Sunday March 7, 2016
Okay. Let’s backtrack to yesterday. Imagine this scenario:
You meet someone on an International dating site. You correspond with them and agree to meet them. She stated that she was taking a taxi to your hotel, but then shows up driving her “sister’s car”.
Do you get in? Is she going to drive around the block and stop? Is her boyfriend going to grab me, beat me up, kidnap me, force me to withdraw the maximum my VISA can take each day until I run out of money? Is this the last of me? (apparently not since I’m writing this)
It went fine. My new friend Joevie (there, a name…no picture yet without her permission) picked me up and we headed out to SM mall, a place her coworkers suggested as the best place to get a phone. She said that she drove her mother all around so we should be fine. Fine??????, my god, she could be a taxi driver any day. Cars (and ours) continue moving slowly and cut people off who are walking in crosswalks!!! Every merge is a game of chicken at 5 miles an hour, and just like a taxi, crossing into another lane doesn’t matter. The highlight was on the way back. We needed to turn around in the other direction. She casually did a u-turn blocking traffic. The car couldn’t make the turn so she calmly, slowly, did a 3-point turn and we headed on our way. I would have been slamming the car into reverse and peeling out as fast as possible and waving an apology to all behind me. No big deal to block the traffic. We had to turn around so we did.
We found a phone shop to her liking (what the hell would I know??!!). I settled on an Android phone, local brand, $60 with $2 prepay card. My Visa debit card would not clear because their system could only draw from a savings account?????? No problem. Went around the corner to an atm machine, and, and, and, it would only allow me to withdraw from savings (it is empty).
So, we found some rest rooms and I dragged out my second wallet from my velcro internal pocket and I pulled out my credit card (hassle…now I’m just going to keep the card in the pocket). Back at the phone store my card was accepted and all was well. What is strange is that the phone can take 2 sims so I can use it here and have a sim for home. Pretty cool. We finished the eveing with a nice dinner, some conversation, and then back home to my hotel. That was the end of the night but the start of a new friendship.
Now for today. I am still too weak to travel much and Joevie told me that I needed a couple more days to get acclimated because the beaches I’m headed towards are HOT (and yes, you eventually will get a picture of me on a white sand beach drinking San Miguel beer. That’s WHY I came here…for a photo op!)
Today will be my first adventure: Malling in the Philippines. I plan to spend an entire day at a mall, treating it as a day at a national park or a monument. I can’t wait to experience my first real adventure.