Articles tagged with: US
Photo Post: Follow the White Rabbit
Internet cafe in Cebu City. They charge 10 to 12 pesos per hour, which is about twenty-five cents US. It’s one of the more pleasant places I’m stumbled across, though there is very little elbow room and when the young gamers storm in, things can get a tad annoying.
Second Prison Visit
My second visit to the prison began very much like the first. I showed up at 1:00 o’clock, and there was a lineup of about twenty-five women at the door, some with young children and many with bundles of food. There were far more motorcycles parked around the door and sidewalk this time, and the lineup was even more of a mess. It also seemed …
My New Room in Legazpi
My new room in Legazpi, Philippines. My old home in Legazpi was booked by a large group for today and tomorrow, and I was asked to move out. I was just staying day to day, so technically I didn’t have a reservation and they gave me the boot. I moved to a very basic kind of place on Rizal Street called something like “J&Y Dormitory”. …
Canteen or “Eatery” in the Philippines
Meet a typical canteen or “eatery” in the Philippines. I’ve eaten pretty much every meal in the Philippines at a place like this so far. The food is great and it’s very economical. The food is cooked beforehand and laid out in buffet trays. You order rice (7 pesos – 17 cents US – per serving at this eatery) and then select from the various …
Meet Carlo
Meet Carlo. He is one of the younger residents of the village of Salvacion – a small agricultural village on the slopes of the Mayon Volcano in the Bicol Region of the Philippines. Carlo had just recently graduated from college in Manila. He studied computers. I asked him what he was doing now. Was he on vacation? And he replied that he was looking for …
Tales of Rabies, Typhoid, and Other Travel Vaccinations
Monday, January 7, 2013
8:45 a.m. Training Center for Travel Medicine
National Taiwan University Hospital – Taipei
Things are a bit hazy this morning. I woke up at something like 3:30 this morning and then for whatever reason I couldn’t get back to sleep. I struggled for a while, but then I gave up and just got out of bed. I figured I’d go back to bed in …
NPR’s Planet Money Podcast
Each week, I listen to a couple of dozen podcasts. My favorite by a good margin is NPR’s Planet Money. It’s about economics, but this is economics as you’ve never heard it before. This is not the economics of complex numbers, difficult equations, statistics, and ten economists in a room all saying different things till you don’t know what to believe. This is economics of …
028 – A Blessing In Disguise
The more time I had to mull over the wallet-snatching incident the more it seemed like a blessing in disguise. It told me more about the country in a moment than I might have learned in months. It became a touchstone in helping me interpret what was going on around me
It laid bare the reality of the place and the fundamental absurdity (from a certain …