Thank the lord, we have money again. We were down to some wanton wrappers, spices and half a package of noodles. We just went to the market yesterday and stocked up, so now we're back in business. You think moving is hard back home, try starting from scratch on a volunteer's "salary." Salary is in quotes because we've been told by the Peace Corps a million times, we are not employees of the Peace Corps. It's like we're covert ops over here. If we are caught they will disavow any knowledge of us. Yet, they still tax our non-earnings. How can you tax it if it doesn't exist? Somehow the government has found a way.
We have a few last things to buy for the house, the two biggest being wood for shelves, and a bbq. We've had books and other random junk sitting in boxes on our floor for a month because we had nowhere else to put it and no money to buy anything, but we're going to buy some planks today to build some quality cinder block and plank shelves. They're going to be beautiful. I'm really excited about the grill though. It's good grilling weather here all year round, and it's a nice change of pace, having grilled meat or veggies. Plus then we don't have to heat up the kitchen to near sauna-like levels. I have to cook with my shirt off because I'm dripping with sweat by the time I'm done with a meal. Of course my shirt is always off because I'm always dripping with sweat, so that's nothing new. It was pretty funny, speaking of meat, the other day we were watching a cooking show on cable, and the lady was making steak. She was talking about the different types of steak you can buy, and both of us thought of our options here. We have beef short ribs and a giant leg hanging off a hook. If you don't want ribs, you tell the guy how much beef you want and he whacks it off the leg. It's good for kabobs though, and tonight we're making beef bourguignon. For all the bitching we do to each other about the food we miss, we eat really well here. I think it was mostly last month though because we had no money to buy meat, or anything other than veggies, noodles and rice.
In other news, we got a kitty! We were totally against getting a pet, but the stars aligned perfectly, so we couldn't help ourselves. Our next door neighbor's pseudo-pet cat had kittens, and they offered one to us. So we looked around, and you can buy cat food at this one "pet" store (mostly pig and chicken feed), we can get sand for the litter box, they have free vet service here so we got her de-wormed and can get her a rabies shot (and fixed), and one of Abby's coworkers already has a cat, and he volunteered to take her when we leave. So we just couldn't help ourselves. She's a little orange and white cat we've named Beatrix. She's really playful, learned her catbox on the first day and sleeps with us under the sheet every night. It's nice having a cat again.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Friday, August 18, 2006
We have cable
I had to join the Peace Corps and come to the Philippines to get cable. How weird is that? Our host brothers were in here playing some online video game that every kid here loves, and I didn't see them. They just came up to me and said hi, and that they missed us. Awww!
Everything here is cool. We moved into our place two weeks ago, and it is awesome. We have it pretty well set up, painted the floor and it's become really comfortable. It's pretty nice to be able to just do our own thing without being in someone's way, or vise versa. We still have a few small things to get next month when we get paid, because the cost of moving in has left us with no more money. I'll try to put some pictures up, but that's a lot harder than it sounds when you don't have an internet connection in your house.
We have a bunch of stuff coming up soon. We're going up to White Beach in Puerto Galera at the beginning of September with some friends to celebrate our birthdays, and just to get away from site. I'm definitely getting a little stir crazy here. White Beach is one of the more popular beaches around the Philippines, lots of bars and restaurants, and of course, a big, long white beach. We've been there before during our summer (march-may), and it was packed. The tourism there is mostly Filipino though, so it totally dies off after summer and every place reduces their rates anywhere from %50-%75, so it's a great deal.
Right after that we are going to PST2, which is mistitled because it's not preservice training, it's just more training. For some reason they don't do any technical training before you come to site, they save that for three months in. Word on the street is that they're going to change that though. We just got a new country director and he's really shaking up the program, in a fairly positive way from what I've heard. My training is down in Iloilo City on the island of Panay, which is supposed to be really beautiful, and a fun town. Abby and the other education people have to go to Cavite, which I consider Manila's butthole. We were there for our first week and it's just ugly and boring. I actually have a fair amount of travel because I'll be going to Cebu City in October with work for a conference on marine sanctuaries. Abby is going to try and come too, we might turn it into a little vacation afterwards and take the chance to visit other islands in the Visayas.
That's pretty much it for now. Work is chugging along. I just got involved with a project that's part mangrove reserve, part crab farming, so I get to help raise crabs with a crazy old guy who really wants me to take a second wife. It's too bad the crabs are mudcrabs, and they harvest them too early so they're these little useless things with hardly any meat. For a country that gets most of its protein from fish, they don't seem to understand much about it. You know, I'm all like "can a get a tuna steak up in this piece?!" But no, I have to eat tiny, bone filled fish, or worse yet, dried, fried fish, for breakfast. Actually they have some pretty good seafood, we've been buying live prawns, then shelling them and fryin 'em up. Masarap!
Everything here is cool. We moved into our place two weeks ago, and it is awesome. We have it pretty well set up, painted the floor and it's become really comfortable. It's pretty nice to be able to just do our own thing without being in someone's way, or vise versa. We still have a few small things to get next month when we get paid, because the cost of moving in has left us with no more money. I'll try to put some pictures up, but that's a lot harder than it sounds when you don't have an internet connection in your house.
We have a bunch of stuff coming up soon. We're going up to White Beach in Puerto Galera at the beginning of September with some friends to celebrate our birthdays, and just to get away from site. I'm definitely getting a little stir crazy here. White Beach is one of the more popular beaches around the Philippines, lots of bars and restaurants, and of course, a big, long white beach. We've been there before during our summer (march-may), and it was packed. The tourism there is mostly Filipino though, so it totally dies off after summer and every place reduces their rates anywhere from %50-%75, so it's a great deal.
Right after that we are going to PST2, which is mistitled because it's not preservice training, it's just more training. For some reason they don't do any technical training before you come to site, they save that for three months in. Word on the street is that they're going to change that though. We just got a new country director and he's really shaking up the program, in a fairly positive way from what I've heard. My training is down in Iloilo City on the island of Panay, which is supposed to be really beautiful, and a fun town. Abby and the other education people have to go to Cavite, which I consider Manila's butthole. We were there for our first week and it's just ugly and boring. I actually have a fair amount of travel because I'll be going to Cebu City in October with work for a conference on marine sanctuaries. Abby is going to try and come too, we might turn it into a little vacation afterwards and take the chance to visit other islands in the Visayas.
That's pretty much it for now. Work is chugging along. I just got involved with a project that's part mangrove reserve, part crab farming, so I get to help raise crabs with a crazy old guy who really wants me to take a second wife. It's too bad the crabs are mudcrabs, and they harvest them too early so they're these little useless things with hardly any meat. For a country that gets most of its protein from fish, they don't seem to understand much about it. You know, I'm all like "can a get a tuna steak up in this piece?!" But no, I have to eat tiny, bone filled fish, or worse yet, dried, fried fish, for breakfast. Actually they have some pretty good seafood, we've been buying live prawns, then shelling them and fryin 'em up. Masarap!
Thursday, August 03, 2006
we are no longer pissed
So everything ended up working out because we are awesome. Actually it's our RM who's awesome, we're just pretty cool. We filled out all the paperwork and then wrote a letter to him explaining the situation, so he gave us the green light and now my hands smell like bleach from scrubbing our new place. It's in surprisingly good shape, just a little dirty from sitting empty for a while. I personally think we got a sweet deal, because after seeing the other crap for rent around here, we're actually living somewhere that doesn't smell like piss or have huge leaking problems. It's two stories, the bottom floor is just an open room, with a bathroom and a kitchen at the end of it. The bathroom is pretty scary, we're going to have to do some work on it so we don't feel like we're showering in a killer's basement. We have a little space out back for doing laundry and we were thinking about making a place to sit, but the communal river of funk flows (or rather stagnates) back there, so I don't think we'll be doing much relaxing there. The river of funk is basically the runoff water from people's kitchens and bathrooms. Here in the city the toilet drains somewhere (septic tank, central system, I don't know), but all other drains lead outside. You can see light through the kitchen sink because it's just a pipe that pops out of the back of the house, and the bathroom drain (for shower water) is literally just a hole at the bottom of the wall. So this water drains out of everyone's house on the block and collects in a ditch that runs along the back of everyone's property. It's not really angled from what I can tell, so the water just tends to sit there and look horrible.
Upstairs is really the selling point of the house. It's two big, open rooms with actual closets and tons of windows. The entire wall is all windows, more or less. So it's very breezy and light up there, which really helps accent the hard wood floors. That's right, hard wood floors. How cool is that? The house also happens to be in a very nice part of town that has cute little streets with lots of families and people out in the street at night, hanging out. It's also a 10 minute walk to my work and a 5 minute walk to abby's work, so we won't have to spend a bunch of money taking the tricycles back and forth. And, there's a sweet bar right down the street. So all in all we're very excited. We've been shopping for things for the house, but had to go to Batangas across the bay to get some things for cheaper. We have all the basics now, plates and cups, a pot and a pan, buckets for showering, tubs for washing clothes, a double burner... We also bought a sofa set that's a sofa, two armchairs and two tables. It's not really a sofa though, maybe calling it a futon that doesn't fold down would be a better description. The tables will come in handy because now we have somewhere to eat. We're also getting a fridge because we can afford one here. The funny thing about the Peace Corps is that we make a decent amount by filipino standards. A while ago I was reading our provincial profile at work and they had the households divided up into tiers based on their annual income. The top bracket was P500,000+ a year ($10,000), the second bracket was P250,000-500,000, which is where we fall. So even as volunteers we make more than about %85 of the population on our island. An interesting side note to that is that the average annual income of a family of 8 here on Oriental Mindoro is p88,000 ($1,690). Things are cheap here, but not THAT cheap.
This week I went with 8 of my coworkers (all in the same car) down to Bulalacao, which is our southern-most municipality. It's not too far distance-wise, but it takes forever to get there, partly because the last 30km takes 2 hours to travel. We have a pretty nice main 2 lane highway here, because a while ago the national government decided to make Oriental Mindoro an alternate route down to the Visayas. However, once you pass the town of Roxas, where the port is, they didn't feel like putting any more money into the project, so it peeters out into a rocky mud pit. It's beautiful country down there though, kind of like a tropical Scottish highlands with mist covered green hills and a lush carpeting of rice fields. It is also home to a lot of the indigenous Mangyans and the worst poverty on the island. It's where you get down to ramshackle bamboo huts and no electricity or water. Bulalacao is a fairly nondescript, sleepy little town with great fish. If you're into eating endangered fish you can get some yellow fin tuna down there for about $1.50 a kilo. We went down there to have a meeting with some fisherman, but it was mostly an excuse for all of us to go somewhere and hang out, which was fine with me. I'm slowly accepting the pace of work here, which is good for me because I feel less bored and annoyed. My job continues to be my one sticking point, but things are happening and I guess that why we're here for 2 years: because it takes 6 months to even begin to start to think about doing something!
Upstairs is really the selling point of the house. It's two big, open rooms with actual closets and tons of windows. The entire wall is all windows, more or less. So it's very breezy and light up there, which really helps accent the hard wood floors. That's right, hard wood floors. How cool is that? The house also happens to be in a very nice part of town that has cute little streets with lots of families and people out in the street at night, hanging out. It's also a 10 minute walk to my work and a 5 minute walk to abby's work, so we won't have to spend a bunch of money taking the tricycles back and forth. And, there's a sweet bar right down the street. So all in all we're very excited. We've been shopping for things for the house, but had to go to Batangas across the bay to get some things for cheaper. We have all the basics now, plates and cups, a pot and a pan, buckets for showering, tubs for washing clothes, a double burner... We also bought a sofa set that's a sofa, two armchairs and two tables. It's not really a sofa though, maybe calling it a futon that doesn't fold down would be a better description. The tables will come in handy because now we have somewhere to eat. We're also getting a fridge because we can afford one here. The funny thing about the Peace Corps is that we make a decent amount by filipino standards. A while ago I was reading our provincial profile at work and they had the households divided up into tiers based on their annual income. The top bracket was P500,000+ a year ($10,000), the second bracket was P250,000-500,000, which is where we fall. So even as volunteers we make more than about %85 of the population on our island. An interesting side note to that is that the average annual income of a family of 8 here on Oriental Mindoro is p88,000 ($1,690). Things are cheap here, but not THAT cheap.
This week I went with 8 of my coworkers (all in the same car) down to Bulalacao, which is our southern-most municipality. It's not too far distance-wise, but it takes forever to get there, partly because the last 30km takes 2 hours to travel. We have a pretty nice main 2 lane highway here, because a while ago the national government decided to make Oriental Mindoro an alternate route down to the Visayas. However, once you pass the town of Roxas, where the port is, they didn't feel like putting any more money into the project, so it peeters out into a rocky mud pit. It's beautiful country down there though, kind of like a tropical Scottish highlands with mist covered green hills and a lush carpeting of rice fields. It is also home to a lot of the indigenous Mangyans and the worst poverty on the island. It's where you get down to ramshackle bamboo huts and no electricity or water. Bulalacao is a fairly nondescript, sleepy little town with great fish. If you're into eating endangered fish you can get some yellow fin tuna down there for about $1.50 a kilo. We went down there to have a meeting with some fisherman, but it was mostly an excuse for all of us to go somewhere and hang out, which was fine with me. I'm slowly accepting the pace of work here, which is good for me because I feel less bored and annoyed. My job continues to be my one sticking point, but things are happening and I guess that why we're here for 2 years: because it takes 6 months to even begin to start to think about doing something!
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