Hot dogs here come in little individual protective plastic sleeves which you have to remove before you heat them. For some unknown reason, I found this hilarious:
Sign Language: Child Abuse?
As we learn our way around the different neighborhoods, describing where we mean by memorable landmarks has been the way to go. Yesterday, I said to Robert – “You know where I mean, next to the place where they blow up babies…” and realised that it needed a photo! So here you are….
BTW, Philippinos are very kind, gentle and good with kids (honest!)
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An Accompanied Tour
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….
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New Routines
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!
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First Glimpses of the City
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):
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Let the Train Take the Strain
So here it is …my first promised blog post from the start of our new adventures. The blog is straight out the WordPress box. No fancy graphics or RSS feeds…and sorry, no pictures either as I can’t figure out what I did with my camera. (Must be in one of the boxes?) I will get to all of that, but here from our suitcase-strewn apartment in Arlington is at least some word of what’s going on..…
Robert arrived late Weds night by train. Spent the night and planned to drive the car back to DC late Thurs afternoon ready to be picked up by the shipping company for transport to Manila. An early call on Thurs morning brought news that snow was hitting Virginia and Maryland and they wanted the car earlier. So Robert split early and headed into what turned into 5 hours of snow-inflicted gridlock on 295, but he made it despite bad drivers, icy roads and a very low gas gauge.
And, we too, did it. 10 hours of packing, 17,482 items later…all the stuff made it into the van and Latham and I headed to the train. Packers were done by 5:45pm, and our train was 7:55pm – pretty good timing, I thought. We had enough gap not to panic, but not too much time to sit around in the freezing cold. Researching the timing was tough. The packing company “does not advise that you travel the same day as your pack out as we are not liable for any expenses incurred if there are delays…” blah blah blah. Of course, I had no bloody choice and had to do my best estimate (without much input from them) and turned out to be a good one.
So we bought the Amtrak tickets and were on the Trenton NJ platform with 10 minutes to spare. I noticed the NY bound train was an hour late and thought “glad that’s not us” and boarded our train which was on time. All went well until about an hour into our 2.5 hour we stopped just shy of Wilmington, Delaware and we told that overhead cables were down in multiple locations between Wilmington and Baltimore due to the snow. We limped into Wilmington station. The announcer said that they weren’t sure how long the delay would be but all trains north and south of Baltimore had come to a stop. One hour went by,,,, two….. three. After 3 hrs of sitting on the Wilmington platform at 11:30pm, they announced it would be at least a couple more hours until the train would move again. We bedded down for the night across two seats each. Covered with my coat and with my bag as a pillow it wasn’t too bad, certainly a lot better than a plane. I caught a little sleep. At about 2am the train starting slowly moving and crawled to Baltimore at half speed. Finally we got into DC at about 4:30am and a taxi cab ride later, we stumbled into Robert’s apartment at about 5am. Not the perfect end to a very long day…some might say unlucky…but I say lucky as our train wasn’t canceled (like so many others) and we didn’t have to turn around and go back to our (non-existant) home…. Til the next time I have a reliable internet connection…
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Day 3: Ennerdale Bridge to Black Sail
Ennerdale Water
Something I learned about English weather – you never know what’s gonna happen. In the picture above you see lots of grey clouds – which on the East Coast of the States usually means that some storms are on the way. However, these types of clouds would typically blow over, and we’d get rained on when we least expected it.
Views of some pine tree plantations. In the 1930s someone thought it would be a great idea to plant pine trees in Northern England - even though they aren't/weren't native.
View from our room at Black Sail Youth Hostel
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Day 1: St Bees to Ennerdale Bridge
view from our room at Stone House Farm - 9:30PM (I was amazed at that hours of daylight - loved it!)
Post Office in St Bees. The Post Office was not only the place to mail stuff - it was like a general store, too.
St Bees train station
statue of St. Bega for whom St. Bees was named. She was an Irish princess who fled her native country sometime between the 6th and 9th centrues to avoid an arranged marriage with a Norwegian prince. She lived as a hermit, but was known for the good deeds she performed - including opening an convent.
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A tribute to some incredible people
As we planned our trip, and created our donation page, we encouraged people to email us with the names of family or friends who’s lives were lost to cancer – or to those survivors who are kicking cancer’s butt. It was my intention to dedicate each day of this walk by making a post “This day’s walk is dedicated to…” Unfortunately, we dealt with unreliable internet access, so I decided to create a special post to recognize these folks. We are grateful to the following incredible people that reminded us to put one foot in front of the other and continue the challenging journey:
Lila
Sam
Shelly
Sharlene
Cathy
Merle
Theresa
Dale
Judy
Linda
Bonnie
Ralph
LaVerne
Fred
Irene
Linda
Eddie
Josiah
Sharon
Brenda
Lisa
Pam
Trish
I cab honestly say that these folks helped get us over some major fells (hills).
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Just for Fun: Vocabulary lesson for Carla
As you might expect, I kept a journal during our C2C journey. Part of my journal included my new vocab words. Caroline was a great interpreter, and taught me many new words. Here are some examples:
Cheers (also Ta) = Thank You
Pudding = steamed cake (if anyone offers you Sticky-Toffee Pudding – take it! However, I also had a Suet Pudding which was steamed beef and potato entree served in a crust of suet. I tried lots of interesting foods in England.)
boot = trunk of the car
serviette = napkin
jacket potato = baked potato
Sarni / Buttie = sandwich
Plasters = band-aids
Chips = French fries
Crisps = Potato chips
Fell = Hill
Beck = Stream
Tarn = Lake
Sweeties = candies
Boiled sweets = hard candy
Cream tea = A cup of tea which is served alongside scones with jam and clotted cream (again, if you are offered a cream tea – take it!)
Off-license = a place to pick up alcohol that is not a pub
Slimline = diet tonic (This was an important one for me. I drink gin and tonics, so I’d order a ‘gin and slimline’. Another change, the English use lemon instead of lime, and typically don’t have a bunch of ice in their drinks).
flannel = washcloth
sultanas = raisins
porridge = oatmeal
courgettes = zucchini
aubergine = eggplant
mash = mashed potatoes
bicky = Cookie
Biscuit = Cracker
Wright Outta Nowhere 