Some things I have discovered so far in my time here:
– It takes about two and a half weeks of not gelling my hair for it to finally return to being flat instead of sticking up at the front (and yes that does include regular [ok semi-regular] showers).
You better believe it
– There are a lot of dogs here. We have two, with a third regularly around and a handful of others that come and go on a daily basis. One is called ‘Lovely’ and is currently pregnant, the other we have named ‘itchy’ since she has some wounds and is quite tattered in her appearance, and the third we have called ‘Bad-foot’ due to an injured foot, this one will be the father of Lovely’s children.
Lovely "Itchy" "Bad Foot"
– A speciality here is a food called Balut (click the word for the Wikipedia link, but be warned: it is a little gross), which is fertilised duck egg. Five of our team have now eaten it (the sixth being vegetarian), with only Pete (not me) being the one who enjoys this practice. We have a 40 minute long recording between Pete opening and eating his and the rest of us getting around to doing that too.
Mmm-mmm-mmmmmm…
– There are two main ways to travel here, other than on foot. Firstly, trikes are motorbikes with side-cars – which means two people right? Wrong. Our current record is eight. Three on the bike (including driver), three in the side-car and two on top of the side-car. Here is a slightly less over loaded trike (four of us riding each trike). Secondly, there are jeepneys. These are large transport vehicles left over from war times that are now basically large, jeep-like taxis. As foreigners we like to be strange and rather than ride them normally, we favour riding on top (which of course we couldn’t get away with in the UK).
Riding on trikes Riding on top of a Jeepney
– Americans love peanut butter. A lot. They eat it with pretty much everything. Which I find weird because I always thought of it as a savoury sandwich filling like cheese or ham, but they treat it like we would if we were being offered chocolate – like it’s the world’s best treat and they must have as much as they can.
Not just bread, apparently it should be used with everything
– Filipino weddings involve a lot of generosity. One gives a monetary gift to the couple on arrival at the reception (where your arrival is announced), people pin a chain of money onto the bride during the first dance, and in all subsequent dances men must pay about 100 Pesos (about £1.50) to be able to dance with a girl of their choice. And so I paid for women to dance with me.
Admittedly I’m dancing with a team mate here, but still
Back to more manual work this coming week, so I’ll tell you more about what we’re doing in the next blog 😉
