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.

Goodbye!

My host siblings, Rachel and Ryan, have now left to move back to Manila for work. Here is the four of us. Elvin, Rachel, Me, and Ryan.  

My Bike

Here's my bike. It's a little BMX bike. I took it for a spin around the neighborhood, and it is fine. I don't think it will really hold together for 2 years on these rough roads, but we'll see. So far I haven't ridden it anywhere, but my host dad thinks that this Saturday I will be getting up at 5:30 and taking a long ride along the coast. I tried to tell him how out of shape I am, and physical activity in this climate is hard on me, but I don't think I convinced him.

Weekly Theme

We have weekly themes at school, which as far as i can tell, are just bulletin boards put together by the teachers, and don't really have anything to do with the lessons of the week or activities. Aug 7-13, as you can see, was family planning week. They have this bulletin board out in the main school yard. The Philippines is in a big push for family planning, because, like many developing countries, the parents have more kids than they can feed. It's hard to see in the picture, but there are 5 or 6 kids and only one fish, and one of the little girls is crying cause she's hungry. Although it seems a bit strange to see these at an elementary school, nobody else is bothered by them, and the message is important. Oh, and in case you're wondering, this past week was Coconut Week. Not sure what the message is there. Eat coconuts, i guess. I saw a sticker at a store the other day, on the credit card machine, that said 'Buy Things'. Sometimes I guess the most straightforward approach is best.

Frisbee kids

Last weekend, our cluster site group (Erin, Anna, Allan, Ross, Tim, and I) went home to our trainins host families. Here's some pictures of the kids playing frisbee. It's so nice to spread the culture of frisbee to other countries. Pok was pretty good with it too, and he's only 4!

Birthday Blowout

If I thought my birthday this year would be no big deal (and I did), I was very much mistaken. My host family and co-teachers and principal made my birthday a big deal. They threw me the first surprise party I’ve ever had! I’ve mentioned before that birthdays here mean you cook for everyone. So I agreed to make a big batch of mashed potatoes and take it to school for the teachers to try after school on my birthday. I labored all afternoon in the hot kitchen making mashed potatoes, showered, and headed to school. What I was expecting was my big empty library, a table with plates and spoons, the bowl of mashed potatoes, and a basket of sweet rolls I picked up at the bakery. When I arrived at school, however, the teachers had decorated in Filipino birthday style, which includes a centerpiece, and ‘Happy 25th Birthday Laura” on the wall. They even got me a cake. The thing that made me laugh was that they picked pink everything - especially for me, because ‘that’s how much we like you!’ If they really knew me, they would know pink is my un-favorite color. But it was a really nice little set up. And they brought some more food so people wouldn’t have to rely on just my mashed potatoes. Which I think I can know say are world-renowned.

The amazing thing was the words on the wall were hand-cut by one of the teachers. I thought, ‘so that’s what my name is supposed to look like in cursive!’ and she CUT that out of paper! So the food was all set up, and we were just waiting to get rid of the students. At the end of school everyday, all the classes line up in the courtyard for Flag Retreat. They sing the national anthem. Well, today, after singing the national anthem, the directing teacher said ‘left face turn!’ and all 1,100 students were facing me, where I was standing in the door of the library. And they sang Happy Birthday to me. I was so embarrassed, I forgot to take a picture, but it was certainly something I won’t forget. Can you imagine, that many school kids singing you happy birthday?
The students were dismissed, and the teachers gathered in the library. First, my principal, Mr. Oberes had some remarks. They were mostly about how birthdays were a celebration of God creating us, and how they didn’t have time to prepare a proper party for me. Apparently a properly planned party would have included a dance number or two, firecrackers, and singing. When he was finished, he called me to the mike for my response. Response!? I am so not a public speaker. I don’t do well when I have everything written down to read off of. So I got up and said how surprised I was (which was true!) and thanked everyone. I thought I was done, but one of the teachers shouted ‘more!’ so I said how even back at home I wouldn’t have had this big of a party (also true! And fine by me!) and I asked everyone to enjoy the food. Then Mr. Oberes said a prayer.
We didn’t get to eat yet. First they sang Happy Birthday again, which goes like this in the Philippines:
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday,
Happy Birthday to Laura

Yes, it sounds as funny as it looks. At least to my ear.
The teachers had pitched on a couple of presents for me, and wanted me to open them right then. They told me you have to rip the paper off to bring good luck. I was worried, opening the presents, because I’ve gotten the impression that most gifts here are chintzy, useless, and/or tacky. But they got me 2 things I actually like and wanted! I was very amazed. They got me a Philippines flag, and a lamp made out of a conch shell. I can’t believe they got me the lamp, I have wanted to get one because all the lights here are fluorescent and that kind of overhead light drives me nuts. I’m a big lamp person. I love lamp. But I never said anything about it to anyone. So the presents were really nice.
Finally we could eat. And I made sure they cut into the cake, so I didn’t have to take home a whole cake just for myself. Everyone seemed to enjoy the food, and I had to take pictures with everybody who came, and then the party was over and we got to go home. I was pretty tired.
But too bad! Because at home was an extension of the party. Another pink cake, more food, but thankfully, no presents. This cake I managed to get Ryan to help me eat some of, but my host mom said it’s just for me, and I will eat cake everyday until it’s gone. Let THEM eat cake, I say. Har har. Sorry.
One birthday tradition I learned about too late is that you should wear red on your birthday for good luck. But I got noodles for long life, and cake so I can be sweet. I suspect Ryan is making up the sweet tradition, but whatever.
So it was a very memorable birthday, and quite excessive. But the whole time, everyone was saying it was a simple birthday, and they were sorry, and it would have been better if they had more time to plan. I’m just thankful they didn’t have more time to plan, or it would have been way over the top.

The pictures are having a hard time uploading, I'll post them next week when I'm at a different computer.

I barely escaped with my life!

It was an eventful and traumatic Saturday here in Cadiz City. It started out innocently enough, playing scrabble with Ryan, waiting for the power to come back on. Then, walking through my room, I swiped my foot against the bed, and a deadly splinter got lodged deep under the toenail of my baby toe. My host brother Elvin is a nurse, so he looked at it for me, and him and my host mother decided I had to go to the emergency clinic, since we couldn’t remove it ourselves. We dashed to the clinic a mere 8 hours after the terrible incident. Walking into the emergency clinic made me a bit nervous, especially at the first mention of an injection, and the not-entirely-sterile conditions of the room. There were five beautiful young Filipina nurses waiting to greet me, and they asked me to sit at the doctor’s desk while they prepared the instruments of torture. The doctor quoted English poetry to me, Whitman and Emerson, and was most offended that I wasn’t familiar with Thomas Grey, a contemporary of Shakespeare! And Keats! I covered up for my ignorance by saying I was more familiar with American poetry. He showed me a book of poems by a local author and encouraged me to meet him. The last place I expected to meet a soft-spoken poet was in a free clinic in the Phlippines. I have never been so glad that this country speaks English, though, when the Dr. Homer (really his name!) told me they would give me one injection for the pain, and one for tetanus. I was able to quickly tell him that I was totally current on my tetanus shots, and I really really didn’t need one. (Some of you may not be aware that I am a huge baby about getting shots. Well, now you know. Yes, I cry like the little girl that I am whenever I have to get one.) After a bit more poetry, they put me up on a table and I stuck my foot out and never looked at it again. One of the 18-year old nurses came over to talk to me and distract me, and she did a pretty good job. I experienced two moments of awful pain, which I assume were the injection and the removal of the ‘foreign body’ from my toe. They wrapped my baby toe up in gauze, and I put my flip flops back on, and we were on our way back home.

Yum

Every month has a theme, set forth by the National Department of Education, and every school in the country follows it. This month was health and nutrition month, and so every Friday, the students cook a dish for themselves. Here’s some kids in the schoolyard cooking. They have very little supervision, because they all know how to cook. The teachers mostly just sit back and watch and chat with each other. They use wood to make the fire, and so every Friday it smells like camping at school and it makes me want to go camping. I asked one of the teacher what the theme for August was, and he said ‘language’. I thought, great! I can put together language activities, and do projects with the kids! A perfect theme for me! Then he said, ‘Yes, the whole month, the students try to speak nothing but Tagalog.’ Sigh.

What do you see?

I got my first few picture books from my aunt and my mom. I started doing storytime with the younger grades right away. Brown Bear, Brown Bear is a big hit. The kids are very quick about participating in the story. They know all the animals except ‘Sheep’ so when we get to that page, only 2 or 3 kids are able to tell what the name of the animal is. I’m going to work up some lesson plans around the book to give to the teachers, so the kids will become pretty familiar with it. I’ve been trying to find story books to make available to the teachers, so I went to the public library and checked out 2 of the very few suitable books and let them circulate around the 1^st grade. But they only let me check out books for 5 days, and only 3 at a time! And the public library has so few picture books available anyway. Still, it’s better than our library, which has no picture books, and when we get them, you will only be able to check out one book at a time, for one day at a time. That’s the decision the library committee agreed on.

Shindig

Last Sunday was my host parent’s anniversary, so the whole family came over for a big lunch. As far as Filipino families go, theirs didn’t seem that big; Eley family get-togethers have more people at them. But there was tons of food! The only person in this picture that I really know is the girl at the end of the table, that’s my host sister, Rachel. If you’re interested in the food we’re eating, I’ll tell you what each thing is, starting at the top. You can hardly see it, but there’s a tray of ‘barbeque’, which is grilled pork on skewers. It tastes really good, but more than half of it is pure fat, so I have a really hard time eating it. Next are two chickens stuffed with lemongrass and seasonings. In the white bowl is the rice. On the tray is lumpya, fried lumpya on the left, fresh lumpya on the right. Lumpya are basically egg rolls. They’re pretty tasty. Then there’s a bowl of some variety of sud-an. Sud-an is the general term for the food that goes with the rice. I’m sure this dish has it’s own name, but I don’t know what it is. To the left is the spaghetti that is prepared for every special occasion here. I don’t know what the origin of special-occasion spaghetti is, but I’m willing to bet it has to do with American troops that used to be here. The Filipinos have adapted it though, so the sauce is much sweeter than the sauce we’re used to. I can eat it, but it’s not very good. Most of the other Peace Corps Volunteers can’t stand it.

Not just a cultural difference...

"Unlike the rain in America, the rain here will give you a head cold if it's gets on your head. That's why we always carry umbrellas, and the Amerians always roam around letting the rain get on their heads!"

This is one of the explanations I was recently given after being scolded for being in the (barely sprinkling!) rain without an umbrella.

library club and great quote

The library club is going okay. I thought I had a good counterpart for that, Mrs. Abong asked if she could help because she loves the library and would love to be part of the library club. Great! She decided we should have library club meetings on Fridays after school, and I couldn’t convince her to change the day. But she never comes to the meetings! Last week’s meeting I had to start on my own and conducted it by myself for about 20 minutes. It was fine, but probably would have gone smoother with someone there who speaks Ilonggo better than me. Well by the time my other counterpart showed up, everything was going great, and I had the kids split into three groups making posters of the rules to put up in the library. The teacher comes in and starts yelling at the kids (this is not unusual. The teachers yell a lot.) and tells them that for next week’s meeting, they need to bring in labels for the shelves, and telling them to hurry up with the posters, etc. After she left, the kids asked me what they were supposed to bring to label the shelves, and of course I had no idea, and no intention of labeling shelves yet. So I told them not to worry about it.

Also, this quote is posted on the wall of one the classrooms: “Don’t let the school stand on the day of your education.” Something tells me the teacher misread and clearly didn’t understand the original quote.

Here are two pictures of two little boys who came in and enjoyed the library, and actually were using it to look at books instead of at me.

Hair

Here is Ryan, my older host brother. He said to call him 'Kuya' which means older brother. He calls me 'sis'. But I just call him Ryan. He shaved his haid the next day after I took this picture, he said his mom and his aunt ganged up on him and made him cut it. HMM sound like anyone we know?

Tuesday, in the park, and it was the 4th of July

As chance would have it, July 4th was Cadiz City Charter Day, which meant big holiday with no school, and lots of activities. Unfortunately, it wasn't nearly as fun as our Independence Day and probably a lot hotter.

First thing, at 8am, me and my co-teachers, along with most of the local civic groups met in the park for an outdoor mass and the unveiling of the new Rizal statue. Rizal is the national hero of the Philippines. They set off firecrackers and released some doves at the unveiling, so I pretended they were big fireworks. They smelled like it! After that, we went across the street to hear the dedication of the new school building for Cadiz East II elementary. They are very creative in naming their schools here. The new building is super nice, I wish we had one. Finally about 10:30, we went home.

The worst part of the day was the afternoon parade. Parades here are, in my opinion, masochistic and pointless. I have now walked in two of them. Ours was held at 1:30pm, and it was even hotter than usual, with the barometer falling. It was oppressive. I don't know why anyone bothers to watch these parades. The only things worth seeing in ours was the high school marching band and the white girl walking with the teachers. Everything else in the parade is just different groups walking togeter, carrying their banners. No floats, buskers, bands, anything like that. We walked forever, and then the teachers decided to take a shortcut back to the park, so we didn't actually do the whole parade route, which was fine by me.

After the parade, we went to a fellow teacher's house for her daughter's birthday, which just happened to be that day. All I will say about the party is that it was not fun and the delicious looking cake was not eaten, it was just displayed then put away. I can tell you about Filipino birthday parties some other time.

Finally we went home. But the day wasn't over. About 9pm I went with my host brother, Elvin, and his friends to the 'disco'. They are also big on discos here, but I really don't get them. Usually discos are a big sound system and a DJ set up on a basketball court and it generally resembles a middle school dance. This time was much bigger, since it was the whole city, and they actually had a live band, which was cool. But we just stood there in the city gym (outdoors...but with a roof) and watched the band play covers of American pop music and popular Pinoy (Filipino) songs. When the second band came out, Elvin's friends ran into another friend, who took us 'backstage'. Remember this is the city gym. We slipped through a gap in the fence surrounding the stage, and then we were about 10 feet from the band. We had an okay time listening to the music and dancing a little. I went home way too late, and had to teach a class at 8am. But i didn't mind. They say making friends is the most important thing a PCV in the Philippines can do.

Uniforms

Charter Day here in Cadiz saw everyone get decked out in their uniforms. And everyone seems to have a uniform.

We have my host father, who is somebody important in the Knights of Columbus organization. I'm not sure what that is, but I think it's some kind of civic service group.

Then there's my principal, Sir Boy, in his Boy Scout Uniform. He's a pack leader or something.
We have a group of girl scouts in matching uniforms, and the high school marching band.

And last is my co-teachers. They have different uniforms for every day of the week. Almost all teachers and government employees have uniforms. They offered to get me some, but I said no thanks.

Festival

Okay my city has been gearing up for our charter day festival for almost a month. Here are some of the things that have sprung up around town. Along my street, people came and set up booths filled with crap to buy. Most of the crap is really crap, like stuff you'd buy at the dollar store. A lot of it is clothing. Here is my host mother bargaining down the price of a pair of pants for me.

Another type of booth set up is called ukay-ukay, and this is found all over the Philippines. It is second hand clothing that sells for really cheap. The problem is, I've heard, that the clothing comes from the U.S., Japan, and other places as relief goods for very poor people. But somehow it ends up in the hands of vendors. It's still really cheap, but I guess it's supposed to be free for some people. Well, here is a pile of ukay-ukay clothes, 10 pesos for any item. (about 19 cents).

There was a Ferris Wheel, which I went on. It was fun, but a little scary. No, I'm not scared of heights, but I am scared of rickety, acient ferris wheels in the Philippines. But I am still alive, and it didn't fall off it's axle.

The most incredible thing that came to town was the portable McDonalds. Two trucks pull up and park, and there you have a McDonalds. They only had about 5 menu items, but it was a big deal in town. I got an ice cream there one day.

Buhok = Hair in Ilonggo

This is a picture of one of the girls in first grade.

I got my first haircut in a Filipino salon! All through training I was fortunate to have a former hairstylist in my group, so I got free haircuts. The salon I went to yesterday was fine, and I never really care much about how my hair is cut as long as it's shorter. Which it is now. And the haircut cost less than $1!