An Accompanied Tour

January 4, 2011January 23, 2012 / wrightsolution / 8 Comments

The dust bunnies have precious few places to hide in this partially furnished apartment. So they roll down the edges of the hallways like something out of a John Wayne movie. The brand new rugs throw up new lint, which feeds them until they turn into large tumbleweeds and the air conditioning blows them around.<Insert theme from “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly>. After about 10 days of living in a cowboy movie, I decided living here without a proper broom and mop was not an option. So, as previously mentioned yesterday, we set off in search.

Now we are a proud owner of an Orga Super Mop <read: metal stick with a cloth attached>…, which left me with the next reality of mopping all that floor space. It is wonderful to have all this square footage to spread out. I can’t hear the TV or other people’s phone calls, and there’s always a quiet corner to read or hang out and look at the view (a favourite pass time). However, someone needs to clean it occasionally <sigh>..…

So accompanied by my new aforementioned mop, I thought it would be fun to get the job done and share a little more of our new home. (There are five bathrooms, for goodness sake!)

So off we go starting in the kitchen:

Door behind leads to maids area, utility room and more bathrooms and toilet…not even going there right now..

And off towards dining room.. Note electric sockets in the kitchen. We have both 110 and 220 and all electric gadgets are color coded, orange or green. Make sure you plug the right one into the right socket or BANG!

And onward through the cavernous living/den area:

And then there’s the entrance way:

And the hallways:

Master (and other bedrooms):

And finally my -soon to be– office.

PHEW! Maybe hiring a little help might be a good idea?! What’s is going be like when we actually get our stuff?! More photos then….

New Routines

January 2, 2011January 23, 2012 / wrightsolution / Leave a comment

I’ve meant to post several times during the last week or so, but as you can imagine, its been busy. We’ve also been going to bed really early in what feels like an alcohol-free drunken stupor. I guess the jet lag just takes longer when you asking you body to make this big a shift.

Its been interesting having the holidays as our first impressions of Manila. The streets have been relatively car-free (sorta) but the shopping malls have been heaving. Today is the first day of “normal” as everyone is back from vacation. So we’ll see what “normal” looks like in the grocery store at 10am this morning when I go out shopping (again). Here’s a few of our new routines as we work at making everything new around us feel like home:

1. Exploring. On foot. We don’t have a car yet and as we are in a city, exploration is limited only by the soreness of our feet. So we’ve done a lot of miles walking around our neighborhood. We’re currently surrounding by many new skyscrapers. Both residential and commerical, completed and in-progress. In fact, there must be about a dozen new skyscrapers going up around up I count what I can see from each direction. There are plenty of empty grass plots too, awaiting the construction on the next tower. This area used to be an American army base, a long way away from the city center, but now it considered metro manila and catching up fast. Lots of interesting sculptures around too. Here’s a close up of the one in the first photo:

The three trees are a metal sculpture. Pretty cool!

2. Shopping. You can get anything and everything here. We haven’t really begun to see the extent of it, but it clear that you get find almost anything… As the main focus has been getting food in the house – as the cupboard is literally bare – we have done numerous foot tours to the nearest supermarket at a giant shopping mall called Market Market!. MM is a four storey mall that includes a department store, a fashion bazaar, a furniture bazaar, restaurants, a food court, a mini funfair for the kids, 60 open air market stalls, and what must be 200+ stores. Oh and there’s a big supermarket in the basement. Shopping there on Christmas eve for basic food items was a nightmare. Crowds like you wouldn’t believe. But I’ve learnt that arriving at 10am when they open gives me about 1.5 hours of sane shopping time before the crowds start arriving for lunch. The following photo doesn’t give any kind of idea of the masses of people, but when you are in the thick of it, whipping out your camera is not an option: Latham and I got a kick out of the sculptured hedges that were made into the shape of different animals with plastic heads poking out:On a completely unrelated note, here’s one more photo of the giant snails we keep meeting on our travels. Latham’s head included for scale:

That’s all folks. Off to buy a mop. Sick of washing the kitchen floor on my hands and knees!

First Glimpses of the City

December 24, 2010April 24, 2013 / wrightsolution / 6 Comments

Its Christmas Eve and we went out for a walk in around Fort Bonafacio, our area of Manila. Then came back and had a swim in the pool. Its cool (for Manila) – only about 75 degrees today I would guess, but still pretty humid. Lots of smog too. Here are some first pics from our apartment windows. I tried to take a few long and closer shots to give a sense of perspective. The fuzziness you see are a mixture of the smog, photographing through tinted windows and the reflection of the glass…so sorry for the quality…but it should give you some idea:

Here’s a long shot of the living room from the dining room. Everything is sparsely furnished until our stuff gets here:

A little closer. Note the floor to ceiling glass windows:

Sitting on the sofa and looking out, the golf course takes up a lot of the closer view. The large very attractive pool is down below on the left. To the right, the towers of the financial district (Makati). You can also see the sea in the far middle horizon, but the camera can’t pick up that detail: