Daily Report: Palliative Pals

Started work a little bit late... but not too late. I managed to get in a below-average morning before breaking for lunch. I had some gorgeous pork and egg dumplings that Susan bought at Ororama: Puffy white bread rolls filled with a ground pork and hard-boiled egg in a sweet sauce. You have to try one to understand just how good they are.

Ednil, Epril's 16-year-old sister, arrived from Jassan today for the holidays. Epril's mother, her 12-year-old sister Inday, her 8-year-old sister Dimple, and her 4-year-old niece Doreen (Susan's daughter) will be arriving tomorrow after they do a pre-dawn Via Dolorosa up the side of some steep mountain. Woe to the residents of Mindanao that God saw fit to bless their land with mountains that dwarf the Mount of Olives, so that the bleary-eyed fervent have the opportunity to suffer as Christ did (at least in the calves and arches) once a year... and throw in altitude sickness as a bonus.

I took a nap in the afternoon, and then did an hour of work. My friend Franky called me from Pattaya this afternoon... my first phone call from The Old World. It was nice to catch up on the goings-on back there.

It's funny: I haven't even looked at anything Pattaya-related on the internet since leaving. But, I think about it all the time. I think I went out of my house in Pattaya less often than I do here in Cagayan, but somehow I feel more "stuck at home with nothing to do" here than I did in Pattaya. I suppose that when I lived in Pattaya, by simply having the knowledge that there were two thosand bars with twenty thousand Westerners, five hundred good restaurants, dozens of night clubs, and a huge handful of shopping malls, as well as a nice group of friends that I could call upon at any given time to go out and party with, made life and living in Pattaya — even if I didn't avail myself of those features every day — more bon vivant. In Cagayan — especially on a day when everything is closed — there is a constant background tenor of cabin fever that seeps into my thinking.

Let's just call it "Pattaya withdrawal symptoms".


An Eastern sunset. This happens
quite often here: The sun in the
West reflects off high clouds in
the east, and creates a second
sunset in the sky. I get to
enjoy both sunrise and sunset
from my balcony on some days.For dinner, I had Susan bake up one of those 59-peso pizzas I bought at SM last night. There is a reason they are 59 peso. I managed to eat two slices.

At about 5:00, Mike Turner and his wife Marissa came for a visit, and we chatted for a while and wandered around the gardens in front of my house and enjoyed the view. After that, it was another hour of work.

At about 8:00, my new friend Tom, a retired psych-ward security guard from St. Louis came to visit with his girlfriend. The girls watched "Pirates of the Caribbean" (one of the DVDs I bought yesterday) while Tom and I chatted. He's a very nice guy, and definitely going to be a good friend.

So, at the end of the day, thanks to some visits by my new friends here in Cagayan, the Pattaya withdrawal symptoms were a little less acute tonight.