Since I was here just a few months ago, there has been a lot of construction going on in the area of the hotel where I stay. One of the new arrivals is a McDonalds. It’s in a small facility that houses several other fast food restaurants as well as a 7-11 store. While the McDonalds is interesting, the 7-11 is delightful as that store has a good array of soda, cookies, and candy. Note the row of motorcycles. McDonalds delivers! Place a call, or even just send a text message, and they deliver to your door. I haven’t had the courage to have them deliver to my hotel room, though.

It’s been a very quiet Saturday. I spent a couple of hours at the Festival Mall and took some video with my little Sony point-and-shoot camera which I intend to put up on YouTube when I get back home at the end of the week. People might find it interesting to see what a mall experience in the Philippines is like. I’ve also had time today to read through several newspapers. A newspaper shows up in front of the door of my hotel room every morning just before I leave for the day, so I don’t have time to look at it. I had time to look through them today. And, of course, I have a few observations.

1. It’s election time in the Philippines. I think the elections are next month in late May and electioneering is in full swing here in the Philippines. The newspapers are quite full of different ways that the government is spending tax dollars in an effort to win votes for the upcoming election. The newspapers are quite gleefully publicizing all of the pork projects that are going on and the associated graft and corruption. However, talking to the people I work with here in Manila, they all agree that it doesn’t matter much who gets elected as nothing will change. As one colleague put it, “bad grass never dies”.
2. The traffic seems to be getting worse and the roads along with it. I had some meetings in downtown Manila in Quezon City on Friday. Getting to and from the hotel was quite miserable for a trip of about fifteen miles. We needed an hour and a half to get there and two and a half to get back. In an effort to reduce congestion at major intersections, several of them have been dismantled and blocked. The cross street no longer goes across. The driver has to make a right turn, go several hundred yards to a U-turn, come back the other way, and make a right turn to continue. That, of course, has only changed the problem rather than solving the problem. The solution set includes (a) significant road and infrastructure investment, (b) a good public transportation system, and (c) taxing vehicles off the road by charging tolls to enter downtown. I expect if I were to come back in 5 years, I would see no improvement but rather a significant degradation.
3. It is noisy in Manila. I think I’ve said this before, but everything is noisy. The vehicles are noisy. The traffic is noisy. Stores play very loud music. Malls play very loud music. People talk loudly (probably to be heard over all the noise).
4. The Bellevue Hotel has gone into cost cutting mode. There’s a whole bunch of little things that are different. For instance, all the light bulbs have been replaced with much lower output florescent bulbs. Now the rooms are dimly lit at night. Today at the mall I bought a couple of higher-output florescent bulbs for my room. It’s amazing the difference that a little light makes. On the other hand, the somewhat threadbare carpet is more visible!
5. There is construction going on all around the hotel. In addition, the hotel has started building a second tower to double the capacity of the hotel. There seems to be a lot of people staying here, so I expect that the hotel is fairly full. Maybe the cost cutting is to help pay for the new construction? Most of the new construction is for call centers. Three new ones are being built across the street. Convergys was already here. HSBC (a bank) has a big call center in operation here. So does General Electric — in a new building that was just beginning construction the last time I was here. The call center business is growing rapidly here. Because of some pictures of Convergys that I took a couple of years ago, I’ve met a person who works at Convergys across the street from the Hotel. Elreen provides Sprint customer services, working from 3 a.m. in the morning until noon so that the US afternoon and evening hours are covered. I can understand why customer support would be coming from the Philippines because the Filipinos want to be very helpful, are very polite and soft spoken, are well educated, and the labor rates are much lower here. Much of this customer support work is migrating from India to the Philippines because of the Filipino personality and the bill collection work is migrating to India because of the insistent nature of the Indians.
6. For some reason, the Philippine Peso is going up in value to the US dollar. It had increased from 52 pesos to the dollar the last time I was here last fall to 47 to the dollar now, almost a 10% change. It is unclear to me why this big change in value, particularly for a currency that is not very convertible. Most banks outside of the Philippines will not take or convert the Philippine Peso for some reason.
7. The air is quite a bit cleaner than the last time I was here. I don’t think it’s because anything extraordinary has happened; probably the wind patterns this time of the year blows the pollution away better than in other times. There are a number of high mountains to the south of town that normally aren’t visible through the smoke and haze, but they have been all week this week. I like the cleaner air!
8. There is a lot of health-related advertising here. Big signs proclaiming ways to manage blood sugar. Big signs advertising milk supplements for children to bring out the “gift in the child”. Big signs advertising nutrition products. These campaigns must work. Every Filipino I know carries a toothbrush with them and they brush their teeth faithfully after eating. It’s almost a ritual thing … everyone heads for the restroom after a meal to brush their teeth. Nothing bad about that; it’s just different.

There are probably more, but that’s enough for now. The trip is more than half over. Next Friday morning I’ll be on an airplane flying back to Pocatello and to my own world. It’s been fun getting another glimpse of the world from a Philippine perspective.

The invitation from a compatriot here in Manila was for a “unique farmhouse luncheon”. Of course, that deserved acceptance. It was indeed unique. The farm was only a short distance from the entrance to the Industrial Park where our plant is located. It was indeed a farm, although it didn’t seem to be very busy. We drove past horses, goats, and lots and lots of gamecocks. A big business in the Philippines is raising fighting roosters. Apparently on this farm it is also a big business. The main farm house buildings were lovely. They have a large swimming pool, several buildings connected by walkways and pathways, and a large recreation area. The owner opened up one of the buildings a few years ago as a place for a pleasant, peaceful lunch. Eating is by reservation only and only in small groups — 2-8 people. The menu is fixed in advance (and doesn’t have a lot of variety). There are a couple of waiters in the dining room, otherwise no one is around. It was very pleasant.

The menu today consisted of a light coconut juice drink, a very nice salad, followed by a seafood pasta, then pork, rice, various squashes, and a light cookie (with green tea for those interested) for desert.  The place isn’t air conditioned, but the weather in Manila right now is very nice. I’d guess the temperatures were in the low 80’s with a light breeze and low humidity. It was very nice to be out of my too-cold office in the plant! The only noise was the crowing of the roosters out in the farm area.

The roosters are raised to be very aggressive. Consequently, they cannot be together in a pen as they’d quickly kill each other. So each rooster has his own “house” and roost. The house is a couple of pieces of plywood in an A-frame shape with a pole on the top sticking out a ways. A rope is tied through the pole and onto the leg of the rooster which limits the radius that the rooster can roam, keeping it away from other roosters. However, the other roosters are close enough that they provide a constant stimulus to each other. That makes for a lot of rooster crowing and strutting. That was interesting as long as I didn’t think about the end purpose of these roosters….

The trip is going well and I think I’ve made the time change. I had some important items stolen from my luggage somewhere along the line. My Minolta digital SLR camera and lens was taken. A folder of CD’s, including all of my Lord of the Rings CD’s and a number of software CD’s was taken. I was bringing an iPod Shuffle over for one of the people here in Manila and that was taken as well. I’m pretty unhappy about that and hopefully I’ll be able to get some reimbursement from insurance somewhere for the loss. The loss of the software means that I don’t have any picture processing software on my new company laptop, so I can’t post any pictures. That’ll have to wait until I get home.

The completely uneventful flying experience ended in Manila right on time. My luggage arrived (although my digital camera has been pilfered from the suitcase!!) and I was in the hotel by midnight. Now I just have to deal with the jetlag. I was up at 6:15 this morning and after breakfast caught the 7:15 shuttle to the office. The day has been busy with meetings and in a couple of hours I’ll catch the 5:30 pm shuttle back to the hotel. I think then I’ll crash for the evening … or at least for a while. There’s a meeting at 10 p.m. that I should be attending on the phone. We’ll see if I can actually make it to that meeting.

The weather here is actually quite nice. It’s about 85 today with hazy sunshine and fairly humid (but not oppressive). Hopefully that’ll persist until the weekend. I’ve no idea what to do on the weekend, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something interesting to do. Meanwhile, I just want to go to bed.

We had a very good visit with Dawnmarie and Kirk and their family in Pennsylvania. We flew back on Monday, April 2nd and got home safely, but dead tired at about 11 p.m. The trip, while very quick, was a good visit. Somehow we need to figure out how to get more time to visit our family all over the country.

On Tuesday, Wendy, Aaron, Kendra, and Aidan arrived in Pocatello for a couple of days. What a lovely treat! Kendra is closing in on her thirteenth birthday and is a delightful young woman. We did a lot of visiting and talking during the day and a half that they were here in Pocatello. They left on Thursday (far too soon) and have arrived safely back home. I guess it’s now our turn to go up there!

I’ve posted pictures from Pennsylvania as well as from Kendra’s visit in the Picture Album.

This is my flight schedule to Manila, departing on April 8th (Pocatello time in parenthesis):

The times in the above table are in the local time of the destination. In Parenthesis I’ve put the Pocatello time. If the date if different, then that is indicated by a +1 (next day) or -1 (previous day).

It’s been a very quiet Sunday evening. Nina has been out with one of her counselors visiting former inmates and I’ve been holding down the homefront while she’s out. Bradica (the dog) has been pacing back and forth through the house looking for Nina. Some nights Bradica will probably walk a couple of miles as she goes back and forth through the house when Nina’s gone.

Yesterday was yard work day. I started by cleaning out the area beside the front door. I cut back the plants so they could start doing their thing for this year and cleaned out all the garbage. The area is a magnet for anything blowing by in the wind which kind of swirls around in that area dumping whatever the wind is carrying. There’s a large window well there which also accumulates a lot of rubbish.

I decided I wanted a window well cover. I checked online at both Home Depot and Lowes to see what they might have available. I couldn’t find what I wanted at the Home Depot online store, but Lowes indicated that they had window well covers and that they were in stock.

I finished up the yard work I wanted to do and headed downtown. That was the start of a frustrating afternoon! I got to the credit union about ten minutes too late to drop off the weblog backup. I got to Lowes to find that the window well covers they usually carried would not be large enough and the only one they had in stock (even though it was too small), was broken. I also wanted a couple of bolts for my motorcycle gas tank cover, but couldn’t find anything that would fit. I went over the motorcycle shop to find that the parts department closed at noon on Saturdays and service wasn’t open at all, so I couldn’t make an appointment to have the oil changed and do the spring cleaning on the bike. Ace Hardware didn’t have the bolts I needed, either. Both Home Depot and Lowes were sold out of the fertilizer I need to put on the yard (“come back on Tuesday,” they both said). There was one bag available at the garden shop, but that wasn’t enough to do even the front yard. The only thing I did get done on my errands was to drop off shirts at the laundry and pick up clean ones. I’m at least set for shirts for the week.

I’m already tired of the presidential nomination campaigns. The first primary is still nine months away and by the time we can actually vote on something, I think most of us are going to be completely turned off by the whole mess. This needs to change. Plenty of people are going to spend far too much money far too soon. When I went through weapon training in the Air Force before my first trip to Vietnam, a very important part of the training was patience … don’t shoot up your ammo until you actually have something in range to shoot at.

A while later I was in Danang, Vietnam, for the first time. We were flying reconnaissance missions out of Bangkok, Thailand … ten hours orbiting in the Gulf of Tonkin keeping track of the North Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Russians, and the North Koreans. We would land in Danang and drop off the package of tapes recorded during the mission along with one person who would stay the night to provide any assistance in processing the tapes and then would catch the airplane the next evening back to Bangkok. We were on a standard rotation schedule … 21 days in Thailand, 14 days back in Japan, and repeat. Of the ten people on the flight crew, six were on rotation for the stay in Danang, meaning that on a rotation to Bangkok, I would stay three nights in Danang.

My first night turned out to be more exciting than planned. I was dropped off along with the mission “take” about 7:30 p.m. and sat alongside the runway for about a half hour waiting to be picked up. I was “armed” with a .45 and five bullets, which were not in the gun — the clip had to be out of the gun while we were on the airplane. My ride finally arrived and we headed to the security compound where the tapes would be processed. That processing consisted of listening to the tapes and transcribing them onto six-ply paper. Analysts would then go through the collected information and write up activity summaries which were sent by teletype to several different places. Usually it would take eight hours or more to process the information and then head for bed. That was a very long day for me which had started at 1 a.m. Danang time to board the bus out to the airplane.

As I arrived at the compound, the Duty Airman (quite disdainfully, by the way) gave me a 2-minute tour, part of which consisted of pointing out the rack of M-16 guns by the door, the locker where the ammunition and helmets were stored, and the instructions to “follow that guy and do whatever he tells you if we have an alert.” The guy I was to follow (and I cannot remember his name) was a Vietnamese linguist, married with three kids in the states, on his second tour to Vietnam, and had been there ten months on this tour with three months left. He was a very likable guy.

We did have an alert. About midnight the sirens went off. I followed my mentor, was issued an M-16 with two clips of ammo (I still had my trusty .45 with five bullets), a helmet, and out the door we went to a sandbag emplacement on the perimeter of the security fence. The sirens were blaring, search lights were shining out into the darkness, and there were a couple of helicopters up tossing out parachute flares for illumination. In spite of all that, it seemed to be pitch black looking out through the security compound fence towards the fence that went around the base.

Within seconds we started hearing shots being fired … kind of like firecrackers … off to the left and getting louder. My emplacement companion was getting pretty anxious — bobbing up and down, swearing, and voicing threats about what he was going to do if the commies got any closer. Well, the firefight was definitely moving closer! A few minutes later he was up and began shooting. I had no idea what he was shooting at! There wasn’t anything out there to see. For all I knew, he could be shooting at our own Marines who might be backing up towards our compound. But there he was, shooting his gun and hollering for me to cover him.

Two clips of ammunition isn’t much. It didn’t take very long for him to empty both clips and then he wanted my ammo because I hadn’t taken a shot, yet. I didn’t give him my ammo, even though he was pretty insistent. Meanwhile, the firefight was once again moving away from us. We were there another two hours — him with a rifle and no ammo, me with a rifle and two clips of ammo and a .45 with five bullets, still not in the gun. When the all-clear finally sounded (but not before several big explosions in the direction of the flight line where Viet Cong sappers managed to blow up several airplanes), we went back into the building. We stripped and cleaned the rifles and turned them in. He took quite a ribbing for having shot up all his ammo on ghosts. I was quite happy, however, that the firefight had gone somewhere else because the 22 bullets for my M-16 and the 5 bullets for the .45 that I had left would not have been much protection.

So, the politicos are out there shooting up all their ammo at each other, but unlike my emplacement companion that night some 41 years ago, they aren’t shooting at ghosts. It’s too soon for that kind of blood letting to be going on in this campaign.

We had a very nice visit with Aunt Marj yesterday in the nursing home in Salt Lake City. She was quite perky! We arrived to find her in her wheel chair in the common room with my cousin Kathy. My sister Eileen came a few minutes later. Shortly after that my cousin Merrill and his wife Jean arrived. A few minutes later my cousin Perry and his wife Linda came in. It was almost a family reunion! Aunt Marj enjoyed the company which literally wore her out. She’s very frail as the picture of mother and her shows. She had been sleeping for the past couple of days without eating or drinking anything. She did eat a little yesterday afternoon but I’m sure that she slept through until sometime today after all the visitor’s yesterday. I took quite a few pictures, some of which will eventually go onto the picture album, but this was a very nice picture of the two sisters together.

One thing about Salt Lake that I do not miss is the traffic. We left the nursing home about 4:45 p.m. to drive to North Salt Lake to Heather’s house for dinner. We finally got there at 6:35 p.m. It literally took longer to drive the fifteen miles from the nursing home to Heather’s house than it took to drive the hundred and ten miles from Heather’s house to our home in Pocatello later yesterday evening.  We were quite happy to get home!

A few pictures made it into the picture album from the weekend. Tomorrow afternoon Nina and I will take mother and dad with us to Salt Lake to visit with Aunt Marj. This may be the last time to visit with her before she dies. The nursing home says that it won’t be very long.