Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Saturday Night was made for....Singing?

We went to the pool in the afternoon. It's indoors but is open air. It is deep and very cool. I thought it was great! All of the sudden we could hear something. The sky opened up and it poured and poured! Rain was gushing off the rooftops. Lots of the roofs here are made of corregated tin so it was quite the racket. We got out of the pool and looked out through the grill work on the patio area. I could see a mother and little kid showering in the run off. They had soap and shampoo. It was very sad. So many here are so very very poor.

In the evening we went out with 18 work people. 17 Filipinos and 1 American who is here on a 2 yr assignment. The Company has a shuttle so we took that way across town (in a direction we hadn’t been) to a Dampa restaurant. For Dampa you select your meats and fish at an open air market (less icky that the other one it looked anyway) and then the restaurant prepares it for you.

We were supposed to meet at 7 pm. We finally got left around 830. We met some of the people at the restaurant/market. Once the sun goes down it’s not so bad here. It was in the 70’s with humidity about the same level. Wilfred, a guy from the other center, did all the ordering for everyone. We had a good selection of Pinoy food.

Adobo is a national way of cooking. We had pork & chicken adobo, a fish soup (with the carcass in it) flavored with vinegar, a plate with chopped mango, onion, tomato, and shrimp paste (I think that’s to mix with the rice), a BBQed/grilled Lampa fish, fried squid, green mussels with a tiny bit of cheese and garlic, grilled pork chunks, and grilled vegetables. We had plates and plate of food. There was barely enough room for everything. We had lots of leftovers. They sack the leftovers in plastic bags and just tie a knot to close it. Even the soup went into a bag.

Speaking of the soup. It was clearish broth with fish heads and long green beans in it. I commented about the green beans several times. No one really said anything. Perhaps no one was listening to me. I took a big bite and since it was hard to bit through I shoved the whole thing in. Tears came to my eyes. I must have hit a hot pepper flake. I was gasping for breath. Turns out it was a CHILI!! I’ve never had such fire in my mouth before. It was horrendous (but oddly yummy). Everyone had a good laugh at my expense. Everything was extremely tasty. We had a terrific time.

After dinner was over it was off to the second half of the evening. Asians LOVE karaoke. Here they have videoake. While singing strange videos play in the back ground. Videos of people dancing, doing aerobics, boating etc.

We went to Dance 21 club. It’s a 3 story videoake bar with private rooms. We did a 3 hour package for 10 people (so we got 2 pkgs). Each package included 24 San Miguel Light beer, ½ a roasted chicken, pizza, French fries, nachos, and Filipino mixed nuts. The mix seems to be peanuts and dried peas with garlic powder. I couldn’t imagine we could eat any more. But we did! Everything but one of the chickens was gone. Kurt and I brought it home and had it for breakfast on Sunday.

Kurt LOVES to karaoke. Filipinos really go for the sappy love songs. They had very little hard, really rocking songs in the books. Kurt did his usual – Livin’ La Vida Loca. He also did quite a few others. Like a Virgin was a big hit! They were taking lots and lots of pictures of “the Big Boss”. It was a surprisingly good time – I was not looking forward to it at all. The San Miguels were going down very easily. I really understood that when I stood up for the first time!
We got back to the hotel around 2:30 a.m. We needed to be in a taxi to go to Corregidor by 6 a.m. It was a very short night

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