Philippine Travel Log: And there was evening and morning the first day

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Jeff Block

Day 1: Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Arrival at Shekinah

Faith and John playing in the tree house

Faith and John playing in the tree house

I’ve already gone into some details about meeting John-John and our arrival at the orphanage, as well as a detailed description of the orphanage itself.  So this will be a brief entry about our life together as we closed out the day we met John-John.

Sadiri took Faith, John and I to our cottage after lunch.  John went down for his nap with no trouble.  We had learned his schedule in theory, but had not been through it yet.  This is what we understood to be typical…

  • 5:30AM – John wakes up, gets his shower
  • 6:30AM – Breakfast
  • 11:30AM – Lunch
  • 1:00PM – Nap for 90 minutes or so
  • 6:30PM – Dinner
  • 7:30PM – Evening routine: Potty time (#2), shower, brush teeth
  • 8:00PM – Bedtime

So, we put John down for his nap.  While he slept, Faith prepared the gifts we’d brought for the house parents and social worker at the orphanage, and then read.  I took a shower.  It would become my custom to take multiple showers a day and still sweat myself to death.

John took a long time to come out of sleep mode.  We have since learned that he is quite slow to wake up when he doesn’t wake up on his own.  And sometimes he can be grumpy.  This was one of those days.  He was pretty withdrawn when we woke him up.  Faith pulled him back into a better disposition by letting him play with our camera.  He subsequently took a bunch of pictures that are actually pretty funny.  I plan to wrap the best of these up into an album and publish to FB when I get around to it.

We had sent a pack of matchbox cars to the orphanage in a care package about a month ahead of our arrival.  They had packaged them up in a plastic grocery bag (along with the other stuff we’d sent), and had them waiting in our cottage when we arrived.  We thought John might want to play with the cars, but instead he dumped them out of the floor and played with the plastic bag (and our camera) the bulk of the afternoon.

We went back over to the main building for dinner at around 6PM.  We returned to the cottage about 7PM, and started getting John ready for bed.  We had never done this before, so we didn’t realize that it would go as fast as it did.  We were also pretty pumped that John dove into his night time routine very enthusiastically.  He was particularly excited about getting naked and playing in the shower.  I found his approach to #2 potty of particular interest, because he had learned to do so without the benefit of children’s toilet seats, etc.  So, he shed his clothes, straddled the toilet, and did his duty.  (I’m so going to get killed for these posts when he’s old enough to find and read them.)  Faith and I were extremely impressed that he is fully potty trained, enthusiastic about showers, very clean, and very compliant.

After potty and shower, we got him dressed – daddy laid out his clothes while mommy got him showered, which has become our custom.  Then, we had him brush his teeth (also something he’s able to do on his own), and hop into bed.  I had spent a bit of time selecting Bible stories to read to him before bed, since I had not brought a children’s Bible with us.  Tonight’s story was the story of Jesus’ birth from Luke 2:1-20.  John wasn’t disobedient, but I could tell right away that he’s totally not into books and reading, which actually bummed me out a bit.  I hope that doesn’t impede his education.  He’s a very tactile learner (also something we observed quickly), so now Faith is busily about trying to find homeschooling curricula based on that style.

After our story time, we said our prayers (something we also always do before meals), kissed him goodnight, and went back to our room.  Faith and I then prayed together, talked for a little while about the day, and hit the sack.

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Philippine Travel Log: A Virtual Tour of Shekinah Home

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Jeff Block

This is a post that describes the orphanage where John lived for almost 3 years, and where we stayed with him for 5 days before bringing him back to America.  Other posts will talk more about him and what we did there.  The purpose of this post is to remember the place itself.  To give you context, my goal more than anything with these posts is to give John-John something to read again 10 years from now when he’s looking back into his past to see where he came from.

Let’s dive in…

It took about 40 minutes to get from our hotel in Laoag City to John’s orphanage, called Shekinah Home, located about 5 minutes outside the town of Dingras in Ilocos Norte.  The orphanage was built on a 6 acre plot of land that was a Japanese military base many years ago during WWII.  An interesting side note there, before I even get started, is that because Philippinos considered the Japanese to be evil, and many Philippinos were killed at this and other bases (they doubled as internment camps for the trouble makers in the indigenous population).  Therefore, the locals thought the place was haunted, and never came around.  So, they had very little trouble, even being outside the city away from the police, from gangs or teenagers or the communists who lived in the hills (I’ll get to that later).

But anyway, we turned off the paved road and drove down a long gravel driveway to the orphanage compound.  I distinctly remember driving by peoples’ houses on the left and a school yard on the right.  Therefore, I got to see people (particularly women) working in their yards and children playing at the school.  The children playing was pretty much what you’d expect.  The women working in the yards were amazing.  I remember one woman in particular who exemplified them all.  Several times when we drove by (on different days), I would see her out there squatting, sifting rice (I think it was rice) in a big bowl.  Big, meaning probably 2.5 ft in diameter and 2-3 inches deep.  But every time I saw her, she was out there squatting, working in the sun.  I can only deduce that she’s out there all day every day.  I don’t know how she’s ever able to stand up after that.  And another salient point … she was probably 50 or so, not some 22 year old who would potentially have the stamina to do something like that.  It was crazy.  But that’s the way the whole of the Philippines was, in my experience … far more about manual labor than about technology.

We pulled through the gates into the compound, which was a rectangular plot of field with a few trees surrounded by a wall on three sides, and a fence on the 4th (the one facing away from the main road).  All four sides had barbed wire on top of the wall / fence.  The fenced side faced a very large open field, where cattle roamed.  There were a few cows within the walls too, as well as goats, chickens and a dog named Ricky – you know, the one who mauled me as we were getting out of the van.

The van pulled up to the front of the main cottage in the compound.  There were three cottages total, with a forth under construction.  I’ll get into each in a second.  The main building was mostly white with blue trim.  I was remiss in that I didn’t get a really good picture of it.  Outside was a canopy on 4 posts under which the van could be parked, and a concrete slab under a big tree where other cars could be parked.  Wide white steps led up to the door, and by the time Sadiri (John’s house papa and our driver) had stopped the van’s engine, the steps were covered with children waiting to greet us.

There were 12 children, including John, at the orphanage when we arrived.  A few were babies and therefore kept separate from the older children, leaving 8-9 in the main house.  One married couple, Sadiri and Auring, served as house parents (called “papa” and “mama”), and their children were there too.  Mary Jane, the social worker, came to work at the orphanage every day as if an office, so she didn’t sleep there.  Brian, the director and his wife and family, only stayed one weekend a month or so, as he teaches university in Bagio (a city 4-5 hours to the south) as a tentmaker (a missionary who has to work in-country in order to pay for his stay there to do ministry).  Brian is an American missionary who started and directs the orphanage.

The main building had about 10 rooms.  It was clean and well kept.  We were immediately impressed by how nice everything was there; not at all what we expected.  The main area served as a play area for the children, of course.  The kitchen and dining areas were adjacent to it.  Off to the left as you enter were the house parents’ room (the only room with a TV, which the children were occasionally permitted to watch), and the office (always closed and off-limits to the kids).  To the right were 4 bedrooms for the kids (2 for girls and 2 for boys), and a single bathroom that everyone shared.  John’s room was the bedroom closest to the door, which he shared with one other boy roughly his name.  Oddly enough, his name was Johnny, which is why John was called “John-John”, to distinguish between the two.

We stayed there for a while, ate lunch with the kids, and then were taken to our cottage with John-John to have several days to bond.  We thought the transition would be taking place more slowly, but not so.  They took us over there and left John-John with us only hours after arriving at the compound.  Good thing John took to us as quickly as he did or it would have been a really interesting stay.

Our cottage was on the other side of the compound.  As I said, there were 3 finished cottages, and 1 under construction.  A narrow, very raised concrete sidewalk connected the main building to the other three cottages by running down the south side of the compound (the side with the fence, facing the open field).  It was half the width of an American sidewalk, and twice as tall.  I learned later that it was narrow because they’d poured it themselves and it saved money to be narrow, and it was tall because monsoons were common, brought lots of rain, and this kept it above water.

Halfway down the walk (so in the middle of the compound on one side) was a big honkin’ tree with a beautiful treehouse built in it for the kids.  John and I played under the tree house a few times, and Faith played in it with him.  I’d have loved to climb up in it, but it would never have held my weight.  It was neat though.  One room, but a full house – thatched roof, windows, etc.  Kids must have loved it.

Also connecting the cottages was an extension of the gravel driveway, which ran more through the center (maybe a bit on the north side) of the compound.  This is how we went the first time, given that we had to take our luggage.  But after this first trip, the sidewalk was clearly our favorite path, especially since John loved to ride on my shoulders almost from the beginning.  The first time we walked it, I wasn’t paying enough attention, so I accidentally smacked John’s face into a tree branch.  Ugh!  So, we adopted a policy that John would keep an eye out and say “Duck!” if I needed to duck while he was on my shoulders.  It’s actually worked great and been lots of fun.  He’s so cute the way he says stuff like that.

So, anyway, we drove to the cottage.  As you stood in front of these three cottages (which were lined up in a row), your back would be facing the main building to the west.  From left to right (or north to south), the three were…

1) The unfinished cottage.  Brian went into great detail about how cost of building materials had skyrocketed recently, and how what used to be enough money to finish it no longer was.

2) The baby house.  This is where all the youngest children stayed.  Two sets of house parents rotated between morning and evening shifts to care for these kids, but didn’t “live” there per se.  I never did get their names.

3) The cottage we stayed in.  This was designed to hold a group of children like the main building does today – the vision of the orphanage is to have 5 of these cottages, each with two missionary house parents and 8-10 children.  Actually, I think the newer cottages being built had another room or two to facilitate this many kids.  This was the 2nd building built, and served as the home of the director, and his family (wife and two adopted children) for some time.  Now, they stay there when they visit.  But while we were there with John, it was our home.

The cottage had 4 rooms.  Two bedrooms (one for us and one where John slept), a kitchen + dining + family room all in one big open area, and a full bathroom.  I took a bunch of pictures of the inside of the cottage, so you could get a feel for where we were.

Now that you’ve gotten a feel for the orphanage itself, I thought I would post one entry a day describing the activities of the day at the orphanage.  We did a number of special outings as well, which I would think should get their own entries.  But our time at the orphanage will read more like a line-by-line journal of our everyday life together.

Here’s an index for your convenience…

Day 1: Wednesday, October 1 – Arrived at Shekinah
Day 2: Thursday, October 2 – A Day at the beach
Day 3: Friday, October 3 – Outing to Laoag
Day 4: Saturday, October 4 – A Day with the Whittles
Day 5: Sunday, October 5 – Church and Departure

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Philippine Travel Log: Meeting John-John

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Jeff Block

We barely slept the night before meeting John.  I was up even more than Faith was, racking up a total of 3.5 hours of sleep that night.  I slept from 9PM-12:30AM, and that was pretty much it.  The rest of the night was filled with journaling, prayer, reading Scripture, studying up on my Ilocano (what litle I know), and watching TV.  Faith did a little better than me (scoring 6 hours of sleep), but we were both running pretty much on adrenaline by the time we got to breakfast.

We showered (I hated that shower) and packed early, so we could have breakfast, check out of the hotel, and have nothing else to do but wait for John after breakfast.  We were meeting Jackie at 8AM for breakfast, and the van from the orphanage was supposed to be there about 9:30AM to retrieve us.  We had so much leftover time pre-breakfast, that I got an hour’s quiet time in the restaurant before Jackie met us.  As is often her custom, Faith met with God out in nature – which meant the pool area, since there was no leaving the hotel (compound) for us foreigners by ourselves.

Jackie had told us that John had woken up early the previous morning talking about how his parents were coming tomorrow.  We spent a lot of time wondering how that morning was for him.  Was he anxious? nervous? scared? still excited? all of the above?  We were.  I had long imagined (and prepared myself emotionally) that his initial reaction to us might be pretty bad.  Having heard Jackie talk about how excited John was, it was tempting to let my guard down there, but I was trying to maintain a very realistic perspective.

We had the exact same breakfast as the day before:  Longanisa, rice, eggs, fruit, and juice.  Jackie talked to the orphanage right after breakfast to confirm schedule, etc, and they confirmed that John was indeed going to come with them to pick us up and that he was excited.  That’s when the minutes started to drag.  We checked out, piled our bags at the door, sat in the lobby and waited.  I couldn’t help but fidget with the two matchbox cars I had in my pocket, ready to engage him with toys if he was nervous or scared when we met him.

When the van finally arrived (like a half hour late), it was just Sadiri, who was John’s house father and official orphanage driver.  No John-John.  I was immediately disappointed, including because now I had to spend yet another 35-40 minutes (the time it takes to get from Laoag to the orphanage) in anxious waiting before I met John.  But just a few seconds later, John and Mary Jane (his social worker at the orphanage) walked up the hotel sidewalk to the door.  It was weird that he arrived not in the van (were they trying to surprise us?), but we were really glad to see them.  This was the moment we had prayed and waited and prepared for for years.

He immediately demonstrated fear.  He clung to Mary Jane and wanted very little to do with us.  After shaking hands with the adults, I immediately squatted down so that I wouldn’t be such a giant in his eyes.  Sadiri and Mary Jane tried to encourage him to go to us, but it was obvious immediately that this isn’t how his personality works.  The more they pushed, the less he wanted to do with us.

Faith and I spoke softly to him.  I gave him one of the cars, which he took without hesitation, but immediately separated from me.  Pretty much conveyed, “I’m all about the car, but you keep your distance.”

We told his caregivers that we were okay with his being shy, and that we should just head back to the orphanage.  So we piled in the van, and headed out of town.  We gave him his 2nd teddy bear (I’ll explain in a second) in the van, which he also took readily and held the entire trip, but it didn’t warm him up to us at all.

What’s with the bear?  Well, we were advised by a book we read to do the following to help reduce your child’s fear in meeting you…  Long before traveling to pick up the child, you buy two identical stuffed animals.  You send the first one over in a care package, as far ahead of traveling there as is reasonable.  The second animal you keep with you.  When you go, take the second one with you.  The child will have (theoretically) fallen in love with the stuffed toy by the time you get there, and your showing up with an identical one will essentially confirm your identity to the child.  He’ll recognize the bear as familiar, even if he doesn’t recognize you as familiar.  Then, when you leave the orphanage, take the one that’s been there the longest with you.  The new one can be left behind so that the orphanage will experience a net gain of one more toy, and your child will have a familiar toy with him/her that smells and feels like the home he knows.

I found all of this to be a genius idea.  Where it unraveled was in the reality that John doesn’t particularly like / care about stuffed animals.  🙂

Like I said, the orphanage was a ways from Laoag.  More than that though, it was in a pretty remote area in general – out in the country.  John clung to Mary Jane and paid very little attention to us (despite our occasional efforts to connect) the entire ride.

When we got to Shekinah (John’s orphanage), he lit up and called out to the other children.  Not only do I think he loved to play with them and is generally pretty social once he warms up to you, but looking back on it and knowing him a little better now, I think he was also showing off that he had something they didn’t – parents.

We filed into the small building (view pictures of Shekinah Home on Facebook) and met Auring, Sadiri’s wife, who was the last adult to meet until the orphanage director and his family showed up the following Saturday.  The kids all called Sadiri and Auring “papa and mama”, and the orphanage director and his wife “grandpa and grandma”.  I’ll share more about them later.

After a very brief chat with the adults, we turned our attention back to John, who was now playing on the floor with his new car.  The bear had pretty much gotten discarded.  I was in dress clothes (dockers and a nice button up), and Faith was in a skirt and nice blouse.  We had been advised that it is culturally-approriate to dress up when meeting someone in this context, so there we were.  Blazing sun, high humidity, 90ish degrees out, and of course the dog jumped on me with muddy paws the second I stepped out of the van.  It was clear that whoever started the dress up in the Philippines rule should be drug out in the street and beaten.

But in a way it was a blessing.  By the time I got to the moment where John was on the floor ignoring us at the orphanage, I was dripping sweat and had paw prints all over my nice tan pants.  So, the decision was easy.  I remember having the conscious thought that even if I had to throw these clothes away, I’d get on John’s level.  So, I prostrated myself on the floor belly-down, facing John a few feet away.  I rolled the second car to him, which doubled his toy quota.  He was thrilled (not with me, but with the car).  There was also a pair of rubberbands from somewhere; not even sure where they came from.  John had one, and I guess I had the other.  He took the 2nd car, and began to try to use the rubberband to attach it to the first car.  I inched closer and offered help.  It took about 15-20 minutes, but eventually we were playing together, dragging rubberbanded cars around the floor together.

And the rest is history.  He kept warming up until ultimately we were playing and laughing, holding him, swapping sunglasses, throwing him up in the air, and swinging him around.  We took some awesome pictures of all the fun.  Here are a couple of my favorites…

The moments he smiled for the first time and let us pick him up for the first time were huge.  The first real hug happened that day too. After all we’d read about attachment disorder, we were prepared for it to take months for him to bond with us and consider us to be special adults who could be trusted.  As it turns out, God gave us the gift of having all that take place in a couple hours.  How amazing!

Ultimately we ate together, and finally headed back to the cottage where we were to stay as a family that night on the premises.  I’ll tell you more about our accomodations and the next several days of just getting to know John-John soon.

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Philippine Travel Log: Laoag City

Posted on September 30, 2008 by Jeff Block

Following our death defying, icy bus ride, we arrived in Laoag City, capital of Ilocos Norte.  The sun came up at 5:30AM (having no affect on the temperature in the bus), and we rolled into town at 6:30AM.  A big “Laoag City” sign and a pair of golden arches greeted us as we drove over the bridge into the city.  I didn’t get a picture of them due to the loss of feeling in my extremities.  The McDonalds sign tried to tell me (can you halucinate due to extreme cold) that there would be civilization there, but it pretty much lied to me.

The very first thing that was glaringly obvious in our arrival was the poverty.  The people there, and in many of the places we visited in the Philippines, live lives I’m not sure I was able to really accurately picture prior to my trip there.  Both homes and shops were mostly shanties.  Many streets had open sewers (a concrete trench dug next to the road), but I didn’t get close enough to them to get a good look at what was in them.  I suspect just runoff from the streets, since the town didn’t reak of sewage at all.  It did smell pretty bad, but that was a combination of exhaust and animals, not rivers of …… stuff that should be in rivers.

The exhaust was horrible.  Tricycles (mostly), donkey-drawn carriages (okay, so the smell wasn’t *only* the mechanized exhaust – there was other exhaust as well) and a few jeepneys and motorcycles crowded the streets.  BTW, just in case you’re wondering, horses are only for the rich in the Philippines.  Donkeys are the beast-of-burden-of-choice.

I was pretty amazed at how many people there were in such a small area.  The town was probably the size of Collinsville, but I bet there were as many people there as in St. Louis.  Those are wild guesses, but you get the idea.  Geography (land area) = large for the Philippines but not the US.  Population = large for the Philippines but not the US. Density of people = typical for a city in the Philippines, but INSANE for the US.  Even with Chicago’s massive skyscraper apartments, I would be shocked to discover that the number of people per acre or square mile was much different.  And these people weren’t living in high rises, I can tell you that.

The bus dropped us off at the bus station in Laoag, which was just like the one in Manila, only much smaller.  A car from the hotel was waiting for us, and took us on the 15 minute ride to get there (weaving dangerously in and out of traffic, which we were pretty much used to at this point).

The hotel was obviously very nice for the area, but foreign enough and in-the-center-of-radical-poverty enough to shock me when I opened the door to our room.  It looked a little questionable on the outside (of our room), but I was actually taken aback when I entered it.  It’s clear I’m very spoiled (yeah, like we needed this trip to tell us that).

The room was the “Family Suite”.  It had two beds, a kitchen, and a bathroom.  The shower head was European in design, and had a wall-heater for the water.  The first shower I took was scalding, and the second ice cold.  There were two nobs on the shower head.  I’m fairly bright, but in two shower’s worth of time, I couldn’t figure the thing out.  Neither could Faith.  So, we just rolled with it.  Also, you can’t put anything that doesn’t come out of your body into toilets in a world like this one, so that was interesting too.  Naturally, I waited until I got to Laoag to need to … well … drop the kids off at the pool, so to speak, so I don’t know what kind of certifiable genius that makes me!  🙂

Anyway, I really don’t want to be down on the hotel.  It was as clean as a room could be expected to be in that environment (where it was obvious that nobody had anything).  Plus, the courtyard and pool and restaurant were very nice – both well kept and pretty.  We did spend time in the pool, which was quite nice, and we ate almost every meal for the day we were there in the hotel restaurant. Also, the hotel staff was very friendly, and all about customer service – as was pretty much everyone in the Philippines.  That was one of the things that impressed me most about the country in general … but I digress.

Oh, I guess I should have mentioned that up front…  We only stayed at this hotel for 1 night and 2 days, just long enough to recoup from our overnight hypothermia-inducing bus ride, before meeting John.  So, we checked in on Thuesday, 9/30 at like 7AM, and checked out on Wednesday, 10/1 at about 10AM when the van from Shekinah Home (John’s orphanage) retrieved us.  In that time, we ate two breakfasts and one dinner at the hotel.  We ate lunch the day we were there in the city.  Let me get into a little more detail on our meals there.

We pretty much ate breakfast immediately on arrival.  It was very good, and I tried not to imagine the cleanliness factor of the kitchen in which it was prepared.  It consisted of eggs, a Philippine favorite sausage called Longganisa (there has to be pork), rice (there has to be rice), scrambled eggs, fruit, and fruit juice.  The rice came in two varieties: white steamed rice and garlic fried rice.  Now, the Longganisa is one of these foods that stays with you all day and revisits the back of your mouth every couple hours (everyone knows what I mean), so there was no way in Sunny Ilocos that I was getting garlic rice on top of it.  That’s the kinda flavor toothpaste can’t cut through.  (Trust me!)  But other than the fact I was beginning to feel my blood turn chunky with pork, it was a really nice breakfast.

Afterword we cleaned up a bit, and then headed into the city to explore.  We wandered the market mostly, which was a fascinating place – if you mentally picture hundreds of very poor people in a very enclosed dirt-floor warehouse selling trinkets and food, you’ll get the idea pretty fast.  I took a couple pictures (all of which will eventually be on Facebook), but they don’t really do it justice.  We bought a few souveniers, and were very aware that haggling was expected, but I just couldn’t bring myself to argue over pennies with people that obviously didn’t make in a year what most Americans make in a week or two – which is no exaggeration; I learned while there that minimum wage in the Philippines is about $7.50 a DAY, making a $100 bill about 2 weeks wages for someone at that salary, which is very common.

We learned from our guide Jackie (who accompanied us everywhere while we were outside Manila; praise the Lord!) that there were plans to go visit a well-known beach resort with John that week.  This sounded awesome, but we didn’t discover it until after we were in Laoag.  We had consolidated luggage and left two bags at the hotel in Manila.  This of course would have been no problem and would have nothing to do with this story if we were morons and hadn’t left our sun block in one of the bags there rather than bringing it with us to the north.  So, we also looked for it while shopping in town.  Sounds trivial except when you think about the fact that we were standing in a town of Philippinos who had probably never had to wear sunblock one day in their life.  We eventually found it, but paid a good 4x what it would have cost us in the States.  Oh well, better than frying ourselves on the beach just a couple hours north of the equator.

Lunch was at McDonalds.  I picked that out of the (correct) assumption that there’d be air conditioning there.  Score!  Faith got the fried chicken, and I ordered spaghetti … because I was told that John-John really like’s McDo’s spaghetti, so daddy had to test it out.  The sauce was really sweet, had a hint of BBQ flavor, and had chopped up pieces of hot dog in it.  The noodles were the same as what we have here.  Guess pasta is the universal constant.  Just not sauce.

Faith loved the artwork in the main building of the hotel, and I loved the radio station that was playing there.  We spent a couple hours there after pool time in the afternoon to journal and have some quiet time.  Faith took a bunch of pictures of the artwork, including the signature on the painting, but even with a 6+ megapixel camera at close range, I can’t make it out.  Maybe you can help…  Any ideas?

We also learned, while talking to Jackie (this was our first interaction with her not over email), that John had been very excited about our arrival.  Evidently, he had worn out the picture album we sent looking through it, and had gotten up early that morning telling everyone “My mommy and daddy are coming tomorrow!”  Just melted our hearts.  My expectations of his reaction to us had been pretty low, but that definitely started them climbing.  We were pretty excited too.  In fact, neither of us slept much that night, knowing that we would be meeting John in the morning.  We journaled, watched TV (on the 12″ CRT in our room), and studied Ilocano.  Was pretty intense.

The last aspect of the day I want to talk about was dinner.  We ordered way too much food, thinking we would try new local things.  And they were definitely local.  I ordered this blackened catfish dish, mentally picturing this seafood linguini I’d eaten at a restaurant near our house in Chicago.  When it arrived at the table, it was a large bowl with a whole very-black catfish floating in the top.  It looked like someone had lit a catfish on fire, watched it die, and then thrown it into my soup.  And I kid you not, the first thing Jackie said was, “Can I have the head?”  I said, “Why yes.  Feel free.”  Actually all the dishes were interesting.  Faith’s fish had so many bones in it that it made my catfish feel like a boneless fillet.  I couldn’t eat it without imagining my intestines being perpherated.  Jackie ordered chop suey, which we loved, until she told us that the secret to the flavor was diced pig liver.  O.O  The meal TMI just went from bad to worse the longer we sat there.

Okay, I think that’s enough of Laoag.  It was great to see, and I’m sure we’ll visit again someday when John is older, but I definitely don’t see me ordering the catfish.

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Philippine Travel Log: Ice cold bus ride

Posted on September 30, 2008 by Jeff Block

We arrived at the Manila bus station long before the departure of our 10PM bus.  I had anticipated that the bus would not be air conditioned, so I wore a pretty flimsy short sleeved shirt with my jeans.  I had even contemplated wearing shorts, but it’s a bit of a violation of Philippine custom for me to do so, so I caved and wore pants.  Thank God too!

The bus station was a bit scary, actually.  Looked like the kind of place where a drug deal goes down every 3 minutes.  It was extremely hot, and you were pretty much sitting in the middle of a bunch of running busses, so you were breathing the fumes on top of the heat.  Half the people there looked like they were ready to rob us at any second.  It was to the level where our guide Jackie went with me to the door of the mens room when I had to go.  And the bathroom itself was one of the most disgusting places I’ve been in a while.  Not my kind of digs.

The bus itself turned out to be pretty nice.  The seats were cheap, but there was room.  And there was A/C.  The bathroom was a bit scary, though, in the sense that I’m not sure I’d have even physically fit in there let alone be able to be productive.  And this was a pretty long trip.

We got there early, got our tickets, waited in the fumes and heat for a good 90 minutes, then boarded the bus.

Travel tip #7:  Never keep anything of value in your back pocket.
Travel tip #8:  Never let your bags out of your site.

So, I had my wallet in my front right pants pocket, with my hand on it the whole time we were there.  And I followed the guys who took our luggage to put it under the bus, and stood there until they closed the door.  Then we climbed on board.

Like I said, the A/C was awesome at first, since I was dripping sweat from the wait outside.  They were playing music videos from the 80’s and 90’s, which was pretty fun too.  It served as a time killer to try to guess as quickly as possible who the artist was and what song they were singing.

When we got underway, they put on a movie.  I don’t remember what it was, but I remember being glad it was on so I could watch it.  Unlike an airplane, though, they were pumping the sound over the general loudspeakers, not through a personal set of headphones of any kind.  That was bad for everyone, since it was loud enough to disturb the people wanting to sleep, and not loud enough for the people who wanted to see it (like me).  The other disappointment was that after the first movie, they shut off the TV.  I can’t ever sleep on buses or planes, etc, so I was looking forward to a little R&R in front of the tube on the way up (once I discovered that it was there).  Instead, I pulled out the iPod.

The problem was that they had the air conditioning in this bus up so high that I was pretty much frozen solid by the end of the movie.  I looked around, and everyone else had on coats and hats and scarves.  THen there was the dumb American (me) with the short sleeve hawaiian shirt.  Felt like a doofus … an extremely cold doofus.  By the time we got to our destination 8+ hours later, I was a total popsicle.  It’s a wonder I’m not sporting a raging batch of pneumonia.

Travel tip #9:  Traveling by bus in the Philippines?  Bring your parka.

Other than that, the only other stuff that was really noteworthy is…

1) There seem to be no main roads in the Philippines.  We were going from the capital to a significant city on the north end of the island.  There were major roads until we got out of Manila, but it didn’t take long to turn off the paved road.  We navigated dirt roads, rickety wooden bridges, and the like.  The driver was a maniac, going disturbingly fast in a bus on a narrow winding back road.  I was glad Faith was asleep, or she’d have white-knuckled the whole thing.

2) It seemed like no matter where we were or how remote we seemed to be, there were always little side-of-the-road shops open.  All hours of the night.  They were little more than shanties, but they sold fruits, sodas, etc.  I found it very interesting that many of these places seemed to be open through the whole night.  I postulated that there is such poverty that the hope of earning a few pesos on something is enough to keep these little places open at all hours.

We arrived in Laoag City at about 6:30AM, and I had never been so happy to get out of the A/C as I was that morning.

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Philippine Travel Log: An Unexpected Day of Rest

Posted on September 29, 2008 by Jeff Block

We woke up early on Monday (6AM) because we expected to be checking out of the hotel, visiting an orphanage outside of Mnila (not John’s orphanage), then touring a rather famous (in the Philippines) volcano nearby, then taking the bus north to Ilocos Norte overnight.  We were a little stressed about the whole thing for two reasons:  1) the bus ride was rumored to take about 13 hours, and I was a bit nervous that it wouldn’t be airconditioned – visions of riding between the chickens and the goat on a jeepney kept me up at night – and 2) we didn’t know what to do with ourselves between the early afternoon (when we assumed the tours would end) and 7:30PM (when the bus left for the north).

After breakfast, we called Che, an employee of our adoption agency’s partner in Manila, who coordinated all the details of our trip, including providing guides for outings like the one planned on Monday.  Without giving much of a reason, she postponed the trip to the orphanage and the volcano.  We were a bit surprised, but not put out.  It was nice not to have to worry about the logistics of dealing with all that in one day.  So, instead, a day of rest.

We both got computer time in the business center, to play with Facebook primarily.  Then we went swimming for a couple hours.  Jeff got a touch of sunburn, but just a little bit.  Faith’s native American genes protected her as usual.  Jeff also worked with the travel desk at the hotel in the continuing saga of making sure that John’s reservation / plane ticket back to the States was foolproof.

Che met us at the hotel, and introduced us to a couple who had just adopted a sibling group of three beautiful children.  We invited her to have lunch with us, and she took us to this local chain Asian buffet.  It was mostly Philippino food, but some Chinese and Japanese as well.  It was huge and inexpensive, but the food was mediocre quality.  Definitely plenty of pork to keep the tradition alive.

After lunch, Faith took a nap while Jeff re-packed for the trip to Ilocos Norte.  We then hung by the pool a bit longer, and got to visit with the new adoptive parents we’d met earlier in the day.  Che was awseome in that she arranged with the hotel to give us a 7PM checkout time with no extra fee to stay late.  That was very convenient, since Jackie met us at about 7:30PM to head to the bus station.  There we caught the 10PM bus to Laoag City.

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