Another Week, Another Post

Another week, another post for the blog. Time is absolutely flying – we are in the middle of August already? I can’t believe it. Just so people don’t forget – its my mommy’s birthday on the 22nd and Lyn’s on the 21st. I’ve bought you both presents (mom- yours might be a bit small so I’m not sure whether to send it or not – I forgot that one size fits all in the Philippines is one size fits all children under the age of 14 in Australia!!). But buying presents isn’t really the most difficult thing – sending them may be a challenge and commitment to your birthdays. . . finding a post office for one, and the bureaucracy here is pretty amazing for everyday things. I went to pay my water bill in the admin part of the building where we live and they wanted a check. The total bill was about $10.00 for the month and it costs about $1 to get a bank check, let along finding a bank open outside of working hours to get a bank check written up. Basically anything involving public services and banks are just a big pain in the butt here really. I really miss Bpay!!

As you can tell we haven’t been doing anything too exciting here – its turned hot again and awfully humid – I’m sick of sweating at 7.30 in the morning – and I’m remembering the one weekend where we headed to the beach and it poured and blew a gale the whole weekend! Oh well. We stayed in Manila last weekend. Neil bought a DVD player and a friend of his from work lent him about 30 burned CDs that we’ve been slowly getting through. On Saturday we went to a going away dinner for an AYAD who is getting ready to finish her time here in the Philippines. We had pre-drinks at our house with our new blender, had an Indian dinner and bar hopped a bit in Malate. It was a pretty big night and Saturday I was pretty hungover the whole day. Must have been those tequila shots – what was I thinking!?! I’m getting old – I just can’t do it anymore!!




Mairin, Jarrah, Me and Natalie at a bar in Malate. We are all AYADs - Mairin and Natalie share an appartment in the same complex as Neil and I, Jarrah is from the intake before us and only has a month or two left to go.





We were going to head out of Manila this weekend as well, but Neil is pretty keen on going to a punk night at a local music club. Natalie’s (AYAD) boyfriend (also an AYAD based in Bangkok) is coming over this week so we’ll be heading out again with the AYAD crew. Neil’s invited some workmates to come along as well so hopefully it will be pretty fun (punk? I dunno . . .). I’ll try to find an interesting picture to accompany this post. Here we go -

This is Leharne and Neil at Indian dinner on Sunday night. It was Leharne's going away. She's been based in Los Banos at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

posted by batik billy @ 4:36 pm