Fun Things!

This weekend was Ben’s birthday, so Tim, Ben, me, and a few of Ben’s Filipino friends went to Bacolod Saturday and Sunday. Here’s the funnest thing. I bought SIXTEEN movies for $4. They are so cool, they come in from China, and they are 8-in-1 DVDs for $2 (100 pesos). So I bought two. Here’s the movies I got: Back to the Future 1-3, Freaky Friday, Chicago, American Dreamz, Pret A Porter, Millions, High School Musical, and some other ones. Actually I really only got 15 movies cause American Dreamz is on both discs. They aren’t top quality, like real DVDs, but they do have menus and were not shot in a movie theater, and come in real packaging. They are probably illegally imported from China, but they are awesome. So are the movie descriptions. Here’s the description, verbatim, for Back to the Future: “Dawn with a time machine back to the strange Boshibulang 1955, after a series of thrilling experiences, the two finally returned to 1985. However, the calm Not long after, strange and sudden Dr. entered the dawn of life, as he once again time to travel to the future and found some strange things might jeopardize the dawn of the next child, in order to ensure the future of Matignon family, and he and Dr. strange time again onto the shuttle machines to 2015.” Wow, sounds compelling, no?
A little thing but it’s fun, and fun things make me happy: I went to buy more minutes for my cell phone, and they had a bunch of phone covers for sale. I asked if they had any for my phone, which is kind of an older, cheap-o model. The lady looked apologetic, and said, ‘all we have is Dora the explorer.’ Perfect!! I love Dora! So now I have a super fun phone cover.
So that was awesome. Saturday night we went out, and first we got Pizza, which is great just in itself, cause I love pizza, and it’s not exactly available everywhere here. We got the giant party pizza, it is 30 inches across!! We couldn’t finish it. Not even close. After that we went to videoke, which is actually way more entertaining than karaoke is in the states, I think. I even did a rousing rendition of “I want to break free” by Queen, and we were all jumping up and dancing around, cause everyone secretly just wants to break free. I also got a perfect 100 score on ‘Pinoy Ako’. Everyone was impressed, because that is a Tagalog song. That was fun. I also played a round of pool with one of the Filipinos, and almost beat him. Really. I only had one ball left, and he had three, but then he got them all in and the 8 ball. But I was close.
Another fun thing is that I’ve started buying stuff for my house, with my host mother’s help. I bought a bucket and dipper (very essential), and a rice pot (also very essential.) I was going to buy the smallest rice pot, but my host mom said, what if Tim comes over to eat, you should buy the next biggest one. Tim can put away the rice. I got some pillows, and an electric water heater. The furniture could be a bit of a issue, but I do have a bed, so that’s the most important thing. Also fun is that they tiled my bathroom, before it was just a nasty concrete floor! Seriously, having a tiled bathroom floor is just so incredibly awesome, I can’t begin to tell you.
One more fun thing is this fruit called rambutan. I don’t think they are available in the states, but here they grow on trees all over the place. They are funny looking fruit, and taste sweet. We got a bunch for free cause they are in season now. I like them. They are funny looking but nice tasting.

PST2

I recently returned from a week and a half trip to Manila. All BETA (Education) and CYF (social work) volunteers were brought to a training facility near Manila for our Pre-service Training part II. Part I being language and culture at our hub sites. This was intended to be more technical and sector specific.

I went a couple days early to hang out with other volunteers I haven’t seen in months, and see what Manila was like. One of my friends from college, Ed, is a Filipino who lives in Manila, and he took me and my friends, Aaron and Erin (easy to learn their names!) out to dinner in the fancy part of town.

Basically Manila is a big city. Like most Filipino cities, the major attractions are all malls. I saw at least 7 of them in a 2-day stretch. Pathetic, I know, especially since Manila actually does have some cultural attractions, museums, and stuff. Oh well. One place we visited was the Mall of Asia, allegedly the largest mall in Asia. I was dying to go there to visit the ice skating rink. We walked up to the rink, and just when we arrived, a wonderful thing happened: it started to snow! Some man-made snowflakes came shooting out of the ceiling onto the skaters. It was fantastic. After that we got Mexican food, which all of us have been craving. Burritos oozing with cheese are just not available here. The Mexican food was great.

The only other thing of note that I did in Manila was get a bagel with cream cheese. You can see how most of my memories involve food. It’s not uncommon.

We all spent Monday through Saturday in grueling, all-day training sessions. 8am to 7pm. Grueling is really just another word for boring. Some of the sessions were useful, and some were interesting, but most were boring. Our main project of the week was to teach a real workshop to real teachers at a real school at the end of the week. We were split into groups, and the elementary education group did a killer job. There are only 5 elementary volunteers in my batch. Me and Ryann and Scott are all from Western Visayas, and know each other well. Vanessa is in the Bicol region of Luzon, and I had been in contact with her throughout training and at site. The only new person to me was Keith, whose site is about 2 hours from Manila. He’s a trained TOEFL teacher, so he knows what he’s doing. We taught about 20 teachers some new methods in teaching reading. It went well, and the teachers enjoyed it and claim they will use some of the methods in their own classes.

If nothing else, training gave me a little shot of confidence to start getting some real work done at site in terms of giving workshops and things. I also facilitated a session on classroom management, since in the Philippines, classroom management is usually whacking a stick against the board to get student’s attention. Many of the other education volunteers are not teachers in real life, so I was able to give them a couple of suggestions for getting groups of people to settle down. Yay me.

I also got chosen to help facilitate a teacher training in mid-October in Bohol. They asked me, Scott Farver, and Eli Heller, all of us Western Visayas people. I have to say, our hub (western visayas) is way awesomer than any of the other hubs. The other places have some real soplado people in them. (Soplado means snobby. It’s quite an insult here.) So Scott, Eli, and I, along with three education volunteers from the batch before us, got together with a woman from UNICEF, who is paying for the training, and worked out what we’ll be doing. It’s kind of cool to be doing something special like this. Especially because I came back to site and told my principal I was ready to do some workshops and he declined my offer. Oh well.

The nights were pretty fun during training. We had a large group from Western Visayas there, (9 of us) so we got back into our routine of nightly game playing. The other volunteers there who weren’t too soplado joined us, and some nights there were 30 people playing games. Whoo!

I flew back to Bacolod on Monday afternoon. Everything was fine, except the baggage claim in Bacolod is insanity. There’s basically a corner of a concrete room fenced off. Guys haul in by hand all the bags, and people shout and point until they collect all their bags. It’s actually fairly civilized on the passenger’s side, not much shoving or anything, but still. There’s got to be a better way.

more pictures from bohol

Here's some more pictures from our trip. Here you can see the outrageous entrance fee to the national park. It probably wasn't any good anyway.

There is Anna and Erin and I in front of some of the chocolate hills. There are hills that are more spectacular than that, but they were still not quite worth all the hype.
















That building way down there? That was Nuts Huts. We took this from up the mountain on the other side of the river, high up. By the way, the picture in the other post with a tiny house you can barely see up the mountain? That was halfway to the caves. we were very exhausted.



Erin and Anna are hanging out on the porch of our bungalow at Nuts Huts. Cool place, no?




And then Erin and Anna are with their guitars that they got custom built for them.

Bohol!

This weekend I took a trip to the island of Bohol with my best PC buddies, Erin and Anna. We did a lot of fun things, and had a great time. Here’s the highlights. We stayed in a place called Nuts Huts, which is a very hip, very eco-centered place. It’s built on the mountainside along the Loboc river. You can either take a boat upstream from the town of Loboc to reach it, or hike in from the national highway. We took a boat in. The main room (restaurant, lobby, hangout) is about 100 steps up from the river. And about 100 steps down from the highway. The bungalows are along the river, but all of them are raised up on the mountain, so you have to climb a ladder to get to your room. It’s a really cool place, but if you weren’t expecting a workout before and after every meal, it might not be the best place to stay.

We visited the Chocolate Hills, which are basically a bunch of small hills that rise up from the perfectly flat land in a series of bumps. It’s not that remarkable, but it’s a big tourist spot.

We tried to visit the National Park nearby, but while the entrance fee for adults was 8 pesos, for non-citizens it was 100 pesos. If we didn’t know we were being ripped off, we would have probably paid it, but even when I talked the gate guard down to 200 pesos for all three of us, we still felt we were being overcharged, so didn’t go in.

We hired a local guy, Joseph to take us up the river to the waterfalls in his boat. We thought it would be a nice relaxing afternoon ride. We were wrong. Joseph ‘docked’ the boat on some rocks (I really didn’t think he saw them, the way we crashed into them) and took us on a hike along the river that made me feel like I should be in an REI catalog. It was very intense, and if you slipped, you would probably fall 30 feet into the river. Joseph did it barefoot, just running along like we were on a sidewalk. It was neat though, lots of climbing up rocks and on tree roots until we got to the top of the waterfalls. After we were filthy and sweaty, Joseph led us back to the boat and Erin and Anna took a swim, and got a ‘hydro massage’ from the waterfalls.

The next morning we thought we would do the ‘exciting cave hike just across the river’ advertised in the Nuts Huts main room. Joseph came and picked us up in a tiny tiny boat. We couldn’t all fit in it at once, so he took me and Anna across the river and went back for Erin. Joseph points up the mountain and tells us the cave is up there. Then he starts zooming up an almost vertical narrow pathway. Also it is covered in wet leaves, this being the rainforest. After about 20 minutes of this, when all three of us thought we couldn’t go another step, and Joseph was walking along while weaving a basked and telling us stories, we took a break in a clearing where some local men had been gathering firewood. While the three of us gasped and tried to find a single dry spot anywhere on our clothes that we could wipe our face with, Joseph started chopping wood. I’m not kidding. We asked him how much farther, and he said we were almost there, and there was no more straight vertical like that. We believed him. After another 15 minutes or so (and it wasn’t as bad as the first part) we reached his brothers house. From his brother’s house, we could see our bungalow, hundreds of feet below. We rested at his brother’s house for a bit. When Joseph said we were halfway to the cave, Erin, who wasn’t feeling well even before we left, decided to wait for us at the house. Joseph and Anna and I trooped on. More intense hiking, and we were over the top of the mountain and finally, to the cave. The first cave we went through was small, and there was a family gathering bat guano to use as fertilizer. One of the neat things about this trip was how authentic it was. Joseph taught us about local plants and their uses, he told us about the livelihoods and history of the people of his village, and we ran into people really doing things, like gathering guano. We continued on to a second cave, where Joseph told us people hid from the Japanese during WWII. All I could think was that they must have been pretty safe, because who in their right minds would go through all that work we just went through to find some poor Filipino peasants. At times Joseph was actually using a machete to clear away plants from the path.

The caves weren’t that amazing, compared to some National Parks caves we’ve been to, but they were still neat to see, and you could touch anything and walk wherever you wanted. After the caves, we began our descent. Joseph left me and Anna at one point to go and fetch Erin, then the four of us continued down the mountain. At times we were worried about falling head first down the side, but we didn’t. Back at river level, we walked along the path that the villagers take everyday to the market, and headed back upstream to where we’d started. We passed kids playing in the river, women hanging up laundry, people doing their daily activities. It was a really neat hike, and both Anna and I had been wanting to do a hike like that since we arrived – but we were definitely not prepared for such a hike to take place that day. We had no idea what we were getting into when we decided to ‘explore the caves’. Back at our bungalow, we took showers and hung our sweat-drenched clothes out to dry. None of us could imagine climbing the steps again, our legs were like jello. But we had to check out. We asked Joseph to come in his boat and take us to town on the river because we were not going to be able to climb 200 stairs up to the highway.

The town’s river landing is also a tarsier viewing spot, and we stopped to see the tarsiers. Tarsiers are the smallest primates in the world. They are about the size of my hand. They look kind of like gremlins, and have huge eyes. After the tarsiers, we got a jeepney back to the capital of Bohol, Tagbilaran. We got lunch, and even though we were exhausted, we went to pick up Erin and Anna’s custom-ordered guitars. We hung out at the guitar workshop for a while, then went to a pension for the night. The girls had bought me a harmonica so the three of us could jam once they got their guitars. We had a fun night.

The next morning we took a ferry back to Cebu, and the girls got on their flight to Iloilo. I had 5 hours to kill until my bus left, so I went to the mall and saw a Filipino movie called You Are The One. It was great. If you can get your hands on it, and if it has subtitles, you should watch it. It’s a cheesy love story, but explains a lot about Filipino culture, and it was cute.

I got back to Cadiz about 9:30 and went to bed. It was an excellent trip.