anything, is a guy pedaling a bicycle behind the truck, picking up anything that didn't make it into the truck bed.

Kitchen waste goes out three days a week. We have a small, green bucket with a lid that holds apple cores, rotten lettuce leaves, mango peels, egg shells and anything else that can composted. Fortunately, they do pick this up every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, as it could quickly become very smelly in the tropical heat.

So, what goes in the dry trash, you ask? Yeah, I wondered, too, since it seems like everything is either "recyclable" or "kitchen waste."

That's when I discovered that, placed right next to every single toilet in the house, is a small waste basket intended to hold, um, used toilet paper.

Our house is by no means unique. In fact, plumbing and sewage treatment systems across southeast Asia weren't designed to handle that decidedly Western concept called toilet paper. Traditionally, southeast Asian bathrooms came with a bucket of clean water to wash your backside with, meaning there was no need for a sewage system robust enough to handle toilet paper. (I don't know if this was true in the Philippines, or if the country's sewage infrastructure is just too old and fragile to handle toilet paper, but when traveling through the countryside in Vietnam a decade ago, I encountered a number of public restrooms that still employed the bucket of water method.)

Emptying the bathroom trash isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, especially since I mentioned to Shelly that it would make my job much easier if she would place her recyclable items next to the wastebasket, rather than in it. Emptying the kitchen waste is a far more unpleasant task: It only takes a few hours, in the heat, before the decomposition process begins.

Wait...She's the Robbing President?

A recent poll suggested that 60 percent of Filipinos want President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to leave office. An printing error on a batch of fresh 100 peso notes has given her opponents even more ammunition.

According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, a European contractor misprinted the bills, spelling the President's last name with a v, rather than a y. The contractor was printing extra 100 peso notes to ensure a sufficient supply at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas throughout the Christmas season, when they are frequently used as gifts.

"I hope this is not deliberate," said Rep. Rolex Suplico. "My Spanish teacher told me 'rovo' sounded like 'robo,' which means robbery in Spanish. This is from 'robar,' which means to rob someone."

Another variant of the word, 'dorobo,' is used to describe a thief, burglar or robber in Japanese, said Rep. Benjamin Agarao.

"It's a national joke," he said.

The lawmakers suspected that the heavens might be conspiring against Ms. Arroyo, the Inquirer wrote, "because the circulation of the newly minted bill would be a constant reminder to the people of the 'cheating, lying and stealing' charges hurled against her connection with alleged ballot fixing in 2004."

This is not the first time the national currency has brought controversy to the GMA administration. Two years ago, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas began circulating new 200 peso notes, complete with a picture of Ms. Arroyo being sworn in as president, complete with a portrait of her father, former President Diosdado Macapagal, on the other side.


***

If that weren't enough grief for the embattled president, she was recently Google bombed by groups demanding her removal from office.

(You might have heard about the June Google bombing of George W. Bush, when searching for "miserable failure" brought up the official GWB biography as the top result on Google, Yahoo and MSN.)

The Khaleej Times reports:

[Y]oung Internet-savvy Filipino militants mounted what they called a revolt on the blogosphere to discredit Ms Arroyo and her deputies through a "Google bomb" attack.

The groups Youth Demanding Arroyo’s Removal (Youth DARE) and the "young radicals" Internet blog staged an online campaign to "Google bomb" the websites of Ms Arroyo and her most rabid supporters.

In the bombings’ wake, Google search queries for ‘pekeng pangulo’ (fake president) now directs a surfer to Ms Arroyo’s website (www.kgma.org). Type in ‘sinungaling’ (liar), and one gets to the site of her Press secretary and spokesperson. The word ‘sira-ulo’ (fool) is a surfer’s ticket to the website of Ms. Arroyo’s Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez.

There's an interesting list of successful Google bombs on Wikipedia.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Happy Thanksgiving from Greg, Shelly and Mister Tanaka!

I had forgotten, from my three years on Guam, how un-Thanksgivingly Thanksgiving feels in the tropics, with the sun shining, the air warm and the pool beckoning. It's even less like Thanksgiving when you realize that, aside from fellow Americans, nobody even realizes that today is a holiday at home, when families are gathering and, at least where I'm from, enjoying a chill in the air.

In Japan, there were enough Americans in Yamanashi that we'd get together, along with a few rogue Brits and Canadians, for Thanksgiving on Japan's Labour Day (which was, in late November, close enough to Thanksgiving to be the perfect day to celebrate). Turkey was hard to find -- and harder still to fit in a miniature Japanese oven -- but we always managed to find some tasty ham or something and most of the fixings for a big potluck. Plus, in Yamanashi, it was cold, so it felt like Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving on Guam was sort of like home, but mostly not. Being part of America, we had big, air conditioned feasts with turkey and stuffing, along with local favorites like fried rice or kelaguen (a delicious, spicy Chamorro salad made with chicken, beef or, my favorite, octopus). And if the feast was followed by a trip to the beach and some snorkeling in the bay, who was I to complain? I never said cold was good.

So to wake up this morning and wish Shelly "Happy Thanksgiving" on a decidedly non-Thanksgiving-like day was, to say the least, odd. I'll make it seem like late November by fixing a dinner that approximates a much scaled-down Thanksgiving dinner from home, with some chicken, a chilled pumpkin soup and some corn or string beans, depending what's in the refrigerator. In fact, the pumpkin is roasting in the oven right now.

Our real Thanksgiving will be on Sunday, as part of our obligatory housewarming/pool party. Depending on my ambition level on Friday and Saturday, I'll make a couple pumpkin pies (from scratch, as I can't find any canned pumpkin or frozen pie crusts at the stores), mashed potatoes, stuffing and, if all goes well with the cold pumpkin soup tonight, some more of that, all topped off with a sort-of smuggled turkey from home.

Myra asked me on Tuesday why I wasn't having the party catered. On Sunday afternoon, I'll probably be asking the same thing.

But it wouldn't have been Thanksgiving.

Thanks for Your Feedback

Thanks for your feedback on Sunday's post. I've fixed things -- at least for now -- by changing Blogspot templates. After I get done taking my fall income tax classes, I might just teach myself some basic HTML, so I can figure out what the problem really is.

How Does this Blog Look to You?

I'm not talking content....though comments on that are always welcome.

Shelly recently noticed that, when she views the Blog on a Windows XP machine, using Internet Explorer, that the sidebar is now all the way at the bottom of the page. When I view it on my Mac, in any of three different browsers, the sidebar appears at the top, right where it should be. (The sidebar is the area with the Manila weather and links to recent posts.)

Please take a moment to e-mail me and let me know how the page appears when you view it. I'm especially interested in other Windows users, but would appreciate hearing from Brad, Mom or other Mac users, too.

Thanks!

American Idol Comes to Manila

If I were a fan of American Idol, I'd be all a-twitter right now.

In fact, I'd probably be in line at one of the nearby malls, waiting to see Constantine Maroulis light the Christmas tree.

Even better -- if I were a fan, mind you -- I would be thrilled to know that Constantine himself will be lighting a Christmas tree just FIVE MINUTES from my house tonight.

His visit to the Philippines is big news, as you can tell by how he's plastered across the front page of the Philippine Star and other newspapers.

Hmmm. Maybe I'll try to convince Shelly that we need to go out for dinner tonight. How could she resist?

The Cat Earns His Keep

We're in the tropics, so we have those really, really big roaches that scare the hell out of you when you walk in on them.

It doesn't matter how clean you keep your house: With no winter freeze, those suckers are everywhere.

Okay, they're not really *everywhere* -- that's me taking poetic license. The house was sprayed just six weeks ago, so there aren't that many of them. But they *are* here, and they do make themselves known from time to time.

Which is one reason it's a good thing to have a cat. Especially a cat who is just beginning his career as a roach-catcher.

Twice this week, Mister Tanaka has caught a roach and played with it for the better part of an hour.

He has quite a sadistic streak, which I fully endorse when it comes to pest control. He bats the roach around until it ends up on its back, then carefully flips the roach back onto its belly. As the roach dashes for safety, Tanaka pounces and flips it over again, repeatedly, until the roach gives up and dies.

Unfortunately, Shelly threw away Tanaka's freshly-slaughtered roach yesterday before I thought to take a picture of the hunter and his prey. Next time the cat goes hunting, I'll go along on the expedition, this time with the camera.