Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Philippines 2022, Part 2: Catching up

Today started out pretty good, I woke up early which means my body has pretty much adjusted already. It’s always been that way when we used to come here every year; my body adjusts almost immediately on the way here but when I go back to Europe, it takes forever to adjust back. 


After waking, I sat in our little bungalow that fronts the beach sipping a fresh ‘buko’ (coconut) enjoying the morning air and the seaview thinking how good it feels to be back here despite all of the minor – and major – inconveniences. The day, however, started in a way I never expected – toilet shopping. We have indoor plumbing and electricity in the beach house which is of course a necessity. When I was here in 2012, the toilet broke and I had a new one put in but when we got here last night I found out that the toilet I had put in was also broken and unrepairable. This caused a lot of drama and let me explain why; Xavier started bagging at the commissary last year and when Virginia saw how much money he was making, she decided she wanted to do it too as it was perfect for her now that Luca and Max are both in school so she had tons of free time on her hands. The main reason was that her father has terminal lung cancer and this would allow her to send money home to help with the medical bills. Sure enough, she started making a lot of money as well and she sends exorbitant amounts of money (at least by Philippines standards) home every month not only for medical bills but also to help out with the upkeep of the house, bills, etc. So, when we arrived and I see a broken toilet and several other things that easily could have been fixed with a small fraction of the money she has sent home in the last year…well, it doesn’t make me happy because now I have to spend my money and vacation time fixing them. But, in the interest of maintaining harmony, I will digress on commenting further. Virginia’s brother Bobby took me to one of the local houseware stores to buy a toilet, then to a local plumber/handyman to hire him to install it which, all told, cost almost $200.00. Not the way I wanted to start my vacation but whatever.

First morning of my vacation spent...toilet shopping?

Normally the first day here is spent making a run into Dagupan City to hit the Nepo Mall and that’s what we did in the afternoon. The Nepo Mall is great, there’s a modern grocery store (the main reason we go there) as well as phone stores so we can get SIM cards for our phones and plenty of places to eat. There are the usual stand-bys, Jollibee, Chow King and Inisal, and there are several little food kiosks with everything from pizza, and shwarma to my favorite – sio mai. Sio mai are basically the Philippines’ answer to Chinese dim sum, little steamed dumplings filled with pork and/or shrimp. There is a little stand at the mall called The Siomai House that serves nothing but sio mai, you get 4 of them for 45 piso (90 cents) and they put garlic chili on them and serve it with a calamansi that you squeeze over the top and a little toothpick to eat them with. The sio mai by themselves are good but the garlic chili and calamansi just raise them to another level and it’s probably my favorite thing to eat here. 

Sio mai from the Siomai House, with chili garlic and calamansi. My favorite!

I normally enjoy a trip to the Nepo Mall immensely, if only for the Siomai House, however the Philippines seems to be behind the rest of the free world and masks are still mandatory in stores shops and anywhere else indoors here. I detest wearing the masks in general but having to wear them in this heat and humidity is absolute hell. Within 5 minutes, they are usually soaked with sweat and I can barely breathe so the whole time I just couldn’t wait to get outside so I could take the frigging mask off. 


Virginia took the kids to eat at Chow King which is sort a Filipino Chinese food chain that is quickly becoming their favorite place to eat. Xavier and Luca each got the sweet and sour pork plate and they absolutely devoured them. Xavier could not stop talking about the pork and when he finished, he actually went and ordered another plate. Of course there was the ubiquitous halo halo since Chow King serves one of the best here and the kids are addicted to halo halo. 

Max staring at his halo halo with great anticipation.

Next came the grocery shopping. Robinson’s Supermarket is actually a pretty modern sizeable supermarket that carries pretty much everything we need/want, not what you’d expect in a place like this. You’d be surprised to find that they carry a decent selection of wine from various countries and the prices are in line with what I pay back home. It’s way too hot to drink much red wine here and I’m not a big white wine guy but I did buy a 3L box of a generic California cabernet so I can sip it in the evenings when it cools down while I write. I’m actually having a couple glasses as I write this and it’s definitely palatable. Robinson’s also has several other western products that I didn’t expect to find such as Italian extra virgin olive oil, Nutella and some specialty European cheeses. You obviously pay more for these as they’re imported but it’s great that they’re even available here, especially the olive oil. They deep fry EVERYTHING here and they use the unhealthiest oil you can imagine so having access to good Italian extra virgin olive oil is a huge win for me. I bought two beautiful blue marlin filets for 200p which is about $4.00 - those would have cost three or four times that much back home. I cooked them tonight, seasoned with salt and pepper, marinated in olive oil and grilled them in a pan, served them with some beautiful pechay which is green leafy vegetable that’s sort of a cross between spinach and swiss chard. 

Two beautiful blue marlin filets for $4.00. Served with freshly picked pechay. 

I’m trying to avoid the deep fried stuff and eat as healthy as possible while I’m here which isn’t difficult as fish and seafood are my favorite foods and they are so plentiful here. You don’t even need to go anywhere to get it either, it comes right to our door every morning in the form of the beach vendors. Vendors walk up and down the beach all day selling anything you can think of. All manner of fish and seafood pulled fresh from the ocean that morning, beach toys, clothes, towels, belts, machetes and knives, fresh fruit, freshly picked coconuts (buko), locally grown peanuts, lumpia, ice cream, you name it. We usually buy fresh yellowfin tuna, squid and giant prawns from the fish vendors first thing in the morning and cook it for lunch and dinner. Most mornings I flag down the buko vendor and have him cut me open a coconut and throw a straw in it for me. Price? 60 pisos which is about a buck. Lola often gets angry when she sees me do it and complains that it’s too expensive but come on, I sometimes pay 3 or 4 bucks for a small carton of coconut water back home so getting the actual coconut for a buck is wicked cheap to me. Plus, after I drink the water, Lola will sometimes cut it open and give the meat to the kids so it’s a win-win all around! 

My daily morning treat, doesn't get any fresher than this unless I pick it myself...

The last thing we had to do today was attempt to get a pre-paid Wi-fi router for the beach house and this turned into quite a chore. In the past, I have always just used The Lazy A for my Wi-fi. For the newcomers, the Lazy A is a beach resort about a 5-10 minute walk down the beach from our place. They have a little open air restaurant with a handful of tables and they have Wi-fi so I would always start my day by going there in the morning after I woke up to have my black coffee and go online to check email, sports scores, Facebook, etc. Often I would go back in the afternoon when I was bored and have a couple beers and go online. As long as I was eating or drinking, they had no problem with me coming there to use the Wi-fi so it worked out well because they made a club sandwich that was worth the trip. But, this being 2022, you can actually buy a pre-paid router with data on it for your house which of course is much more convenient. We paid 799p (about $15) for a router with 10GB. I told them I wanted to buy the 100GB package that was 1,000p which I figured should last a while as long as the kids don’t play their online games all day every day, but they must have not understood me as the router only has 10GB and that will not last long. They activated it right there and said we just needed to plug it in and connect with the password so we got it home and plugged it in but we quickly discovered that the signal at the beach…sucks. You can’t connect at all in the house or the nipa hut so you have to sit outside to get a signal and even then it’s very slow. I guess I should have expected as much in this place. Thankfully the Lazy A is still there. The Lazy A never lets me down… 

Pre-paid wireless router. Reception is hit or miss but it's good to have Wi-fi at the beach house. 

I haven’t had a chance to walk up and down the beach to see what’s changed yet but hopefully tomorrow as I have nothing planned. From what I’ve seen so far though, there have been A LOT of changes from the beach I remember. Pretty uneventful day today overall, hell I haven’t even fired up the karaoke machine yet. 

Let’s see what tomorrow will bring…


To go to Part 3, Click Here

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