These are some notes that I made during the day we spent at Villa Escudero:

We’ve had lunch — about 10:30 — at the waterfall. A river was dammed up and the water runs over the dam down into the river gorge. Tables have been set up in the river in the gorge. That’s where you eat, with water up to your ankles running over your feet. It did cool off the feet! Of course, I don’t have appropriate attire. So, I rolled up the pant legs and left the shoes and socks on shore and waded in for lunch.

Lunch was buffet style with chicken, pork, and fish plus several kinds of fruit. Since I had no breakfast, it tasted pretty good.

The doesn’t seem to be much more here to see after the museum. The pool complex is large with three different pools. One is for the children, the other two for adults or bigger children. It’s bright sun in the pools so only the diehards are in the pool. One of the Pocatello guys has bright, white skin. He’ll be a lobster pretty soon. There isn’t much more to do here, so I’m going to find better shade with a real chair, and get a Sprite.

It’s just 5 p.m. We’re getting on the bus to head back. The afternoon did include a cultural arts show from 2 until about 3:30. It was pretty good. I managed to find a good sitting place after the show.

The name of this place is Villa Escudero Plantation and Resort. Swimming and related volleyball or basketball is the main draw. It was mostly families or large work groups. You were generally expected to show up in the earlier morning and stay at least to mid-afternoon. It’s far enough away that coming for just a couple of hours is impractical. Those that went swimming got sunburned and will feel it tomorrow.

This was a plantation of the Escudero family. The originator came from Spain, married a Filipino woman here and never returned to Spain. He had one son who did the major development of the coconut plantation. The originator came over shortly after the Spanish were awarded the Philippines in the early 1500’s by the Pope when he divided up the new world between Spain and Portugal. Apparently it’s still a working plantation and this resort is in a small part of the estate.

I think we’re stopping for dinner somewhere….

It’s 7:30 and we’ve been in heavy traffic for the past hour. It’s solid traffic both ways moving at about 10 mph in fits and starts. We haven’t stopped for dinner yet, but that’s supposed to be Real Soon Now.

We did make a short stop about 5:45 for 10 minutes in San Pablo at a place looking out over a lake and some fish farms. The area does a lot of tourist business because of the seven lakes around the area and the tall, dormant volcanoes to be climbed. Mt. Makiling has three peaks and Mt. Banahaw is supposed to have mystical healing powers in it’s springs and streams. The town was setting up for their annual celebration which starts on Monday.

Then just as suddenly, we turned into the area where the hotel is located! It was after 8 p.m. and the decision was made to skip dinner and just go home. That was just fine with me! We were dropped off at our hotel and we had a small dinner about 9 p.m. and then off to bed. The day was good, actually. I certain that I wouldn’t have made any better use of it than going over to the plantation. I saw a lot of countryside that I would otherwise not have seen. Spending the time with the local staff was a lot of fun. And my first week in Manila has come to an end.

This is the home away from home right now. The Bellevue Manila hotel. My room is on the back right side of the hotel on the eighteenth floor. The twentieth floor is a bar / discotheque / dance club and I can occasionally hear the music in the background. Never enough for me to pay any attention to it. I was able to get to bed at a decent hour last night, so I set my alarm for 5:30 this morning to get outside and take a couple of pictures of the hotel and surrounding area. Some of those pictures are now uploaded to the “pictures!” page (see the link at the right side of the page).

The hotel is very nicely equipped. There is fresh fruit in the room every day, some of which I eat. Fresh bottled water is also put in the room daily. The bed is comfortable and some time this weekend when I’m in the room with a little more light, I’ll take some pictures of the room and other interior parts of the hotel.

Monday is now a holiday. Apparently the government has the ability to declare a national or a regional holiday whenever it wishes. Yesterday afternoon they announced the decision that Monday will be a national holiday. I’ll still come into work, but much of the staff here will be out for the day. Today after work the general manager here and I will go to the temple to do a session. I’m looking forward to seeing the temple and doing a session there. Unfortunately, it’ll be dark so I won’t get any pictures from the area tonight. Perhaps I’ll be able to get back up to that area during the daytime and get a few pictures while I’m here. The first week of this trip is almost over. It seems like I’ve been here forever, but on the hand, the week has gone by pretty quickly.

We stopped for lunch at a Pizza Hut in a small mall in Calamba (far south side of Manila). There were no facilities in the Pizza Hut so I went into the mall to use their facilities. I was struck by this sign one the side of a booth for selling some kind of a card. Fall in line? The multiple possible meanings were delicious to think about. I’m sure that the Filipinos think the sign is quite normal. I could picture people falling all over themselves in line and my experience here is that Filipinos don’t queue anyway. It’s usually every person for themselves!

The Pizza Hut was an interesting experience. There is a much more varied menu than in the States. I had a chicken oriental salad and it was very nice. The pizzas ordered by the other guys looked to be pretty good — but much more cooked than at home. The crust was very hard on all the pizzas coming out of the oven. After lunch I took a few minutes outside to take a few pictures. Some of them will get posted tonight to the “pictures!” link on the right side of the page. More pictures to come!

On Saturday the IT department here is going to a cultural heritage center Villa Escudo for the day. I’ll bring the camera along with both (fully charged) batteries and should have a field day taking pictures. If so, then they’ll show up on the web page sometime over Sunday or Monday. In order to “maximize our time” at the center, we’ll be leaving at 5 a.m. (gasp). It takes a couple of hours to get there and a couple to get back, so I think I’ll have plenty of time to experience everything interesting at the place.

There is about 14 hours time difference between Manila and Pocatello. It’s 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, April 27th in Manila and about 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 26th in Pocatello. The morning hours in Manila overlap with the evening hours the previous day in Pocatello. After being in a part of the world for a time a person gets used to the time differences and can quickly calculate them in the head. I haven’t gotten there yet and have to double-check my mental calculation quite regularly. There is a time zone converson chart hanging in the office here which I use quite regularly. Manila doesn’t change time between daylight savings and regular time, so whenver the US changes times, everyone here in Manila has to relearn the time differences.

The other interesting difference is that Manila is fairly close to the equator and the length of daylight changes very little during the year — perhaps only about a ninety minute difference between the longest daylight day at Summer Solstice and the shortest daylight day at Winter Solstice. Conversly, in Pocatello, the daylight hours difference is fairly pronounced with as much as 6 1/2 hours daylight difference between December and June. Essentially the sun sets at about the same time year around in Manila. According to the US Naval Observatory, the sun sets at 6:27 p.m. on the Summer Solstice and at 5:32 p.m. on the Winter Solstice. The meaning for me is that there is no real good light for pictures after I get out of the office in the evening! I’ve also had some late night meetings which makes getting up any earlier than 6 a.m. difficult.

Last night after I had dinner with the general manager here, I caught the 8 p.m. shuttle to a local shopping mall. I wasn’t at all prepared for how large this mall is — and it’s one of two malls within a five mile radius. The other one is supposedly the same size with a little more emphasis on restaurants. The mall closed at 9 p.m. and I learned that meant the outside doors were locked at 9 p.m. About 8:45 every store started shoving people out and closing the shutters. At 9 p.m.. all the doors everywhere were locked and getting out required a guard to open the doors. Finding a guard wasn’t difficult, however. Every entrance door into the mall had two guards on duty. They inspected all purses and backpacks coming into the mall and looked at the same going out. The entrance from the highway into the mall parking area was also guarded and the driver had to show identification to get past the checkpoint. While the security certainly isn’t intrusive and is actually fairly superficial, it is certainly more than I’m used to seeing. There has been some terrorist activity in Manila and these measures are quite OK with me if it keeps me safe. Further, whenever I go into my hotel, there’s a fellow out front with a dog that sniffs everything being carried into the hotel. Then at the front door a doorman looks inside of all bags and backpacks. Again it seems to be somewhat superficial, but it’s still much more visible security than is present anywhere in the US.

At the mall I spent a little bit of money in a drug store. My noise-cancelling headsets have a piece broken off. I bought some superglue to piece it back together so they’ll work on the flights back home. Also, the change in diet caused my system to rumble a bit too much yesterday so I also picked up some pills to settle that problem down. It turns out that pills like Imodium AD are purchased pill at a time. I could buy as many pills as I wanted at 50 pesos each (about $1 apiece — a bit pricey?). I bought five of them since one should do the trick, but I’ll be here for about 18 more days and who knows what future diet issues will cause. I’m now at work and the day is well underway. Life is OK.

I’ve had no real opportunity to be anywhere except the hotel and the office. I did get a few pictures yesterday afternoon around the office and this morning from the hotel room window. I’ve posted a few pictures — just click on the “pictures!” link on the right side of the webpage.

I went back to the hotel yesterday afternoon about 3:30 and grabbed a couple hours of sleep. I had dinner at the hotel and went back to the room to catch up on some work activities. About a half-hour after I went to bed the power went out at the hotel and I sat in the dark for about an hour before power was restored. My nasal CPAP machine (for sleep apnea) doesn’t work with no electricity! That made for a little shorter night than I wanted, but the day today has gone quite well. Jetlag is a difficult issue but I’ll be here long enough on this trip to get quite acclimated to the time in this country.

It gets dark early here — when I got up after my nap yesterday at 6 p.m., twilight was almost over and nightfall was descending. There isn’t much close around the hotel so it isn’t worth trying to take a walk in the area. Tonight I’ll take the shuttle over to one of the malls and walk around there with camera in hand. There just might be something worth taking a picture of. I also have a meeting at 10 p.m. tonight so I’ll likely have another chance to write something about my impressions of the country so far.

It was a very long day but completely uneventful from a flying perspective. The flight out of Narita was on time and in a newly refurbished 747. Very comfortable and a very nice flight. I even got a couple hours of sleep! The service consisted of one meal which was also tastey. This flight had on-demand movies, but I wasn’t interested in movies. I was ready to get a little sleep. The cabin lights came up about 5 minutes before we landed in Manila, which was about 10 minutes later than the scheduled arrival.

It is quite muggy here as I would expect. How long does it take to get used to that? I’m not sure. The transfer to the hotel was uneventful. Driving methods haven’t changed since the last time I was here, but I only had to suck wind once when we came pretty close to colliding with a van that cut in front and then stopped in the middle of the road (because they got cut of by a jeepny) to let someone out. The hotel is 20 stories tall and one of the tallest buildings in the area. The rooms are comfortable and very European in style. I got to the hotel about 11:50 p.m. local time and was in bed by 12:15! I’ll take a little more time to look around when I get back to the hotel this afternoon.

When the phone rang to wake me up at 6:30 a.m. I definitely wasn’t ready to get out of bed. I kind of quickly showered, shaved, and dressed, and headed for the breakfast room. I got there with 5 minutes to grab a quick bite and then meet the folks to ride into the office. I did make it but will be right ready for lunch sometime today. The workday has now started and I’m moving reasonably well myself.

I’ve arrived safely and without incident in Narita. This airport looks nothing like it did when we left in 1998. Literally everything has been redone. There is a new lounge and it has WIRELESS! It’s just a little after 5 p.m. here, which is about 2 a.m. there in Pocatello.

The wireless costs 500 yen for a day. Not a bad price considering what most other places arer charging. My flight to Manila starts boarding in about an hour and leaves in about two hours. Some of the rice fields were flooded and I took quite a few pictures out the window. I may even have a picture of Mt. Tsukuba. Definitely have Tsuchiura. It smells the same here, however. There’s no mistaking the odor of Japan when you walk up the jetway. There are quite a few people here in the lounge. There are flights to Bangkok, Shanghai, Manila, Hong Kong, and Singapore in the next couple of hours.

The airplane over here was a 747 and Northwest has upgraded their airplanes a bit. Business Class is larger than just the front part of the airplane. It now extends back several more rows into were Economy was before. The food was reasonably good. Dinner took a long time to get served. Breakfast was served about 90 minutes before we landed. We were at the gate about 4:15 local time which was about a half-hour early as I recall. My iPod ran out of battery a couple of hours before we landed. I was glad I had my minidisk player with me. There was no power on the plane for laptops where I was seated. Only in the up-front area and upstairs in First Class. “Soon,” the flight attendant told me. I was not in the front part of the airplane. Business class was full. First class had room for 8 and had 3 people. I didn’t look at Economy, so I don’t know how many people were back there. We had a lot of turbulence coming across — more than three hours in one stretch.

We went north out of LAX up to just north of San Francisco and then went out over the ocean. We continued way north, however, along the same track that I would have expected we would fly out of Seattle. It is very quiet here in the lounge so I expect most people have come in from the US and are making connections. Lots of folks are snoozing.

It’s quite clear outside and about 50 degrees. It is very green, just as we would expect. It makes me a bit “homesick” as this is one of the beautiful times of the year in Japan. Oh well. I guess looking out the window will have to do for this trip!