Sunday, January 6, 2008: Expats and Instant Coffee	Return to Journal TOC >>
I wake up early again. Weirdly, I seem to be a morning person in the Philippines, although I'm mostly nocturnal in the States. It may have something to do with all the roosters. It doesn't seem to be the time difference (12 or 13 hours, depending on whether the U.S. is on Daylight Savings Time), and my body adjusted to the trip quickly. I just wake up earlier here. The cell phone I'm using is buzzing again, although nobody has the number. It's another of the frequent text message-based scams that are very common here. Basically, imagine your typical Nigerian letter scam or Irish Lottery scam sent by text message. We decide to try breakfast at hotel this morning. When we get down to the courtyard the calico cats are playing again; as we watch, a very nordic looking man who seems to be a long-term guest brings them a plate of dry food. The pensionne's four-item breakfast menu is geared to expats, like the hotel itself. (Theoretically, they have a dinner menu as well, but I never see anyone eating anything besides breakfast there.) We order eggs and toast - which will be the first bread I've eaten since we arrived. It supposedly comes with orange juice (although they actually serve Tang) and brewed coffee. Brewing is not something you can take for granted in the Philippines, where most of the coffee is 1970s-style instant (despite the fact that they grow coffee here). The brewed coffee is still pretty bad, as is the toast, which comes with a tiny pat of ersatz butter and a teaspoonful of jam. Like every other food provider here, the napkins are tiny. It's a beautiful sunny morning. There are a few others eating or reading newspapers in the courtyard - the nordic guy (who turns out to be from Norway) and his friend, an older Malaysian man; a couple from Denmark with their two very blond children, who are here for three weeks as part of an eight-month trip through this part of the world (they've just come from Australia and Thailand is next); a couple of Asian women. We chat a little, but few of the other visitors are really social. The locals are similar: very friendly if you ask them something (or they ask you something) but baffled if you say hello on the street. After several days of no e-mail (and with the pensionne's connection still down) we walk across the street to the internet cafe, which is located upstairs from a disco. The minimum charge is only p10 (about a quarter), which gets you a slowish connection on a Windows XP system with a Korean-style keyboard. Luckily for those of us who don't touch type, it also has American characters in the secondary positions.
<< Previous	Next >>