Back in Canada after 3 months in the Philippines

I'm back in Canada (Vancouver) for 2 days before heading to California for a week.  First impressions on being back in North America after 3 months in the Philippines:

- everyone speaks English and I can understand the conversations going on around me
- Vancouver is so clean
- Vancouver is so grey and cold
- Vancouver is so quiet - no one is honking their horn
- the cars drive so fast and they stay in their lane, and indicate before changing lanes
- there's no bottled water in the hotel because you can drink the water from the tap.  Honestly, I spent at least a minute looking for bottled water in my room, before I figured it out.  I put that down to an 11 hour flight and 16 hour timezone difference, but did laugh at myself
- as I write this, I'm eating shellfish and salad without worrying about the possible after-effects.  Thanks be for my iron gut, I've not yet had the dreaded traveller's diarrhea or food poisoning, but apparently it's just a matter of time in the Philippines
- I can order a glass of white wine and it's not warm before I finish drinking it
- the hotel restaurant is big and mostly empty and it's not because the food isn't wonderful
- there's only 1 server and 1 busboy for the entire restaurant (instead of 5 or 6) and the server checked to see how I was enjoying the food

It's great to be back.  I've been quite homesick for the last couple of weeks, knowing that I would soon be back in North America.  I plan to enjoy every minute I'm here, especially the time with family.  But I also know I won't be sad to be heading back to the Philippines on January 3.

More good things about the Philippines

Inexpensive spa treatments, even when booked at what is likely the most expensive spa in the city.  $25 for an hour long massage and that includes the tip.  Apparently manicures and pedicures are really inexpensive as well but I’ve not tried that yet. 

Appreciating that Canada really does do some things better!  As some of you know I have long been frustrated with my Canadian cell phone provider who will remain unnamed (but it rhymes with Dodgers).  It turns out they are pretty darn great, compared with one of our providers here.  That’s right, I said one because we have to have two providers in the office in order to increase – not guarantee – the likelihood that we’ll have Internet.  And all Internet here is over the phone lines; the cable companies haven’t entered the market yet so service levels go up and down depending on how many people are trying to use it.  The one provider here actually cut off our cell phones because we hadn’t paid our bill.  The reason we hadn’t paid our bill is that we couldn’t get them to send us our bill.  So now it’s up to us to chase down our billing every month so that we can pay it.  Bizarre.

Enjoying the hunt looking for products that I’ve taken for granted in the past.  A couple of weeks ago I found real Q-Tips in a little store here and I felt like I had won the lottery!  Finding cranberry sauce was also a good thing, as was dried onion soup mix for the turkey stuffing.  Yes, as I write this, I am cooking a turkey in the large toaster oven they call an oven here.  I didn’t have enough confidence in the oven to actually invite people for dinner so John and Nena will be the guinea pigs.  Nena had never seen a turkey before and certainly has never tasted turkey, or stuffing, or cranberry sauce.  

My iron gut (touch wood).  I have so far been spared any of the dreadful travel sicknesses and put it down to my stomach of steel and the quantity of wine I consume.  It took John a week and a half to recover from something he picked up at our last resort, and it wasn’t a fun time for him.  I'll not post any pictures of that! 

I've written before about the great service one gets here in the Philippines but the absolute best example yet is golf caddies!  I was invited to golf at a semi-private club here and when we arrived, I discovered that each golfer has their own private caddie!  I've never golfed with a caddie before but I can tell you that it was great, and you feel like a pro when you hand your club to your caddie, no matter how bad your shot was.

Finally Christmas in the Philippines.  It is huge, absolutely huge.  As soon as the “ber” months start, so that would be September, the Christmas carols start playing and the decorations start coming out, and there are just more and more all the time.  This past week they put up a tree in our condo lobby.  

And here it is with two of our guards.  As I mentioned earlier, there are guards everywhere and we have three in the condo lobby and there are at least three more in the bank that's also in our building.  

They're very nice and in theory prevent incidents from occurring, but I'd really rather not put that to the test.  Here's one of the trees that have begun to appear at the mall.  I'll try to get some that better show the incongruity of Christmas in the tropics. 

Happy Remembrance Day, everyone.  They don’t celebrate Remembrance Day here, by the way, and I now realize how very ignorant I am on the part of WWII that didn’t affect the UK.  I intend to rectify that before I leave here. 

The best things about the Philippines

This post has been a long time coming!  I got back to Cebu City early in September and while it took me at least 3 weeks to recover from my "round the world" vacation, there's no excuse for not posting sooner than this!

After being in the UK, Canada and the US, it was good to be back but I also found I had a slightly different attitude about the Philippines.  When I first arrived here in June, I found most everything either interesting or charming, but now after the month away, it's a little more complicated.  But I've also had the chance to see some of the better parts of the Philippines.

This really is a tropical paradise -- imagine Hawaii or Mexico but with much better service!  John and I have gone to two resorts since he got here 3 weeks ago and while we are now resort snobs, we can honestly say that Philippine resorts are very good!  This is the resort we were at 2 weeks ago.

And here's the one we were at this weekend.  They truly are lovely places to relax in and I'd highly recommend them to anyone.  Much better than cruises because there is more space and fewer people, it's always warm, and the service is great, all the time.

One more picture of the bird of paradise flowers.  I just can't get over how plentiful they are here.

Circumnavigating the earth on vacation

I'm back in Cebu having left here a month ago.  I traveled west across Asia and Europe to the UK, then west again across the Atlantic and Canada to Victoria and northwest Washington, then west again to Hong Kong and back to the Philippines.  That means that I went around the world, which is kind of interesting, but mostly just means I had a lot of timezones to adjust to!

I learned a few things on this trip:
1. always fly business class - 12 hours in cattle class overnight from Hong Kong to London was not fun
2. jet lag isn't great but it's much easier to deal with when vacationing as opposed to working, and it's really not as bad as I think it's going to be
3. at some point, one will get sick - it's inevitable, so don't whine or worry about it

Some highlights from the vacation --
- this was my first paid vacation in at least 25 years, which was grand
- Scotland was also grand.  We got to see Alex in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  Here's Laura with Alex in his Erpingham Camp costume, soon after we arrived and before the play received a 5-star review and sold out performances through the rest of the run!  It was good fun and we enjoyed the show and seeing Alex showing off his great dancing moves.

Laura joined us after spending 3 months touring the UK and Europe with a friend and on her own.  She looks the same but has really grown up over the last few months and is now officially a grownup girl!

If you're thinking of going to Edinburgh, my only word of caution is -- don't go in August when the Fringe Festival is on, unless you really love Fringe.  The Royal Mile was fairly calm when we first arrived because the Olympics were still on, but later in the week it was truly bedlam. 

One particular highlight in Edinburgh was the Royal Botanical Gardens.  We walked there and then spent a few hours in the gardens and their huge greenhouses.  This is John enroute to the gardens.  It was a really lovely walk through some of the most charming streets in Edinburgh.  

One of my favourite greenhouses was this one, with these huge lilypads in them.  They were so big and perfect that it was difficult to resist the urge to step out onto them.  I didn't, however, and I'm sure John is grateful that he didn't need to (a) rescue me and (b) try to explain to the gardeners what I was doing.  

We only stayed 3 nights in Edinburgh and then we (John, Laura and I) headed out to Kinghorn, a small fishing village of 2500, 45 minutes north of Edinburgh by train, to an apartment vacation rental.  This was a great spot, that John found, to do day trips from.  We hiked in the area, took the train to see many castles, churches and ruins, experienced a not-great bus tour and generally enjoyed spending a week and a half in Scotland.  

After Scotland, we went back to Canada for a few days.  John's son's wedding was definitely the highlight of that segment of the vacation.  It was a lovely wedding, perfectly planned and executed (and I am a bit of an expert on weddings, having watched all those wedding shows on TV over Laura's shoulder).  This is one of the nicest pictures I've seen of Matt and Jen so far.

And here's how they looked just after the ceremony, really happy, which was lovely).

Part of my oversees role requires that I spend no more than 10% of my time in Canada but that's fairly easy with half of my children in the US.  So, after the wedding we headed to Lake WenATCHee, for a week of family and relaxation.  The emphasis on the "ATCH" part is mine, to remind me to pronounce it correctly, American style :)  It's not Lake Wen"autch"ee; it's Lake Wen"AAATCH"ee.  It's hard for me to convey the tone and emphasis here in the blog, but I hope you get the idea.  My American family corrected my pronunciation many times!

In any case, we had fun.  We rented a true cowboy house for the week and since I have 3 grandsons who are cowboy crazy, that worked out well.  This house was huge, and completely over the top with cowboy stuff.  Cowboy pillows on the beds, cowboy pictures on the walls and 5 dead animal heads as well, cowboy rugs on the floor, cowboy plates, cowboy bowls, cowboy cutlery, cowboy towel racks in the bathrooms (with the occasional bear motif thrown in to mix things up), rough hewn log bunk beds in the "bunkhouse", and antler lights and chandeliers wherever they would fit.  A bit odd but the boys really liked it.  We liked it because it was next to a golf course and the park where my eldest and her family live.

And there are horses to ride.  This was Laura's first time riding a horse!  Here's her looking calm and relaxed, but I think the horse is looking a bit nervous.  It all worked out well however and she can tick "horseback riding" off of her list of things she's never done. 

Lake WenATCHee is close to Leavenworth, a Bavarian-style tourist town with many attractions, and mini-golf.  Here's Laura and the mini-cowboys in the hot sun playing mini-golf.  They all got the hang of it quickly

In this next photo, can you see Gavin (on Nicole's back)?  He's only 1 but is already keenly interested in each golf shot, and commented on every one, with appropriate oohs and aahs.

After a few days, we put Laura on the Clipper to Victoria from Seattle, and then I headed back to Cebu from Vancouver, via Hong Kong.  I'm happy to be back but my body is still adjusting to the jet lag, waking early, tired most of the day, and asleep by 9 latest.  Circumnavigating the globe takes a lot out of a person!