White Clouds and Cotton Candy

I'm in the office right now and I don't have much to do at this time obviously. The work here is not as hard as what I usually do in Manila. The operations all happen there. In here, it's all just coordination and reporting with the client. But despite the lighter workload, there is great pressure since whatever questions, requests, and problems that they have with the output of the offshore guys in Manila are all directed towards me. It's something that I have to grow into and deal with. I'm confident that given time I'll be able to adjust and do just fine. I still have some apprehensions because I'm all alone here with no one to watch out for my back. But I trust that the good Lord will guide me in the path that I should go. The place here is great. It's like I'm in happy land. The grass is really green and has no sign of brown patches anywhere and it is well-cut too. It reminds me of the setting of Teletubbies (hence the happy land term). It is also very progressive and modern. What is surprising though is that there are no skyscrapers or some humongous modern structure as one might expect from an advanced country but everything is all laid out in flat structures. The tallest building that I spotted was just 10 to 12 floors high. Either they have a limit on building length or the planes just keep them at that height. Practically every time you'd look up you can see a plane flying, landing, or taking off. This place is also the terminal of Northwest Airlines, NWA planes go here when they need to either sleep or rest. That of course explains why there are lots of planes but not why they have flat buildings. It appears that the presence of a lot of real estate dealers in the area could be the answer. Land must be pretty reasonable here. They might not have skyscrapers but the buildings are all laid out wide. In the place where I'm working, the building is only 6 floors high but it's shaped like a W and it's bigger than two Megamalls. If you count the area from the fences it can encompass about an eighth of UP Diliman. The food is, well, great but I'm trying to hold back for two reasons. One is that I am dieting and the prices if converted back to pesos, are nothing short of horrendous. Just this lunch I ordered skewered chicken and coke and it cost me over five dollars. It was very filling but I would have cringed at the thought of spending over 275 pesos for lunch. Dinner costs so much more. My allowance is more than enough but I'm thinking of saving it so that I can travel to several states during my vacation leave. I can even buy a laptop if I really save enough. I'm living in a townhouse with five other people. It's an excellent place. It's like living in a hotel only with no room service. That means I get to fix my own bed, prepare my own food and share in the cleaning of the house. No one here trusts that I can cook so I get to have the unenviable task of washing the dishes after every meal because most of them do the cooking. Me and two others that are. Learning how to cook good food offers the only real freedom from the oppression of washing the dishes. I need to learn ASAP since the sooner I get to cook the sooner I get to stop doing the dishes. Despite the vastly limitless employment opportunities, I'm not here to further my career as a dishwasher. I would have made a killing in the black market had I learned that there was a demand for pancit canton and adobo here. I would have brought a whole box of pancit canton and rekado, sold them, and then buy myself a nice digicam and an iPod mini. Immigration would have been strict though. Carrying stuff that many would surely attract attention at the airports. I don't have enough credibility to pass off as an eccentric chef but I could be mistaken for a pancit canton smuggler. If ever I got deported because of that I don't know how I would have handled having the reputation of being a pancit canton smuggler. I would have to put a paper bag over my head. Then again I could always stamp the logo of, say, "Lucky Me" on the bag and then charge them for advertisement. Just the other night I woke up to a sound very much like a police siren or that of an ambulance or firetruck. I have seen the movie twister and I knew that it was some sort of tornado warning. It was 2am and the thought of a giant swirling force suddenly sucking us up in our beds made me wonder if we should go to a basement or something. But I guess that stuff only happens in disaster movies. That'll be all for now. Until the next time.