My house hit by Typhoon Ondoy

During the flood...

Water level in relation to the first floor ceiling...

After the flood... (my mom pointing to the floodline on the wall)

Back to some old habit

After giving up my mountain bike to an uncle who needs to practice regular cycling following his mild stroke, I finally decided to replace that 10-year-old mountain bike (purchased in 1997) with a new one. Last Easter Sunday, Joy and I braved the harsh summer heat and headed to Raon, Quiapo where there's a line of bicycle shops where one can supposedly find the cheapest bikes, parts and accessories. An hour of haggling with the rather cunning shop attendant saw me opting for this hunky and clever-looking mountain bike you see on the picture above. The good thing about buying in Raon was that you could simply choose one of the bikes on display, and tell them to upgrade some bike parts as you wish. I did ask them to change a couple of the original parts, so mine turned out about double the original price, but I still believe it was a good buy.

My first mountain bike was silver-painted and had an armrest that resembled the bending horns of a bull, and it was my companion whenever I hit the roads at night from my house in Sta. Mesa to places as far as UP Diliman, White Plains, Greenhills and Roxas Boulevard.

My new bike is now almost a month-old, and it does feel good to be back to some old habits.

DELE Superior

After about four months since the test, Instituto Cervantes has finally released the results of the DELE which I took last November. It's a test meant to measure your proficiency in Spanish, much like its counterparts such as TOEFL, IELTS, JLPT, etc. Upon checking their website last week, I found out that I passed nivel superior, the highest level there is, and now it's time to wait for the diploma to arrive from Spain perhaps in 6 months' time.

I would have been happier if it were the quinto EOI diploma (had to drop my quinto class when I left Spain) but really, news of my passing the DELE kind of fed my need for good news these days...I'm happy!

What's a good title for a newsletter?

There are plenty of things capable of inducing a heart attack but this is the one that almost killed me. We're currently conceptualizing a newsletter on the topic of disability and one of the first things that we need is a title for it. I asked this person who's supposed to work with me on this for a suggestion, and while I was expecting her to come up with "normal" titles such as the quarterly update, herald, the times or something, she surprised me with two very complex suggestions:

1. Self-Presentational Explanations of Behavior for each colleagues
2. Disability Handmaids thru Individuals

What the $#%@?

Deep. Profound...

Fortune plant

A few days before year-end, my father excitedly asked me one morning whether my digicam had some battery power left. I did not understand the question at first because he would normally have nothing to do with the digicam. But as I would find out at that very moment, the Fortune plant standing right outside our house had started to bear some flowers so he wanted me to photograph it. He believes that the flowers are a sign of luck because Fortune plants are not known to bear flowers, and if they ever do, it would have taken them many years to produce the tiniest sprout. In fact, in our case, we had to wait for at least 18 years.

Apart from my father, our Chinese neighbor was quick to point out with a knowing smile spread all over her face that the flowers indeed could mean good luck. If she and my father are both correct, then the fact that my father got three out of six numbers right in yesterday's lottery (he would usually get none of them right) and that he won P1,000 for himself was the start of this so-called "good" luck. So now, elated over the lottery results, he seems more confident than ever to continue betting in the lottery until the day that he bags the jackpot.

I'm not exactly superstitious but I have something in my heart that I truly desire. The Plant knows what it is.

A quiet day

The only reminder that today is my birthday, aside from my having to buy a Goldilocks cake before coming to work this morning, is the slew of greetings I've been receiving in my mobile. It all started on New Year's eve, when a friend of mine in the neighborhood got drunk and announced in his booming voice on the videoke microphone that the store owner who lives on our street had set up outside his house, that hey everybody, January 2 is Tony's birthday! Some 12 hours after that, when the clock was a few minutes away from January 2, another neighbor followed suit by messaging me happy birthday, apparently wanting to be the first one to send me her greetings. Some four minutes after the clock had struck 12 midnight, my mobile beeped again with a message from another friend asking for a birthday treat.

When I arrived in the office this morning, I was expecting today to be an ordinary day, quiet, calm and without unnecessary fuss, because for a long time I'd been celebrating this occasion in a sort of low-profile way. That's probably because celebrating your birthday at the tail-end of the holidays is an anti-climax. And so today has been rather quiet, just as I wanted, with only a small cake to somehow mark the occasion in the office, except that my mobile has been getting quite a lot of birthday greetings. In Spain, I would receive about three or four greetings in my email or mobile. But since this morning, messages have been coming in even from people I did not expect would mark this date on their calendars. That's actually great and something to be thankful for.

It reminds you, for better or for worse, that you are in your country.

Dark beauty

Some three weeks ago we spent a couple of nights in Legaspi City to organize the culminating activity of a disaster project of ours in Bicol in response to the damages caused by typhoon Reming in the last quarter of 2006. There was a tour that took our team together with some local partners and donor organizations to the evacuation centers, avalanche-hit areas, community hospitals, relocation sites and to the famous Mount Mayon which is said to be the volcano with the "most perfect" cone. The volcano was majestic and the sight of it commands your attention even as your plane lands on the airport. It was so pretty it made me forget for a while that I despised everything around me at that time...and that's just priceless!

Overworked

I've been calling in sick for the past three days because of a bad flu accompanied by a fever and I still consider it a blessing in disguise even if I'm about to consume all my leave credits for the next nine months in just one week. Why? Because for the past two months or so I've been behaving like a workaholic Japanese salaryman. I juggle two jobs at the same time in such a way that I have no rest day during the week. I have a regular day job at a Frech NGO where I work full-time from Monday to Friday, but aside from that I do graveyard shifts on weekends as a part-time Spanish-speaking agent for the booming call center industry in Makati.

So it feels good to be just at home and taking a rest, even if my body feels damp all the time and even if just yesterday my stomach would not admit any substance apart from fruits and hot tea. I swear I could vomit just at the thought of sinigang, nilaga and other oily soup stuff your elders, if you were born in the Philippines, would give you in order to supposedly make you feel better. I don't exactly like having to live with my parents but when I'm feeling sick as hell, that's one of the moments I'm truly grateful that they're here to take care of me.

Chasing deadlines

And so it's been roughly 1.5 months since I left Spain and came home to Manila, and now I find myself in front of my laptop in a room very much different from the one I had in Málaga. It's a room I had lived in practically my whole life but now I must get used to it over again. Since the day I arrived, I have been quite busy catching up with family and friends I didn't realize I hadn't produced any writing until now. So, it's taking me some time to finally write this project document. There's now a half-filled page on the computer screen with some occasional scattered notes at the bottom. If I were in Spain, I would probably finish this assignment in a flash because all the information and supporting documents that I need for it are all in. However, there seems to be a harsh spell of hibernation wreaked upon my person that I can't help it at all. To my suprise, I even forgot that the deadline for the document was Tuesday. Somehow, I mistakenly lost track of the passing of the days I thought that February 20 was still Thursday. That gave me some justification to put off the task and go to a friend's house yesterday night for some beer and pizza. Ufff...had I known, had I known!!

Happy birthday to me

Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to me. I've just turned 28 today and it feels quite odd because I'm leaving Spain tomorrow to go back to the Philippines for good. For the past two weeks I've been very busy meeting up with friends to say goodbye, packing up my stuff, closing bank accounts, paying last-minute bills and simply trying to get over with a thousand things that one normally has to finish when leaving a country. Once I arrive in Manila, numerous lunch/dinner dates will be arranged to meet up with old friends that I haven't seen for a long while, and surely most of these people will ask me: Why did you come back? Shouldn't you have stuck it out in Spain, considering that you already made it there? And I wouldn't be surprised if some of them would think that I was stupid for making this move. Truth be known, it was a hard decision to leave Spain, and Europe for that matter, because I will be leaving behind wonderful people, places and a lifestyle that I've grown increasingly attached to over the past two years. However, I thought hard about it and no matter from what perspective I looked at it, reason wouldn't have me stay much longer. Why? Because I felt that if I did, this country -- and my personal circumstances here -- would shape me into someone that I don't want to be professionally. And I can't live with that. Thus, I finally decided to put an end to this chapter of my life and start a new one in Manila. So...goodbye Spain!...but...to all my friends in the Philippines, see you soon!

Goodbye home sweet home 2