One Last Holiday Hurrah

The malls do an amazing job with holiday decorations here. I never quite got around to posting this last month, but I was so impressed with this mall in particular (the Podium in Ortigas) that I had to share:

The Reset Button

I figured I'd better write something to keep my average above one post per month.

Sigh. I had such great plans for the New Year. Yet here I am mid-month, all those good intentions nothing more than a list I made and stuck in a drawer somewhere.

I blame it on that huge red Reset Button (which was pushed against my will, I might add). You know the one where life throws huge, uncomfortable changes at you, new problems and plot twists to throw you off your game, and you adjust, realign, make peace with How Things Are Now, and even manage to make wonderful new friends, amazing friends, and then THEY MOVE AWAY. To CHINA.

I feel like I'm eleven years old, looking out the back window of the car as we drive away from my childhood home to start a new life somewhere else. It STINKS.

Now that I've had my tantrum...

Yes, our most wonderful friends the Openshaws have moved to China. We went to Singapore together, shared Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, went to movies together and played goofy board games and generally commisserated about life here in this weird, weird place. Now we're left behind in the Philippines waiting for the glacially slow adoption process to be finalized before we can figure out where to go from here, and when. The lawyer says plan for June or July. We were hoping for April. And some dark, ominous murmur deep in my gut says it will never be over.

So I blame my lack of productivity on dragging my shredded resolve back together one more time, hitting Reset and gearing up for this final stretch of our time overseas. I have to keep reminding myself that there are lots of good things about being here, that ultimately we're happy, we're blessed, we have our little girl already and are just waiting for it to be official.

Plus there are things to look forward to: the court hearing at the end of January, my dad's visit in February, and a trip to China in March. And if any more Reset Buttons rear their ugly heads in the meantime, I'm slowly learning that instead of reaching for the Self-Destruct I can grab the controls and pull up, dang it, pull up, right out of that tailspin and into the great beyond.

Pocoyo!

As a parent, I've suffered through a lot of terrible children's television.

As someone with an avid interest in children's literature--and, by extension, children's entertainment in general--I get excited when I find a true gem, a show that gets it right in every way possible:

Pocoyo!

It's adorable. It's simple, colorful, playful. Sly. Funny. Gentle. Incredibly original. From the music to the characters' facial expressions and body language...sigh. Masterful. It's never didactic, and it frequently makes me laugh out loud. The web site's nice too (http://www.pocoyo.com/).

Go. Go watch this with your kids, or on your own. It's comforting to see stuff of this quality on the air for the little ones.

Oh, and another great show for guaranteed giggles: Shaun the Sheep. The lettuce-as-soccer-ball episode gets me every time.

Back in the Groove

The bummer about being sick--other than the sick part--is losing my groove: the feeling normal and/or productive groove, the parenting groove, the errands groove and exercise groove and writing groove. By default, grooves that fall a lot further down the list, like the blogging groove, remain AWOL long after I get better.

But there are good things about being sick, such as:

-The glorious feeling of being well again;

-Sympathy presents from your spouse--namely, a nine-foot Christmas tree that fills our front room with majestic, twinkling splendor. And if that sounds overblown, then I'm not even close to doing it the justice it deserves. I love, love, love it.

In other news, now that the kids are on school break we've been looking for things to do. Five minutes from the house is a new little zoo shaped like a life-size reproduction of Noah's Ark. They have tigers, monkeys, birds, a petting zoo, a crocodile, lizards, and...

an orangutan!

I think the kids were there too, and I'm pretty sure I got cute pictures of them with bunnies and stuff, but this is the part I'll never forget. Just...wow. It was awesome. One of the coolest things I've ever experienced.

I might have to go back again next week.

Road Trip

We went for a Sunday drive a few weeks back to escape the city. We made a huge loop, going east and then south through the mountains and skirting a lake called Laguna de Bay, returning to Manila via the SLEX, or South Luzon Expressway.

After six hours we were awfully tired of the car. But the mountain air and the constant sea of green made it all worthwhile. Along the side of the road you could buy coconuts, wicker furniture--even Christmas decorations.

The view:

These cuties were selling quail eggs when we stopped at a lookout point to take pictures:

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Question (thanks, Angela!): How come it's common practice not to talk to your neighbors [in the Philippines]?

Answer: I have no idea! We tried introducing ourselves/engaging in small talk a couple of times, especially when a new family moved in across the street. It was perfectly friendly, but did nothing to establish any sort of neighborly relationship. People still prefer to stay within their enclosed spaces. Most of them honk their car horns when they come home, wait for their domestic help to open their huge front gates, then pull into their driveways while the gates are closed behind them. Gives you warm fuzzies, no?

Last month the Vice President of the Philippines attended a party a few houses down from ours. Apparently there were security personnel swarming all over the place. I heard about it second-hand, though, since I was tucked safely away within our own little walled fortress and had no idea anything was going on.

In contrast, the people you do see on a regular basis are the domestic workers. They're out walking dogs, gardening, tending children, or chatting with each other. They smile frequently and some of them are on friendly terms with our kids.

The antisocial stuff is obviously a learned behavior of people with money here, whether it's a matter of security, privacy, or just plain being uppity (or maybe some combination of those). It's all about perspective, I guess. Compared to the circumstances in which most Filipinos live, our way of life is wasteful in the extreme. Yes, the company pays our rent, and it's an amazing perk, and more house than we could ever afford on our own. Yet it's not so different from the standard of living we're used to in the US. But to those outside the village walls, it might as well be the moon.

Tricks and Treats

Halloween in the Philippines is hilarious, and slightly surreal.

Trick-or-treating does take place, in a weird sort of way. Many of the malls and businesses sponsor trick-or-treat events, usually a few days before the actual holiday. But the house-to-house routine really only happens inside the villages.

A village is a community of very large houses surrounded by a ginormous barbed-wire, cinder-block wall and a gate with guards. There are at least a dozen villages just within our little corner of Metro Manila. The villages are home to politicians, diplomats, executives--and foreigners with expat packages. Each individual house is surrounded by its own wall and gate. You interact with your neighbors as little as possible. The only family within our village we speak to and see on a regular basis is the American family down the street.

So. On Halloween each village opens its doors to trick-or-treaters from all walks of life, regardless of race, economic status, age, or the presence of a costume. Our village cheated and did this three days early. But the village down the street, where our good friends the Openshaws live, waited for the 31st and we were all about getting the authentic experience. Except not cold, dark, or spooky. We settled for hot and humid, and controlled chaos. And a marching band.
It works like this: The home owners (those who participate) send their house help to stand outside the gate with a basket or sit at a table and pass out treats. No Snickers or Reeses or Skittles or even Tootsie Rolls or Dum-Dum pops, unfortunately. Imported candy is expensive here, it melts, and there are HUNDREDS of trick-or-treaters, at least half of them well past puberty. Instead they pass out local treats: little bags of chips or hard candies or wafer cookies or whatever. All KINDS of strange stuff. Tiny cups of gelatin (very popular here), gummies--even something called Totoy Tongniks Crunchy Corniks (garlic flavor). It's a plus for our kids, though. Keeps Mom and Dad from raiding their stash.

The marching band

We had a blast. The atmosphere was festive. Giddy, even. I couldn't keep up with the eight-year-old. The five-year-old's feet got tired. The one-year-old was done after a couple of houses. But they looked so cute! And they got something so far and yet still so very close to the authentic experience. (Mom and Dad even got chili and hoagies at the Openshaws afterward.) Next Halloween when we've moved home and the kids are complaining about the cold, I can pull out these pictures and remind them of the trippy, tropical Halloweens half a world away.

Kellie, Amaya, and Avery