Its been A MONTH!

I know I have been super MIA (missing in action) but its the holidays.

And when you work in retail… Holidays don’t really mean the traditional meaning of spending time with your family enjoying a cup of hot chocolate and cozying up underneath a blanket watching movies. it means long hours… Being on call… and the possibility of gaining white hair every other day.

Oh how i wish i was getting paid to be on vacation.

Speaking of vacation

it also been about a month since i was in the Philippines.

which I didnt finish the story of my trip.

basically after the disastrous trip to Coron. We flew back to Clark and headed to My Mom’s home town of Bataan where we spent the night at my cousins house. The trip was long but I could feel myself getting used to the weather. 90+ degrees and humid. Loose shorts and a plain tee. (i noticed that if you wore long pants or sweats it meant that you were either going to church or you were a foreigner) and it helped that My dads truck has air conditioning.

After that night we went to the wet market again in the morning and hung out there for a few hours and then said our goodbyes to my cousin and his family and my Uncle, my moms only living brother and headed back to Manila.

most of that ride back i listened to my dad’s complaints on how traffic out in the provinces needed to be more regulated. mainly because of the tricycles. Have i talked about them before? if you didn’t know well they are like slower motorbikes with sidecar attachments and sometimes can have 10 people riding on them. the driver one sitting on the handles one or two sitting behind the driver two or three sitting inside the sidecar and three sitting on the back end of the sidecar. and i remember the last time i had gone to the phillipines seeing people sitting on the roof of the sidecar if the had roofs. and there are hundreds and hundreds maybe even thousands of them in my moms hometown. and streets in the provinces aren’t wide enough for both a car and one of these tricycles to share a lane. And there in my moms hometown only ONE main street/highway. CRAZY there was even a story that i saw that on a highway a truck driver fell asleep on a highway lost control and drove head first into one of these tricycles. the people in the tricycle obviously didnt survive but their bodies were found 30+feet away from the impact. Wow that turned dark.

But anyway.

Back in Manila we honestly spent the last couple of days shopping. but instead of driving (my dad doesnt like driving in the dark or being stuck in traffic (which happened we spent 4 hours in Metro Manila trying to find a faster way back to Laguna from my cousins.) we took the bus. Lets just say transportation is vastly different. They use those huge tourist buses as regular buses for comfortable transport to other cities. and then there are also JEEPNEYS which are okay… slightly dangerous and you get to smell the fumes from other cars… but they are another common way of getting around in the cities.

the trains arent like what they used to be. 10 years ago it was like a mediocre amount of people using the trains. Now… its like a freaking sardine can. depending on how far away you live from Metro Manila the more and more it gets packed. and the trains they used… well there was Japanese signs all over them and NO air conditioning. i think in that day i must of lost 5 pounds in sweat.

and then my dad’s dog bit me two days before we were supposed to fly back to the states.