I’m tired of ordering takeout. The other night we had pizza from Domino’s and I was so unhappy with it. I needed to eat real food.

Since I knew my new refrigerator would arrive this afternoon, I bought some greens that would last us until tomorrow. Then I will do a big grocery shopping tomorrow evening after work… If I finish early. 🥴

Last Friday I followed up my requests for meetings with people in Singapore and booked my hotel and plane ticket. Because I was so exhausted, I didn’t realize I typed my maiden name on my ticket instead of my legal married name which I haven’t used in 8 years. Now I had to jump through hoops to change it to my legal married name that matches my passport. Philippine Airlines is charging me USD 25 for that. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Good thing I mentioned this to one of my bffs, who was my travel partner to HCMC two weeks ago. She told me the Department of Foreign Affairs is allowing married women to change their passport name to their maiden name even without annulment. 🎉❤️

This is wonderful. However, I have to fix my birth certificate first because of a huge error my father made when he registered me. 🤦🏻‍♀️ This complication sprang up when the National Statistics Office was consolidating and digitizing records to become Philippine Statistics Authority and the agency flagged this to me. Long story short, I need to go to the Manila City Hall to fix this and I need a week off to do this because this entails a lot of back and forth between offices.

I will do this after my Kuala Lumpur trip in June.

I went to the SM Mall in another city and picked my fridge. I can’t last another month or another week without a fridge. But before that, I went ballistic on the local Panasonic service center and the service center hotline in Metro Manila. My patience has runneth over.

I wanted the pastel blue top-freezer model because it was slightly bigger and has a larger fridge-to-freezer ratio compared to this bottom-freezer model. However, they would have to pull it out of their central warehouse so it will take 7 business days before it can be delivered to me.

I can’t wait for another week. I’m so tired having no refrigerator for so long. 😭

The black one was available in their stockroom. There you go.

On the way home, I saw fruit vendors along the road and couldn’t resist the summer fuits.

I’m loving provincial life. Fresh food, fresh air, and more space to move around. ❤️

While I was on my way to Manila yesterday, I saw that our mountain has become colorful. Trees are blooming! In a few days, the fire/flame tree will become red and the road along Ayala Greenfield will be so alive. Acacia trees will also add color and add to our allergic misery.

It was quite hectic as I attended one AGM at Conrad. At the same time, I had to edit one or two stories because reporters are trying to meet the quota before the month ends.

Then we had to rush a story from the event. I was still editing a story while dealing with my boss at almost 10 pm. I left Starbucks in Makati at 10:30 pm when all is said and done.

So today I’m just dead.

An Italian-British colleague of mine remarked that Filipino sounded Italian after listening to my conversation with another Filipino colleague. I said we have so many Spanish loan words and pronunciation that sometimes we do sound Italian or Portuguese. We used to have compulsory Spanish subjects until college but that was removed during my generation. It was just an elective when I entered college in the late 1990s.

So we do still use Spanish/Spanish loan words in everyday life. I tell time and count in Spanish. Household items and house parts are in Spanish e.g. abre-lata, plato, platito. I do use pero, por que, and que horrible quite a lot.

Chavacano is more Spanish than any language in the Philippines but that is pidgin Spanish that uses Bisaya grammar. I watched a video about some Spaniards from Spain who tried talking to Cavite Chavacano speakers and Zamboanga Chavacano speakers. They still couldn’t understand them completely but somehow but they could get the gist of what the Filipino Chavacano speakers were saying.

I tried learning the language on my own by watching soaps but damn, I didn’t realize Mexican or Latin American Spanish is completely different from Spain Spanish. Filipino Spanish is more related to Latin American Spanish, more precisely Mexican Spanish, since we were governed by Spain through Mexico for 333 years. I decided I should just learn the language formally by enrolling in Instituto Cervantes because it’s hard. The grammar is more related to French and Italian (hence the term Latin languages) than the Anglo-Saxon (i.e. Germanic) so it twisted my brain a bit. Learning the words is easy since we do have a lot of loan words but grammar is tough. The feminine/masculine part of the language—it’s a hard concept to remember because Filipino languages are genderless. Even before wokeness became a thing, Austronesian languages (like Malay) are already genderless. Our pronouns are genderless.

During the First Vatican, Catholic mass was in Latin. My parents heard mass, especially high ones (i.e. Advent), in Latin. This is the reason why many Filipinos are just religious but do not understand the meaning behind so many things in Catholicism—it’s because the language is not understandable. The mass became in English or Filipino under the Second Vatican, which pissed off the conservatives. But my mom still prays the novena in Latin/Spanish and I really don’t know if she fully understood it. This requires a whole different blog entry so I leave this for now.

So yeah, this video about Philippine Spanish vs Spain Spanish is funny. You would think we would be able to understand Spaniards but we really wouldn’t. But at least half of the battle is won since we can pronounce Spanish words easily unlike monolingual Americans who mangle Spanish words.

¿Intiende?

We went back to the trade fair yesterday to buy samples to show clients and our financial sponsor. Even though we thought we had slim pickings, we still had some good ones. I also did one interview and that exec gave me one intro to one of the biggest companies in Vietnam. Another interview prospect is still hanging in the air but it could be worth pursuing.

After the trade fair, we hopped to the Factory Outlet where they sell export overruns of foreign brands manufacturing here in Vietnam. I bought Adidas apparel for my sister and Crocs for my girls. My friend bought six pairs of footwear (including the Saucony running shoes she bought near the exhibition center).

This morning, we were awakened by jets flying overhead again. We were shocked to see all the roads closed off and breakfast places shuttered. We had to walk several blocks to get to the nearest open restaurant.

It was hard booking Grab on the way the airport even an hour after the roads had been opened.

And I need to buy a new laptop bag. This one is already saying farewell. One zipper already gave up and this handle is on its last thread.

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Landing in NAIA is wasteful for airlines. The planes circle around Manila Bay until the pilots get the go signal to land. They do this for 30 mins because we only have one runway so there’s a long queue of planes circling above Manila Bay.

So technically, Ho Chi Minh should only be 2.5 hrs or less but it takes longer because of that idiosyncratic airport.