Never Thought I'd Say That ...

Four and a half years ago Ryan and I were trying to settle into our new life here in the Philippines with our 25 month old boy and a 7 month old girl. Now here we are with a 6 year old, 5 year old, and 2 year old. I have 2 girls who favorite food is rice and a boy who loves red filipino hotdogs (which I refuse to touch) more then the normal brown (?) hotdogs I know and love. I'm positive that their time here will have a major impact on their lives and who they will become, how they view minorities in the future and hopefully give them a love to explore different cultures. When I hear my kids say things that sound Filipino or love to walk by the fish section in the grocery store to see the big fish eyes staring back at them, I expect it, this is the only life they know. When I hear myself say some things out loud ... I know it's been too long:

We are driving down the street past a little meat market and I casually mention to Ryan "You were lucky there were pig heads hanging here when you took your mom because there aren't any left today."

Panaad Sa Negros 2011

It's that time of year again. The time to celebrate the Province Negros Occidental. It's a collection of 13 cities and 19 towns that come to one location here in Bacolod to show off what makes their municipality unique. Each has a permanent booth which shows off their own festival, craft and/or food that makes them special and you walk from city to city taking it all in. Each one of these 32 locations has an annual festival where they celebrate with flashy colours, dancing and music and as a part of the Panaad Festival each gets their time on stage to show off the beauty their festival has to offer. ALSO, each one has a beauty pageant entry for the Lin-ay sang Negros contest which is Miss Western Visayas! They were all these girls with their super long legs trying to walk steadily up these stairs in their high heels and short shorts and then yelling their names and ages into the microphone in their best english accent. I think it's safe to say that all four us were caught chuckling at one point or another.

After we watched some of the dances we walked around the different booths to see what the different cities and towns had to show off. Their booths somehow take on what they are famous for, examples would be known for livestock it looks like a caribow (ox), or famous for seafood it's shaped as a fish:

In the stadium they had all the different costumes from the cities that they wear during their annual festivals. Some were made out of sea shells, others had these vibrant orange corn kernals but all were stunning and unique! Just outside the main pavilion there were all these cops standing around looking lazy, laughing it up but they were all behind these big plastic shields as if they were expecting some big riot!? I don't know. I'd say being mentally prepared and prepared with props are completely different things. As we walked around we passed all these different foods; corn, cotton candy, fish, chicken, mango shakes. Some looked and smelled appealing and others not so much.

It was a lot of walking and a lot to take in but it's always fun for me to see all the different wonders these different parts of Negros Occidental have to offer and see a little of the different festivals they celebrate. It was a late night but worth it!

Start Those Engines

This afternoon after an early dinner we went out to the old Bacolod airport to watch some drag racing. We live right by the old runway and can hear them racing every Sunday. That whizzing roar tempts us every week so we finally decided to just bite the bullet and check out the action. Well, we picked the best Sunday to go! There is a festival in town this coming week and as a part of the Panaad Sa Negros Festival they had drag races all weekend. The runway was lined with spectators, snacks and motorbikes. We just drove down a dirt road right onto the runway and just parked along the side so we didn't have to walk very far at all.

Even though these were just little 125/150cc scooters they were going pretty fast and made some pretty big noise. We got front row seats right along the race track which was outlined by old tires which Madison hunkered herself into and made her own little chair.

People had brought a couple plastic chairs, the guys were walking around selling water, peanuts and cicharon. We were there for about an hour before it ended with the finale, a tricycle (motorbike with a sidecar) race. It was just so nice to take advantage of the sunshine on a Sunday afternoon and be outside doing something different. It was fabulous.

The One and Only

In Bacolod, as far as I know, there is only one public park. In some of the sub division they have their own parks but they are private for the people in those specific areas. There are a few indoor play places where you can pay to have your kids play but as far as free and public this is the only one. We pass by it almost everyday since it's just along one of the main roads in the city and the kids love to play there. We hardly do ... for many reasons. One being apparently kidnappings happen there, another reason is that I hate seeing the old guys sitting there taking pictures of my kids with their phone camera's and the most important reason is because I fear for my children's lives.
I decided that since it really is so bad that I would take a bunch of pictures as proof so you all wouldn't think I was exaggerating so here they are although it was night time so they don't capture the true colour of the rust but I hope that you can get the just of it:
Here is a rusted hole on the platform to the slide. Just a thin sharp rusted edge waiting for a foot to fall through so it can scrape my kids legs up giving them gangrene. These 'holes' can be found throughout the playground and when you're a 4 year old excited to be at an actual park the last thing you are looking for is eroded holes. The next picture is of what you land in once you make your way through the rusted holes and down the slide. Not so bad I know, just a puddle. But puddles are not 'just' water around the Philippines. When people drop their pants and pee wherever they want, throw their trash on the ground and spit all the time I like to think of these puddles as little open cesspools. My father in law has always said that public hot tubs are big cesspools and I totally agreed, until I moved here. Now in comparison hot tubs are crystal clear. So in summary you carefully make your way through the rust trap and get down to the bottom of the slide to only fall into a puddle of garbage juice, urine and strangers spit. AWESOME!

So the slides aren't really something we spend too much time on because no one likes to get their feet covered in that muck so we move on to something else. But what!? Everything is broken. The seesaws only have 1 seat and the last time I played on a seesaw by myself it really sucked. The chains on the swings are half broken and tied up so no one can wreck them anymore. I dont' get it because as far as I can tell anything someone could do would be an improvement? At least if they left the rusty chains untied the kids could swing from them and play Tarzan or something?

Now these last pictures are to show that the park isn't a complete bust. There is a merry-go-round that Ryan can get moving fast enough to make the kids happy. Just outside the park we found a kitten that was pretty cute. I'm too sure if it had flea's or some other random disease so the kids weren't aloud to touch it but we ran after it and that was fun.

Now we do have a park in our subdivision that the kids love to play in so we don't have to go all the way to the Lagoon to go down a slide. The sad thing is that the one here in Palmas Del Mar is even more eroded, more rusted and more deadly then this one. I would actually think that Palmas Del Mar would be embarrassed to keep it around and not junk it already but I guess it's just another Filipino Park in Bacolod City.

Bang Bang

I'm not sure if anyone remembers this post where Ryan bought himself an airsoft gun. He had such dreams for the gun; destroying the dogs and cats that got into our trash, man bonding in the jungle while they shot at eachother and of course staring at the green laser pointing from the gun to it's target. Well I have to say that from the 6 times I saw him use that gun his dreams went unfullfilled so when he suddenly started talking about selling this gun for a new hand gun style airsoft gun I was a little shocked. Why does he want a new gun when he doesn't even use the one he already owns? Stupid Silly me, apparently it went so unused because it was too big. Of course! It makes sense? Yes, No? :S Men! I'll never understand so instead of asking him to help me understand I just did the old smile and nod trick. Well a few Saturdays ago Ryan wakes up to go to 'work' and hops on his motorbike and off he goes. He comes home a little while later sporting this:

Well, welcome to the family new airsoft gun. I hope you get used more then the one before you! One thing is for sure ... Ryan loves walking around the sub division with this beauty shoved in his pants searching for stray helpless animals.