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Aug. 28th, 2013 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mari4212So, a longer version of living in Baguio City, now that I have better internet.
I got into Manilla late their Friday night. Eastern Standard time it was about 11 am, but the Philippines are currently exactly twelve hours separated from that, so it was 11 at night. I'd been in transit for a little over 24 hours at that point. Which, yeah, not the most fun. Coach on a 747 is not all that comfortable for twelve hours of flight time. They fed us full meals three times, but I can't really recommend the food that much.
The major stress of the flight was actually at the very beginning. I walked into the airport in Dayton expecting the same easy check-in I'd had on all of my prior trips, only to have the people at the desk tell me that I couldn't get on the plane. There was an issue with the fact that I had such a long stay planned, and the visa I was going to be getting in country was supposedly only good for a month with no way of renewing it. Which, yeah, I knew wasn't the case. They've been sending YASCers to the Philippines for a while, the DFMS knows what it's doing to set these up correctly. I called one of the people in charge of YASC and rather frantically explained the problem, only to find out that the other girl heading to the Philippines had had the same issue, and it had been solved by calling someone high enough up the Delta hierarchy to justify it and explain that there was actually a way we were going to get the visa extended for a year. I returned to the desk and had them call far enough up the chain of command to get told the same thing, and was allowed through.
Compared to that, walking through customs and immigration in the Philippines, even that late at night and with nearly no sleep on the plane, was a breeze.
Andrew, the YASCer currently in the Philippines, picked us up from the airport and we drove a bit through metro Manilla to where the Cathedral and the national church offices were. They poured us into bed at the guest house. I think I got a few hours of sleep, but me and transitions are not exactly friendly. I woke up a few hours before dawn and watched as the sky gradually brightened and birds and roosters woke up first. I also found out that at least at the guest house in Manilla, they don't have hot water for showers. It makes sense, Manilla is so hot year-round that normally the last thing you'd want to do is add extra warmth when you wash up. But it was 3 am, my room had an air-conditioner that had actually been working a bit too much for my taste, and I'm shivering under a cold shower until I turned it off and just went with the two bucket method they also had available in the shower stall. Luckily the guest house at least stocked towels, so I could dry off and warm up a bit with the friction. Elsewhere in the Philippines, there aren't many towels. Nobody has electric dryers, and there's six months of the year where you are hard-pressed to dry clothing, much less something that holds as much water as a towel.
Our days in Manilla were pretty unscheduled. We met a few of the people in the National Office, we got cells that would work in the Philippines, and on Sunday we went to the second services at the Cathedral and tried to go and visit Taal volcano. I say tried, because the rainy season means that when we got out to the volcano and went to a restaurant that was supposed to have a good view it was so foggy we couldn't see much of anything. Really, the best thing about that restaurant, since we didn't have much of a view, was that there was a live band of the semi-Mariachi strain playing "The Tennessee Waltz" at us.
That's been one of my other big surprises about the Philippines. Especially in Baguio the most popular genres of music are folk and 90/early 2000s era country. Seriously, everything I grew up listening to when the country music station was the only one we could get clearly in the basement of my house is on the radio and mp3 players here.
Monday morning we did visa work with the national office, and then I was driven up to Baguio. With Lloyd and Andrew driving it was about a five hour drive with low levels of traffic. Apparently on a bus it's closer to seven hours or longer. Traffic and driving in the Philippines is rather terrifying. Most of the time the highway was a two-lane road, so whenever Lloyd wanted to overtake a slower type of vehicle he would switch into the lane of oncoming traffic. Everyone does it here, so every so often as you drive you are suddenly confronted by someone driving straight at you and hoping that the correct lane lets you or them back in in time to avoid a collision.
I'm going to post a few pictures of the drive up, once we entered the mountains. They were so beautiful, and my pictures are somewhat blurry, so you'll only get a bit of a taste for it, but imagine driving through these for two hours to get into the city:
Currently I'm living on the cathedral compound in Baguio, at a combination restaurant/inn run by the diocese of the North Central Philippines. That's temporary, in a month I'll be moved to what everyone here is calling a mansion that isn't quite done yet. I've met with the President and the chaplain of Easter College, and we've figured out to some extent what courses I will be teaching and to what grade levels. It looks like I will be working mostly with Christian Ed classes for the high school students, but I might also do some one-off lectures and discussions for the college students on the relationship between science and religion. This is what happens when you tell people that you majored in both Biology and Religion in college. I will squee more about the school and especially visiting the weaving room in some following post, because it really was incredible.
Once we get my schedule set up at the school they'll also schedule me to work with the development office of the church, which is a way to get me more integrated into the larger community and visiting more of the Philippines, seeing how the programs are working.
I got into Manilla late their Friday night. Eastern Standard time it was about 11 am, but the Philippines are currently exactly twelve hours separated from that, so it was 11 at night. I'd been in transit for a little over 24 hours at that point. Which, yeah, not the most fun. Coach on a 747 is not all that comfortable for twelve hours of flight time. They fed us full meals three times, but I can't really recommend the food that much.
The major stress of the flight was actually at the very beginning. I walked into the airport in Dayton expecting the same easy check-in I'd had on all of my prior trips, only to have the people at the desk tell me that I couldn't get on the plane. There was an issue with the fact that I had such a long stay planned, and the visa I was going to be getting in country was supposedly only good for a month with no way of renewing it. Which, yeah, I knew wasn't the case. They've been sending YASCers to the Philippines for a while, the DFMS knows what it's doing to set these up correctly. I called one of the people in charge of YASC and rather frantically explained the problem, only to find out that the other girl heading to the Philippines had had the same issue, and it had been solved by calling someone high enough up the Delta hierarchy to justify it and explain that there was actually a way we were going to get the visa extended for a year. I returned to the desk and had them call far enough up the chain of command to get told the same thing, and was allowed through.
Compared to that, walking through customs and immigration in the Philippines, even that late at night and with nearly no sleep on the plane, was a breeze.
Andrew, the YASCer currently in the Philippines, picked us up from the airport and we drove a bit through metro Manilla to where the Cathedral and the national church offices were. They poured us into bed at the guest house. I think I got a few hours of sleep, but me and transitions are not exactly friendly. I woke up a few hours before dawn and watched as the sky gradually brightened and birds and roosters woke up first. I also found out that at least at the guest house in Manilla, they don't have hot water for showers. It makes sense, Manilla is so hot year-round that normally the last thing you'd want to do is add extra warmth when you wash up. But it was 3 am, my room had an air-conditioner that had actually been working a bit too much for my taste, and I'm shivering under a cold shower until I turned it off and just went with the two bucket method they also had available in the shower stall. Luckily the guest house at least stocked towels, so I could dry off and warm up a bit with the friction. Elsewhere in the Philippines, there aren't many towels. Nobody has electric dryers, and there's six months of the year where you are hard-pressed to dry clothing, much less something that holds as much water as a towel.
Our days in Manilla were pretty unscheduled. We met a few of the people in the National Office, we got cells that would work in the Philippines, and on Sunday we went to the second services at the Cathedral and tried to go and visit Taal volcano. I say tried, because the rainy season means that when we got out to the volcano and went to a restaurant that was supposed to have a good view it was so foggy we couldn't see much of anything. Really, the best thing about that restaurant, since we didn't have much of a view, was that there was a live band of the semi-Mariachi strain playing "The Tennessee Waltz" at us.
That's been one of my other big surprises about the Philippines. Especially in Baguio the most popular genres of music are folk and 90/early 2000s era country. Seriously, everything I grew up listening to when the country music station was the only one we could get clearly in the basement of my house is on the radio and mp3 players here.
Monday morning we did visa work with the national office, and then I was driven up to Baguio. With Lloyd and Andrew driving it was about a five hour drive with low levels of traffic. Apparently on a bus it's closer to seven hours or longer. Traffic and driving in the Philippines is rather terrifying. Most of the time the highway was a two-lane road, so whenever Lloyd wanted to overtake a slower type of vehicle he would switch into the lane of oncoming traffic. Everyone does it here, so every so often as you drive you are suddenly confronted by someone driving straight at you and hoping that the correct lane lets you or them back in in time to avoid a collision.
I'm going to post a few pictures of the drive up, once we entered the mountains. They were so beautiful, and my pictures are somewhat blurry, so you'll only get a bit of a taste for it, but imagine driving through these for two hours to get into the city:
Currently I'm living on the cathedral compound in Baguio, at a combination restaurant/inn run by the diocese of the North Central Philippines. That's temporary, in a month I'll be moved to what everyone here is calling a mansion that isn't quite done yet. I've met with the President and the chaplain of Easter College, and we've figured out to some extent what courses I will be teaching and to what grade levels. It looks like I will be working mostly with Christian Ed classes for the high school students, but I might also do some one-off lectures and discussions for the college students on the relationship between science and religion. This is what happens when you tell people that you majored in both Biology and Religion in college. I will squee more about the school and especially visiting the weaving room in some following post, because it really was incredible.
Once we get my schedule set up at the school they'll also schedule me to work with the development office of the church, which is a way to get me more integrated into the larger community and visiting more of the Philippines, seeing how the programs are working.