Seriously. It's a barnyard, a barangay (barrio, Philippine style), and blasting rooster cries, barking dogs, sheep, and goats bleeting it out at 2:30am. I just read an article some clever friend posted on Facebook about our historical pattern of sleeping twice a night, and it claims the main driving factor for those cold Europeans getting up in the middle of the night was to stoke the fire. I'm going to assert that roosters, dogs, sheep, and goats might have played into that a bit. A whole lotta bit. Oh yeah, that barnyard is my yard.
I've been in Manila a whole 41 hours. I've conveniently forgotten what true humidity felt like until now. And I don't know when to sleep, when to eat, when to be awake. My body, usually in charge and very vocal about these issues, has entered into the Twilight Zone of what the fuzz is going on neutrality.
"Do you want soup, body?"
"Meh"
"Are you hungry?"
"I could eat, I guess"
"Tired?"
"Always"
Dinner is worth writing about, for sure. Mission: local hangout with soup. Reality: The motorbike ride to the end of our street and onto Russia took longer than I remembered. I noted a walk to the end of the street to be very, very, very long indeed. We are deep in our barangay, with innumerable pot holes and speed bumps through gated communities and slums. Better Living Subdivision, where it doesn't flood. Much. Well, during a typhoon maybe. Which could be 2-3 times during a wet season. At the intersection of Russia and Swaziland, there are a number of notable places. Big C - the grocery store that might someday. An open-air market - yet to be explored - is across the street, opposite of the coldest beer in the world. It's on the huge freakin' sign out front and naturally I tested it out. Pretty freakin' cold. Cold-est? Um, probably not, but close enough for this girl.
The sashimi plate of salmon for $5 (and containing no less than 250 grams of protein) was also the coldest sashimi I've ever had. Frozen, really. But still good with lots of wasabi and equally cold San Miguel Lite stuffed with lemons. Across the street, Aaron and I had the second part of our dinner meal. The "restaurant" was the size and shape of a one-car garage in the US. Open, with some ramshackle boards worn smooth by thousands of butts parked there day and night consuming the same fatty broth littered with garlic so roasted it was as deeply into bitter as I am into Better Living. We ate it vegetarian, having perused the selection of meat cuts in the grocery store earlier. Noodles, broth, cabbage, and veggie lumpia (fried egg-rolls) dipped in - all in all a good dinner.
I personally found myself struggling with the revulsion of watching cockroaches the size of my thumb weaving in and out of the bamboo slats that served as a "wall" between the restaurant portion of the building and the people-living-space carved into the 100 square feet left. Don't know what it is about cockroaches, a simple beetle, that turns my stomach, but there it is. It's funny, the story of Byron Katie's spontaneous enlightenment carries a similar theme - a cockroach crawled over her foot and BOOM! Enlightenment. Seems like I'm in the right place then. Right????
It's 2:45am, I have two more hours to go at work. I'm downloading the program needed to write my first iOS app. It's "Hello World" time coming up and I find myself trudging through some heinously detailed how-tos and surprisingly available information on how to write iOS apps. It all looks so simple and easy until I read the structured data model chapter. I think I need to approach this learning process the same way I approach web development. I need this thing to do this thing so I'm going to learn it.
While I'm at it: if you have an app idea that you have no idea how to implement but it might just be awesome, I need some ideas I can try to conceptualize, build a structured data model about, and write an app for. Make it interesting people. I'm offering this for free 'cause I need the experience. And a share in the profits. Yeah.
The roosters are kicking it up out there. A round-robin of sounds that make me wonder what the hell they're talking about so urgently, frequently, and early in the morning. Might be a male thing?
I'm making a promise to myself: I need to make my camera a necessory. That's right, I didn't coin it first, but necessity and accessory make a neat little mash up and that camera is going to be my necessory. I can't just talk about this stuff abstractly. Not when I can present empirical evidence. Exhibit A - the dreadlock sheep in my front yard. And so on. In other words, pictures are coming!
Until then, my friends.