…from the comparative safety of our apartment building. This thing creaks, groans and shudders when the hard winds hit, but doesn’t feel like its going to fall over!
Things are supposed to get a bit a worse before they get better… hoping everyone stays safe.
The British Women’s Association do a High Tea each year here in Manila at the British Ambassador’s house. And a very good job they do too. Anyone who has read Carla and my blog from our walk may remember Carla’s post on learning British terminology. “Cream Teas” were part of her new lexicon, and High Tea is essentially the same thing. Lots of ladies in beautiful dresses, and fancy hats, drinking Pimms and tea.
They serve sandwiches with the crusts cut off (cucumber and salmon sandwiches, of course) and variety of different cakes. Of course there are also scones, jam and cream. It really was very pretty with roses on the table and colourful bunting.
Sourcing some of this stuff in Manila can prove a little challenging. For example, you can’t find clotted cream anywhere outside of England and UHT whipped cream isn’t really the same. Finding tea pots was tricky too, so we all dunked our tea bags in the china cups, but who’s cares…. it was an elegant afternoon!
Sorry about the lack of hat. I was one of about five people who didn’t wear one. I simply didn’t own one and didn’t have the time to track one down here. I’ll try better next year!
Everyone’s been complaining about the increasingly dirty windows recently. We were wondering how often they actually got cleaned and have learnt that the answer is “barely ever”. So it was exciting to see a notice in the lobby a week ago saying that the window cleaning would start this week. Why they picked the rainy season, I’m not sure…?
Anyway, while working in the kitchen today, I watched this cage lower itself down….
And three guys step out with a cloth and one bucket of very dirty water. They hung out on the precarious metal “architectural feature” that runs down the building and smoked cigarettes and texted for a while. I guess they were on break. It was really weird to have three guys hanging OUTSIDE my dining room twenty floors in the air. I didn’t want to photograph them in case they thought I was going to get them in trouble or something. I waited until they started work. Here they are once the action got going:
The precarious ledge sans workers. (Yes they did have harnesses, but it still looked pretty dangerous to me):
The result? Eh…a bit better. Not exactly smudgefree. But I’m not sure I could have done better with only one bucket of water, 50 floors and no squeegee… Until next year then….
8
For everyone dying to know the growth rate on that giant building across the street….an update….
We have gone from this in December…
To the last update in February….
To this in September…..
and according to their publicly posted plans they have another 7 floors to go…. Goodbye view of the mountains…goodbye 50% of my view altogether! Note how there’s another building sneaking in on the right hand side which is working away at removing 25% of the remaining view. That’s going to be a tall one too – a bank I think. Every day and every night the building goes on and on and on…….
Fish eye view of raindrops
The rainy season goes here from June to about November. Its cloudier than usual although the temperatures are usually in the mid-80s. We get heavy rain every day for a short while, or at least the threat of it. (The gloomy clouds gather above me as I type.) But its kind of refreshing to be out of the heavy sun for a while and a cloudy 85 degrees is feeling pretty reasonable these days…so I don’t mind it most of the time. That may be because I’ve missed 2 typhoons and one flood by sheer luck and good timing with trips abroad, so the rainy season is just feeling a bit wet right now, rather than threatening.
We had a heavy downpour last weekend and decided to go down to the pool for a swim anyway, with the camera…and have some fun with photos:
Well…here it is…the icebreaking re-launching post that I have been threatening to put up again. Can it really be late February since I last posted? I hang my head in shame. I really do want to keep this thing up and running, and the blog is almost defunct…just sitting here neglected…. I did have a number of reasonable excuses in March. Our household effects arrived and I was up to my eyeballs and above in boxes – literally – and once I dug out from that, there were some school issues and other work things going on. But really…. mid August?! There’s no excuse.
Since then, we have been on a trip to the South Pacific country of Palau, in May I was in Guam getting my American citizenship, and then we spent a wonderful six weeks in Greece. There might be content for a blog post or two in there…what d’ya think? But the grip of blog apathy had already taken hold and I somehow couldn’t coordinate the apparently complicated coordination of camera, photos, and computer and come up with content in a timely matter. Not that the timing really matters of course.. Just because I did a trip a few months back, doesn’t mean that the story is less interesting, right? And not all posts have to have photos. They make posts more interesting, but as an excuse for not posting they just result in a story unshared.
So, confession over and now comes the action part. Having spent many an hour lecturing my high schooler on the value of commitment and consistency in his responsibilities, its time to swallow my own pill. So here it is:
1. I promise to post at least once a week. I’ve noticed all the best bloggers do it at least that frequently.
2. No picture will not equal no post.
And 3. I’ll work at fixing the technical glitches I’m having that are making things worse with the camera
The start of the blogging diversions!
And to the precious few who read this…PLEASE…. feedback or support comments much appreciated. I think I need a shove!
I may have mentioned before — several times in fact — that there’s a lot of construction going on around here. Running the danger of boring everyone rigid on what has become a bit of an obsession…I thought I’d do a post specifically on the subject. Its really compelling to me that I am in a city that is literally growing up around me faster than I can keep track. There are probably as many as two dozen buildings in various stages of construction just in my immediate vicinity. And I really do mean in various stages…from the very first ground breaking, through to the final stages of fitout and everything in between. On my walk to the store this morning, I took the following photos, just by pivoting on my heel from one spot:
First groundbreaking. Two weeks ago this was just open space that we cut through on the way to the store. Now it looks like the first hole for a new building is being dug.
Here are some more taller examples. Note the sheer number of cranes and the blue/green netting everywhere that protects people below from falling materials. Sometime the city just looks half unwrapped to me:
I could go on, but you’ve probably seen enough!
This used to be the US air force base for many years, since before the second world war. It was called Fort McKinley and has been renamed Fort Bonifacio…or the Fort… and from this the marketing wiz guys have created “Bonifacio Global City” or BGC. In the last five years or so, they have taken flat open land with a few remanents of old miltary buildings into a giant plan for a new “global city”. As its the first really planned city of its kind here, its a big deal, as other areas of the city have just sprawled organically with ensuing disastrous consequences. The planners here are promising better. If you can stand to listen to the saccharin language of this promo video (you will gag) it actually gives an overview of whats going. Grab a barf bag and watch this:
The most significant building of this whole production to me is the one that is going up directly across the street. Looks like its going to be a very tall combination of residential space, office space and retail units. When we arrived in late December it was two stories high and I couldn’t figure out why the windows were all slanted. Two months and 5 stories later, its obvious that the first six floors are just going to be parking and that the “sloping windows” are doing so because of the garage ramps they are building.
Here’s a couple of comparison pics:
This was back in December.
Here is now (late Feb):
The significance to me is two fold:
1. Once this thing hits about 15 floors 50% of my kitchen view is going to be obliterated. Fortunately there are other windows and other directions, and the view of the golf course is guaranteed to remain. So its with fascination and regret that I watch it grow
2. Its the closest building to me. I can see it from my desk as I work all day and I watch the guys crawling all over it like ants….doing what they do from 6am when I wake until at least 9pm at night…on and on… From my soundproof window it just looks ants on a picnic table, but if I crack the window just an inch the noise is overwhelming. The hours and the work are brutal.
I have the luxury of being able to take an academic interest in all of this, while they labor on in brutal heat for little money. But these are also valuable jobs and will hopefully create an infrastructure that will bring more wealth and jobs in the long run. Some of the buildings are proudly declaring themselves LEED compliant, which is a good thing, but the city still has a long way to go to save its own environment. In the meantime, the building goes on…
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!
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:
Crisper pictures to be had out of my kitchen window, as I am not battling the sun on the glass so much. (Panoramic views all round from every room):
A Blog about Music and Popular Culture
Balkans, Travel and Beyond!
Observations on food, travel, history & tradition
Teaching the art of composition for photography.
The Art and Craft of Blogging
The Art and Craft of Blogging
About my daily thoughts and life here in Lisbon
“One Journey Leads to Another”
Michael W. Mosley
3 kids,1 dog and way too many moves
Peace Corps in Jamaica
Travel photos, memoirs & letters home...from anywhere in the world
She sails the seven seas in search of FREEDOM
Cries from Jamaica
Thoughts on kayaking, science, and life
Wright Outta Nowhere 