[smartads] Today started out with a brown out. A brown out is what Filipinos call a black out. We lost our power at approximately 6:15am. It only last for about 20 minutes, but it’s the inconvenience of the whole thing. Brown outs happen here a lot. Actually last Saturday, the day before I started this blog, we had a scheduled brown out. The city will schedule a brown out from 7am until 5pm and we will not have power the whole day, unless of course you have a generator, which we do. These brown outs are to conserve the electricity. Overall it’s for the greater good, but it bugs me. Thank goodness they are building a new power plant a few clicks down the road from our house. This new plant is suppose to reduce or even eliminate all these outages. At least no more scheduled ones.
My wife is off to the open market this morning. On the way she is going to buy a new tire for the tricycle we bought yesterday. She has our house lady (Vicky) with her. More on Vicky in a later post. But I will say that Vicky’s husband (Eddie) is the guy that is ‘renting’ our tricycle. He is the one that gave them a ride downtown to the market this morning. He is also the one that found the other guy that is ‘pawning’ his tricycle to us. It’s his neighbor. See yesterday’s post if all this is confusing to you.
My wife is back from the market. She bought 2 kilos of yellow onions for 200 pesos. She remembered to buy the tire , but more importantly she found someone else that wanted to pawn their tricycle to us. We will be doing that after we return from our trip to Southern Leyte this Thursday thru Sunday (26-29 Aug). Another income for us. We’re trying to get as much as we can so we will not have to use my military retirement check at all. That’s the money we want to use to travel with once our house here is complete.
The new Filipino word for today is: asawa. a-sa-wa means spouse.
I’m going to be buying a notebook tomorrow to write all these words down so I won’t repeat any. I’m also going to use that notebook to write things down so I can be sure to transfer them here, hopefully for your viewing pleasure. I hope to add some more pictures tomorrow also. If I remember to bring the camera downtown with me, I will. I’m planning on getting a picture of Jolly Bee’s and maybe Chow King also. Along with other pictures too, of course. I still need to get the picture of that tricycle for y’all. I’ll be sure to do that.
Not and interesting day today, but tomorrow I will go downtown and take those pictures. I have to go to the bank. The banking experience is something else also. When you open an account here, you have to give them about 6 signatures on the signature card. Just so they can get the slight variation that most people have when signing their name. I have never been to the bank when there were more than 2 tellers working at the same time. The transactions take longer than I’m use to in the States, but they do get it done. Sometimes when I go I have to wait a little bit longer than normal because there is one teller that does not know how to do the dollar transactions. If my turn comes up and she is the next available, I have to wait longer. I’ve never been there when she was the only teller, maybe that doesn’t happen. Instead of standing up in a line (Filipinos call it “falling into line”), they have cushioned benches to sit on. Very comfortable, but no back to them. There is a security guard at all the bank doors who doubles as a door man. You should be careful though, be nice to him, because they all carry firearms. I’m not talking about a pistol either, I’m talking like an M-16. Anyway, I’m going to the bank to get some money out of our peso account. We need a little bit extra money for our trip to Southern Leyte this coming Thursday. We are going there to, as my wife calls it, celebrate the anniversary of her father’s death. Now it’s not like she didn’t like her father, she loved him, I liked him very much. It’s just what she calls it, maybe because she doesn’t really understand the meaning of ‘celebrate’ or because it is a tradition. We are going to have a big party, the whole barangay is invited. A barangay is like a village. Pronounced: baa-ron-guy, just say it fast. We are also suppose to be going to a new resort while we are there, and I hear it has a waterfalls. I will be sure to take pictures to post.
Well that’s about it for today. It’ a little past 9 pm and it doesn’t look like anything wonderful is going to happen the rest of the night. Tomorrow will be more exciting things.
Salamat, Paalam
