I like fruit

They have really great fruit here as you can probably imagine, and they practically force feed it to you. They have, in my opinion, and awesome tradition here of having something called a merienda which is basically a snack between breakfast and lunch and then again between lunch and dinner. It's nothing big, usually just fruit, or a little empanada, but it's great.

So let's see. We have wireless internet here in this "resort," hence my ability to post a lot, but there are internet cafes everywhere, so I'll probably be able to keep this up. We don't have a cell phone yet, but apparently it's the thing to do, especially in this country. We went to a mall nearby to by a surge protector, and every other store was a cell phone store. When I say every other store, I mean that literally. There would be a clothing store, and then a cell phone store and then a food stand and then a cell phone store and then an electronics store and then a cell phone cover store and so on. It was insane. But anyway it's really cheap, text messages are only a peso a piece, which is about 2 cents a pop. Someone here told me that Filipinos send more text messages than any other country in the world. My point is eventually we'll have one, and then we'll send out the number and people can call us if they want.

We found out a little more info the past few days about where we'll be going and what we'll be doing, so get out your maps. Abby and I are in a really good group of people who are going to be assigned to the MiMaPa 3 region (which isn't official by the way, that's a Peace Corps term). Basically it means a few things. One is that we'll be the only group learning Tagalog, which is the national language. The other 4 groups all learn the regional dialect/language of wherever they're going. So in the respect we have a real advantage because they speak Tagalog everywhere, whereas Cebuano or Iligano are only spoken in their respective regions. I thought that was pretty cool. Geographically, we'll be spending the next three months in the region of Bataan, which is north of Manila, but on the other side of the bay, basically. It's about a 4 hour bus ride away (or more, depending on Manila traffic), and we're going to be in the town of Balanga, which is supposed to be really great. They have coffee there (whoop whoop), and they're really close to a lot of great hiking and a lot of historical sites, mostly related to WWII. That's all we know for now. Out actual site could be anywhere in the region, which consists of provinces to the north of that, as well as one region to the south called Caminares Norte, and then the islands of Mindoro, Marinduque and Palawan. Basically I think we got a great placement so far.

We leave tomorrow to go the these "hub" sites for the rest of our pre-service training, and in a little less than a week we meet our host families and go off to live with them, so that's going to be awesome. I'm already planning to blow some minds with my cooking skills, plus guys don't cook so I thought that would be a fun cultural exchange. Anyway, Abby's waiting and I'm using all the internet time, so I'll write later from the hub site.

I saw a monkey last night. I was walking through the compound and I looked up and there he was, just hanging out. At first it didn’t register, I was still looking for squirrels and house cats, but it was one of those things that actually confirms for you that you are somewhere different.

Anyway, enough about the monkey. Everything has gone really well so far, and smoothly too. It’s been kind of weird, actually, traveling and not having to deal with any hang-ups or delays. Detroit was fine, if not a little boring. It had that “first day of class” feel about it, where you spend all of your time introducing yourself to everyone and talking about your only shared interest: the fact that you’re all there. It has been neat meeting everyone though, because I envisioned being surrounded by a bunch of 20-somethings who all wanted to change the world. It turns out that we have a very diverse (and large) group, with people of all ages and backgrounds. We have a surprisingly large contingent of older people, probably about 6 or 7 of them over 50. It’s been cool getting to know people better though because a lot of people have really interesting stories. One guy was recently over in Thailand teaching for 3 years. Another was raised in India. One guy was over in Melbourne waiting tables while he was going through the whole process. It’s nice to be with a group of intelligent, well rounded people. Not that there aren’t also people who are fresh out of college and have never flown on a plane, but hey, they’re here.

Right now we’re outside of Manila in this weird resort-y kind of complex with a “zoo” and giant pool complete with rickety water slides and various other strange diversions, but all in all it’s pretty nice. Never having been to a resort before I have nothing to compare it to, but I was expecting to just be in some hotel, so I really can’t complain. Actually, so far the Peace Corps has just been throwing money at us. I mean, we each got $160 for 2 days back in Detroit. Granted, we only got 585 pesos ($11) here for the whole week, but still. Yesterday about 5 of us took a jeepney into the nearest city center and walked around a little bit. There’s a huge mall here called SM (Shoe Mart), but we didn’t go in. We actually passed a lot of cool looking places though, a big market, little stalls of that sold various meats on sticks, that kind of thing. The resort is a little confining, so I imagine we’ll explore more since we’ll be here for about 4 more days. As you can tell from my incoherent thoughts, we’ve all had a fair amount of info to process so far.

We’ll have a lot more to do it sounds like, more orientation here, a visit to the embassy, training, etc. We’ll meet our host families in about a week and a half, which I’m very excited about. It’ll be nice to progress out of the confines of this initial orientation and actually sort of start our lives here. Well, I’m tired of typing and I’m not sure what the write next, so I’ll just save it until the next update.

Welp...

Well, this is our last day here in St. Louis. Today has been pretty nuts because although we've actually done some pre-packing, there are still a lot of things to pack, last minute details to take care of, etc. We've been been on over-drive since about 8:30 this morning, running around the house, making trips to get boxes and taking things over to Abby's parents house. I finally took a minute to eat some left-over chinese and sit down for a second before plunging back in.

It looks like we'll be pretty much down to the wire here, but hopefully tomorrow's an easy day because I'm going to be dead tired. We have about two days of training in Detroit (well, actually at a hotel by the airport in a suburb of Detroit), and I can only imagine what a blast that will be. Filling out forms, getting inoculations! It's going to be a blast. Oh well. This is about as much time as I can spare, so backing to packing and my next post will be from the warm, polluted confines of Manila. Hooray!