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.
