Back in Manila

So sorry it has been ages since I have updated this blog. MrD and I recently returned to Manila for another stay at our tropical palace. It has been a long couple of months since we have been back so it is good to be home and chewing on some decent mangoes again. I packed a whole suitcase of food stuffs in Vancouver because I planned to cook a dinner for our staff here at home. Our office here in Manila is located on the ground floor of the condo unit where we live. My birthday was coming up, more on that sacred event in a moment. Every year around this time if we are in town, we usually take our staff to the Manila Shangri-La Hotel to enjoy their world class five star buffet but this year MrD requested that I cook at home and invite the staff upstairs. We had several new staff that had never been to visit and it was time to bring them all home. So I filled my check in bag with a 5 kilo ham and veggies you can’t find in the tropics like parsnips, turnips and sweet potatoes. I gathered a dozen or so of my favourite local artisan cheeses, three different varieties of pesto and other treats I knew were not available here on this island paradise. I knew from past experience that check in bags travel down in the hold where it is quite cold enough to keep everything fresh enough until we got here and there is no customs control like most countries here in the Philippines. You could bring in panda steaks and humming bird pate if you had the notion. I did not need the space in my luggage for regular things like clothing and toiletries because I already have all that here at home in Manila.
Dinner was a success but our staff is very easy to please when it comes to eating. They just require lots and lots of food and then just stand back and let them go at it until it all disappears.
The day after the dinner party MrD and I flew off to our island getaway of Boracay. You my silent reader may remember my last trip there when I met the dreaded black banded sea krait and lived to write about it. This time a typhoon just to the north was ongoing. The island storms were very dramatic with the palm trees doing their Gilligan’s Island impersonations. The famous white sand beach totally disappeared under the waves. The water was right up to the tree line. The whole side of the island exposed to the winds had been barricaded with plastic and bamboo screens to keep all those tacky coconut souvenirs from blowing off to our Chinese neighbours to the north.
I love the island when it’s stormy like this but some of the hordes of tourists, mostly from Korea, did not seem quite as excited. It rained a lot but a warm tropical rain and there was no lightning so I went swimming in the torrential downpours. I noticed one tourist standing waist deep in our hotel pool in the rain holding an umbrella over her head. Nice image but a bit confusing.
Alas we only had 3 nights of peace away before we needed to return to Manila. But it was good to be back and say hello to my Filipino home away from home.
Back in the city I needed to go to the National Bureau of Investigation, the Filipino version of the FBI to obtain police clearance documentation so I can apply for a new class of visa. Every year since we moved here I have had to get a working visa which I can because together with MrD we own companies here and hire enough locals to fit the requirements but it is a long involved process requiring lawyers and endless documents. Now because I am …of a certain age…I can apply for a retirement visa which in the beginning is just as tiresome to apply for but will eventually allow me more freedom to enter and exit the country.
I won’t go into the traumatic events of the long endless lineups only to be told we had to go to another office with even longer lineups on the fifth floor of the worst fire trap mall in all of Asia. Long story short. I got my clearance after three excursions into bureaucratic hell and all I need now is to deposit a king’s ransom of American cash into a Filipino bank and they will eventually, after a million more documents, allow me a retirement visa.
On a lighter note, your Trophy H has turned another year older and wiser. We invited MrD’s family for lunch. I refused to cook. I have cooked for that crowd very often but I insisted that this year I wanted the day off. We went to the weekend market early on the Saturday morning and bought Filipino prepared foods like chicken empatido, pork barbecue, seafood rice, roasted corn and other local favourites. I had ordered the giant flour less chocolate cake from the Manila Shangri-La that I have raved about in previous blogs. This beauty weighed in at about 5 kilos. Just think giant chocolate ganache truffle and you get the idea. I served up all the guests each a tiny slice and kept lots for me to enjoy later.
The in-laws loved the food, ate as much as they could and brought the rest of it home. I kept my eye on the leftover cake though so they couldn’t make off with that beauty. MrD left the next morning and is back home in Vancouver where I will fly off to join him again this coming Saturday. In the mean time I am getting much needed massage therapy, eating as many mangoes as I can stuff into me and working my way through all the rest of that delicious cake.