Life here in the  Philippines has always been fast paced.  In short, it’s never really boring.  However, there are sort of little challenges along the way.  It’s not that easy.  There’s brownouts, extreme heat, untrustworthy people, and people demanding us for stuff.  I guess that’s already a given since this is part of living and moving to a new place.  You get all sorts of surprises you thought you had covered from the start.   It’s hard to think but sometimes I try to ask myself again why we moved here.   Then again, I remember how life was in Amsterdam.  It wasn’t all that bad either.  However, it also wasn’t all that good either.  There’s always one thing we know, we sacrifice being away from our families to have our shot on an opportunity to do something extraordinary and I guess not many people can admit being able to do that.    We live in a bit of luxury but that is to balance out some of the extra hardships/inconveniences  and hardwork involved in living here.   Most of our waking hours on the weekdays is consumed by work, and because of our night-time work schedule a lot of normal life we experienced — for what it’s worth, back in Amsterdam is non-existent.  We know this is not forever, we look forward to a few more years of hardwork and sacrifice (at least mostly for MrC) and then if all things work as planned we don’t have to be constrained anymore financially in where we want to live.  We just hope that we can keep ourselves healthy mentally and physically.  And then, there’s also the social life aspect, of which our apparent nerdiness  helps us not to be bothered from the lack of it.

The Team is shrinking, they are now down to 8 again.  I guess the honeymoon has ended a few months ago.  Two staffmembers left, we don’t know for sure why, the other one claimed medical issues and the other one pursuing his own venture.  We doubt if they are truthful, but we have realized one thing, people seem to be prone to telling lies.    They say one thing and don’t do it.  White lies or not, it is still a sign of lack of character.    It’s really hard to find good and loyal people who are not very demanding.  Times have changed or has it been like this since the beginning?  Nevertheless, it is hard to keep faith in people  and continue to be nice if this happens way too often.

Our home, inspite of being spacious and a littie far away from the main roads is still not perfectly quiet.  In the early morning, where we still need our extra 4 hours of sleep we are awakened by vehicles honking, and cries of little kids, and what not.  Sleep and quietness is something hard to obtain here.    We just take note of this when we move to another place, whenever that may be.

We tried to have pet cats (rescued from the streets)  but we have already lost 2 in a span of 7 months of living here.  One disappeared on Good Friday and the other one was run over by a car.  We still have 3 kittens though, which was found a few days after by our driver’s kid. Their names are  Gloria, Binay and NoyNoy.

I started one experiment last month.  I am looking to secure a telecommute IT project from the US.  I don’t know but it has not been easy (duh!).  However, I know this is a big experiment so I know it can run both ways.  I will be in the East Coast in two weeks, right after attending MrC’s sister’s wedding and will be focusing more on this.