I’ve been back over a month since my last jaunt to the UK. I had a great time there but this time it definitely felt more like I was coming back home. Although my homecoming wasn’t helped by an unfortunate drunken run-in with a wall a few days before, that left me returning with a corker of a bruise on my forehead and no small amount of shame. It does look like I’ll have a nice scar on the middle of my forehand, although not as bad as it might have been save for some expert patching up (cheers, Steve!)

As well as that I’d been feeling run down and generally under the weather in the UK, a cold that virtually disappeared the minute I stepped back in the humidity outside Manila airport. And so followed some long needed early nights and lazy weekends. Although I’m starting to get out and about again the weather here puts me off any longer trips — well that and the fact that I can’t really face getting on a plane again for the time being.

But the weather … the weather is insane. My first weekend I was back the skies opened and dumped rain on the city, complete with thunder, lightning, the whole works. The word I used at the time, explaining why I wasn’t venturing out the apartment to the pub, was ‘biblical’. Then, an hour after it started, it stopped. And it’s been like that ever since, most nights I can see lightning somewhere in the distance. Occasionally it move’s over where I live and the lightning starts hitting the conductors on the top of the buildings — which is pretty loud if you’re looking out the window on the 26th floor. Still it’s over quickly at the moment, no sign of the massive typhoons that battered the country last year, but it’s not quite the season for that yet. And while it’s not raining it’s just stupidly hot and humid, one place was showing 35C at the weekend. It’s no wonder everyone is feeling tired and wiped out all the time.

So what else has been going on here? Well not much. I did miss writing about one major milestone: on May the 12th I had lived in the Philippines for one year! Although given my previous visits and my frequent travelling maybe I can just call today roughly 365 days of non-cumulative Manila life. Over halfway through my official contract, time to start thinking about what I want to this time next year. To be honest I’m fairly sure I’m going to stay in Manila for a while longer, the reasons I took the job haven’t changed, the UK economy is still mostly screwed, and I hope there’s still lots of things I can contribute here. I guess I have to see how the rest of the year pans out — there’ll be far less travelling so I’ll have more chance to really see what long term life in Manila is like.

Still, lots to do before that, not least deciding if I want to move apartment again. But this post is already too long, and it’s too hot and too late here to get into the pros and cons of moving elsewhere in the city. Maybe next time.

For the first time I can remember I’m not voting, I could probably have managed a proxy or postal vote but I left it too late (and the Philippines postal system leaves a lot to be desired). I doubt my vote would count for much, my home constituency is solidly red and my parents — where I could also vote — solidly yellowy-orange, or whatever the Lib Dem colour is. I have to clarify as the Scottish Nationalists can’t pick a colour different enough from the other three, what’s wrong with a nice purple?

I know I should have made more of an effort to vote, but I’m honestly not sure of who to vote for. Thirteen years of Labour haven’t turned out as well as it might, the economy is in the toilet and our civil liberties are fairly shredded. I used to be very much of the mindset that “if you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear” but I’m not anymore. Whilst I genuinely think that government did what it thought was best it’s left the machinery there for a later government to abuse.

Which annoyingly leads to me liking a Tory policy, as they’re looking too repeal a lot of it. Unfortunately it’s only one policy and they’ve got a bunch of really dubious candidates standing and other dubious policies to match. Although they might be the only party that wouldn’t panic the horses in the city too much, which might prove important in the long run.

The Lib Dems are dangerously close to actually having some power, and having to enact some of their policies. Something that would have been unthinkable in any other UK election I can remember. I guess they deserve a shot, but I’ve never really got over the sudden compromises the Scottish LDs made when they got a sniff of power in the Scottish government.

I’m not sure I believe the Nationalists argument that they’re still relevant in the UK parliament, previously perhaps — nowadays, not so much. And they trail a distant third or fourth in either seat I could have voted in.

Maybe I’d have voted greens or a maverick independent, who knows. I certainly don’t. I don’t know what’s going to happen next either, but I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction:

The Lib Dems vote collapses to just above it’s usual level as ‘Cleggmania’ fizzles, probably partially due to being given a stupid name. Their vote is split roughly evenly.

This gives the Conservatives the most votes and seats, but no overall majority. The LDs could make up the difference for the Tories but not for Labour who come second but with too few seats to make a coalition work.

Gordon Brown resigns in a surprisingly dignified goodbye, Nick Clegg starts to make overtures to the David Cameron but insists that electoral reform an absolute must. Cameron says no. Some newspaper makes a Man from Del Monte joke.

Cameron goes it alone and forms a minority government. The city has a bit of a fit as it realizes that this might go on for a bit, the FTSE drops along with the pound. In reaction the LDs and other smaller parties agree to support a limited Queens speech and an emergency budget and then ‘address each issue on merit’.

The opposition try and push through electoral reform, they may or may not succeed before Cameron calls it quits and goes back to the nation for a proper mandate.

All signs pointed to this being the last first-past-the-post election I would see, with reform following rapidly on it’s heels. Now I’m not so sure, I think we’ve got one more old-school election before we’ll see proportional representation … maybe more.

I really don’t know where the time is going, the weeks seem to be flying by at the moment. It’s nearly the end of April, a third of the year gone already. The first few weeks of the year seemed to really drag on and now I can barely find the time to do anything.

So what have I been doing? Well I’ve been to Sydney — which was ace, I’m surprised I managed to pack so much into the trip after spending my first weekend just relaxing and mooching around. Since I’ve been back it’s just been mental, I spent two days catching up on work then had to go on a leadership training course for the rest of the week. Giving just enough time for the work to mount up nicely again.

Meanwhile Manila has been getting slowly hotter, hitting 38C last week, and even the locals are complaining that it’s way hotter than normal. It’s going to be a long hot summer, fortunately I’m off travelling again (for work this time) in a fortnight, so I might miss the worst of the heat. And arrive back in time for the rain.

Anyway I’ve managed to get my Tokyo pictures on Flickr so I’m now only two trips behind on the pictures and about four behind on posts. I’ll try and catch up with that over the next few weeks even if I don’t manage to do that much interesting in the meantime.

Last weekend I was in Shanghai, it’ll get it’s own post in due course, although I have to confess I wasn’t at my best. Just back from China and on the back of several big nights out (courtesy of various visitors to the office) I was feeling under the weather, generally worn out and arriving in a foreign country after midnight (breaking one of my self-imposed travel rules) just wasn’t the best feeling. Made worse when the taxi pulled up to the hotel to reveal an entrance that was properly shut and chained — fortunately the real entrance was round the corner but it’s still not the sort of thing I wanted to deal with at that point in time.

Sitting in the hotel I questioned my sanity for shoehorning this trip in, I actually wanted nothing more than to be in my flat in Manila. Sleeping. Which, given my love/hate relationship with Manila this year, was a pretty interesting feeling. Still, I made the best of it and discovered some cracking places in Shanghai, details soon.

But a weekend of sightseeing (and occasionally drinking) really didn’t help my overall wellness, and I was even more worn out by the time I got back to Manila. So I’ve spent the last week and a half sitting around watching TV and sleeping.

I feel pretty much back to normal now, which is good since I head to Sydney in two days! I still really can’t get my head around the fact I’m going, it’s been booked for so long that it’s just been a ‘thing’ and now here it is. I’ve done hardly any of my normal research for this trip, but that doesn’t matter, it’s not a flying weekend visit. There I’ve got plenty of time to settle in, look around and decide what to do. Plus I have friends around Sydney so I know I’m going to be getting at least some guidance while I’m there.

Even better is that this is a proper holiday, previously I’ve been darting away for the weekend or cramming in some travel during work trips. So I’ve had my work laptop and pretty much been ‘on-call’ but this time, although I’ve agreed to ‘keep an eye’ on my e-mail, I’m officially out of the office and out of contact. It’ll be an interesting feeling, I hope I can let go.

Of course that just means I’ll have a pile of work to return to and it’ll be just under three weeks before I’m away again. But I’m enjoying my work, I’d rather be busy than bored. And I’m more busy than normal because, although neither my salary or my official job title has changed yet, I’ve been promoted. I’m now looking after a team of fifteen people, which is a little scary and also means that the last flicker of a chance of me doing any proper engineering has pretty much died now. I’m sure I’ll find a way to keep my hand in — I have an evil plan.

Overall, despite my body’s protests and my insane schedule, I’m having fun. To go from, earlier in the year, wondering what I was doing in Manila to, on my last trip, not being able to wait to go back means that something must be going right over here.

Hopefully I’ll be able to throw something interesting up here when I’m in Sydney — otherwise I’ll be playing a bit of extreme catch-up when I get back.

I’ve mentioned before that I live in a little enclave of Manila called Eastwood City. It’s difficult to describe if you’ve not been here but it’s around a kilometre square of hi-rise buildings, restaurants, shops, etc. When you look at Manila on a map it’s a small area, you have to zoom right in on Google Maps to see it.

Within this tiny bit of Manila is packed a huge range of food outlets. From fast food to fine dining, everything is here and within a couple of minutes walk. One night I worked out you could eat out every night for a month and never have to visit the same place, if you were happy with fast food for lunch some days you could probably do lunch and dinner for a month and still never have to repeat yourself. And you wouldn’t be eating the same thing all the time, there’s a huge range of places here. From decent Philippines fare, to Japanese, to French, to Mexican, to Greek, to Chinese, and then back to the Philippines. You’d not only never have to eat in the same place twice, you’d never have to eat the same thing twice in a month.

It’s not all good, there are a few places that I’d never go to again but there’s far more that serve excellent food at decent prices. The cheapest places will do you a decent meal for a couple of quid, the average seems to be around eight pounds for two courses plus a drink and you’d be really hard pushed to break thirty pounds per person for a full three course meal with wine even in the best place in Eastwood (and it’s totally worth it).

Eastwood is pretty expensive, it caters to business people and well-off locals, but even so you’d have trouble spending more than fifty pounds per head at the most ridiculously pretentious restaurant in Manila (unless you start cracking into the wine cellar — in which case all bets are off). You can easily knock a third off Eastwood prices at other similar places in the city and you can probably at least half them if you pick an out of the way restaurant that doesn’t live in one of the main ‘destinations’, and once you get out of Manila it only gets cheaper.

Eastwood isn’t unique in Manila, there are a handful of other similar areas with the same concentration of eateries, and there are literally dozens of malls which have food courts and a smattering of other places to eat.

So, is any of it good? Well, as I said above, yes — some of it is excellent. But unless you know a local and/or know what you like it’s a little hit and miss. And, to be honest, it’s somewhat more miss than hit, I think that is part of the reason that people have a bad impression of food in the Philippines.

There are also some cultural differences that piss off people, I’ve heard my fellow ex-pats complain about a couple of things that really don’t bother me but I think they contribute to the opinion of food on these islands.

First is that food isn’t generally severed piping hot, it’s a hot country and the locals are used to food coming out kinda lukewarm. You get used to it, and it’s never really been a problem for me except for the occasional steak that’s a little too cool for my liking, but it’s the primary complaint you’ll see on-line if you start researching Philippines food.

The second complaint I’ve heard is that dishes come out at the same time or in the wrong order. I can’t really get behind this, restaurants here are used to people ordering things to share and re-ordering as necessary rather than following the western three course tradition. It’s unusual the first time you get your soup after you’re halfway through your steak, but it’s one of these things you get used to. I’m bewildered by ex-pats that have lived here for years and still complain about it but that, sadly, does seem to be a pattern with some ex-pats here — or maybe it’s just a safe common ground they think they can talk about.

Also, in general, food is generally served ridiculously fast, I’ve had servers apologise to me when my food has taken more than ten minutes. I think this is something that the country inherited from the states, but frankly I don’t mind taking time over my meal and I’m used to a decent meal taking a while. I’d prefer that things took longer, but the the speed of service seems completely unrelated to the quality of the food. Some of the worst food I’ve had took ages and some of the best has been almost instant.

I was going to talk about the difficulty of cooking for myself in the Philippines but I think I’ll save it for another time. I do try and cook in the apartment most of the time, you get bored of eating out all the time.

So finally I’ll talk about my problems with the eating out in Eastwood. I could find you a decent example of whatever you wanted within five minutes walk apart from two things. I haven’t found a decent burger in Eastwood, everything is fast food style. But worse I haven’t found a decent curry in Manila, the one area lacking in the food in the city is spice. Philippines food isn’t particularly spicy, it leans more to the sweet/sour angle, and so almost all restaurants tone down their dishes for the local palette. I sure there are places that would satisfy me but they tend to be harder to find.

But these are concerns that should only worry the people that come to live here, those of you coming for a visit should concentrate on trying out the native cuisine which also gets a bad rep but is, in my opinion, totally undeserved as long as you’re willing to stretch your taste buds a bit (or a lot, depending on what you’re eating). But more of that some other time when I’ve collected more photos.

First stop was one of my favourite cities: Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong. It’s pretty close to my perfect city, big enough to have lots of interesting things to do. Small enough to be easy to navigate. It’s got a brilliant mix of western and eastern influences and it’s just one of those cities where you can find something for everyone.

But there’s no way I could live there. Not only would the language barrier be too much but it’s just way too expensive. The money I spent in 36hours there would have done me a month in Manila. Maybe a slight exaggeration but it’s close.

After that I was in Shenzhen, China for work. It’s one of the big cities in southern China that attracts a lot of business due to the proximity to Hong Kong. Unlike that other nearby city I’ve been to, Guangzhou, it’s pretty nice. It’s only been around in it’s present form 30 years and so it has decent roads, and public transport. This makes it all a little too spread out for my tastes, but it’s fun for a few days. Since I was working I didn’t get any chance to do anything interesting, although the guys I was with did take a detour to pick up a really impressive looking knock-off iPhone. If it turns out to work even half as impressively as it looks then it’s a pretty good buy for £40 or so.

Being in China again did make me appreciate living in Manila, even though you’ll not hear much English spoken here pretty much everyone can speak English. In Shenzhen we were lucky to find a handful of people who could understand us, even in the touristy places. Maybe I’ll stay for a weekend next time I’m their and do a bit of sightseeing, but I get the impression it’s pretty much all businesses and shopping centres catering to people on a day trip from Hong Kong.

After all that I’ve been living a pretty quiet life, actually cooking for a change and trying to save money after Hong Kong.

Which is good because I’m off to Shanghai next weekend, completely random bonus holiday as my Chinese visa was only good for three months and work don’t need me to go back. So I figured, why not?

After that I’m back for a bit and then it’s Australia, for a proper holiday not just a mad long weekend.

For a while it was looking like I was going to end up doing a stupid round-the-world trip after that, heading to the US and then Europe and basically travelling for all of May. But the US part of that, at least, has been delayed. Which is good, I like travelling but that might have been a bit much, the organisation involved would have been insane, but it would pretty much have guaranteed me a weekend in Vegas on the way between two of my stops.

Hopefully I’ll have time to queue up a post for next weekend when I’m in Shanghai. Hopefully it’ll have more content.

Before moving out to Manila I bought myself a shiny new laptop since it was easier to ship out than my ageing desktop. It came pre-installed with Vista but, at the urging of a friend, I installed the Windows 7 beta. Since then I upgraded to the release candidate and, last month, finally did a full clean install of the retail version. After nine months using the various versions I can honestly say I love it. It’s without a doubt the best version of Windows I’ve used. It’s like Microsoft really took notice of some of the problems with the previous versions.

Which is not to say it’s perfect, the full install took an entire evening to do. This is mostly because I had to do it twice, the first time it helpfully decidedly detected the previous Vista install in the partition and automatically preserved all the files. I can see why that’s sensible but I wanted a clean install, I could have gone in and deleted everything but I figured it’d be easier just start again. Easy, I thought, boot to the other (Windows 7 RC) partition, clean the drive and redo. Here I came up against one of Windows 7 safety features, where it refused to delete the system files out of the other partition and it wouldn’t format the drive either. Safe, sure, but I’d rather be able to delete files when I want to regardless of how stupid it may be. There’s probably a way round it, but I remembered there’s minimal partition manager on the installation DVD that would let me format the drive.

The second install took a couple of hours, and while it’s pretty painless it still missed a bunch of drivers that I would have thought it should auto-detect. Having to reinstall the video and audio drivers isn’t exactly newbie friendly. I had a fair amount of hassle with the bluetooth and fingerprint-reader drivers, but I think that might have been my fault. I think Windows had already detected them properly but just wasn’t that clear about it. I probably just made extra work for myself with the reinstall.

It was once it was running that I realised how much more thought had gone into this version, setting up networking, downloading from my camera and tweaking settings is just so much easier than it was before. The user interface is more intuitive, things just work and once you get to know it you find it’s full of short-cuts and tweaks to make life easier.

Whenever I’ve installed XP before I’ve normally followed up installing a whole bunch of utilities and extensions, but here it’s all there for you. Stupid things like automatically changing backgrounds are now built in, nothing special but it saves having to install yet another little program.

Part of the reason I installed so little is that I do so much in ‘the cloud’ (as the techies say) nowadays. For the record here’s what I’ve had to install and why:

Microsoft Security Essentials: Microsoft’s new virus/spyware checker, I can only guess why this isn’t bundled or offered as a automatic download (probably anti-trust reasons). But it seems secure, non-intrusive and it’s free. I previously used AVG but I got really annoyed by it’s continued version upgrades and associated nagging.

Google Chrome: Sorry, nothing will convince me to use IE expect for those few specific sites that only work on it (mostly work-related where they only develop for the officially supported IE). Plus Chrome is just so much better set up for smaller screens, you can tweak other browsers to behave the same but Chrome does it out the gate and still gives you all the same info.

Paint.NET: For photo-editing, it’s free and it does everything I need. Although I discovered that I couldn’t access my old Paint Shop Pro files, eventually I had to use my mum’s computer with it’s old install of PSP to covert the files (and I still had to save out the separate layers in things like the banner images into their own files so I could recombine them). I used to use PSP for screen capture too and I can’t find that function in Paint.NET but that’s OK because Windows 7 has a decent built in screen capture tool.

WinAmp, ml_iPod, and gPodder: In my continuing quest to avoid iTunes I’m trying this combination of programs which is allowing me to manage my music and podcasts. ml_iPod is a WinAmp extension that improves the iPod support and gPodder is a stand-alone podcast manager. It’s taken a fair amount of tweaking to make them work together and, to be honest, it’s not working perfectly. I may have to cave and install iTunes but I’m prepared to keep fiddling for another few weeks to see what I can manage.

Growl and GMail Growl: To get pop-up notifications of my incoming mail.

Skype: For video chat and cheap calls back to the UK

And that’s all I _needed_ to install, everything I want to do could be done with that lot or on the web. Arguably I didn’t even need the last two.

For completeness here’s the less essential things I installed: Flickr Uploader (it’s much easier than using the online form to upload multiple files), Google Earth (because it’s pretty), SumatraPDF (Google Docs will render PDFs but this is easier and fairly lightweight), ECTool (to track e-mail chess) and Microsoft Office 2007 (because I’ve paid for it and because Google Docs doesn’t format text documents nicely for printing).

All in all, aside from Windows and Office, this computer is using only free software and for the first time in a while I’ve actually paid for the Microsoft components. I imagine this machine will get cluttered with other programs over time, but I’ve been surprised about the lack of stuff I’ve needed to install and just how easy it is to use. Plus there’s a ton more features that I’ve not had a chance to play with yet.

So, if you’ve not tried Windows 7 and your hardware supports it, give it a go.

One attraction that’s definitely worth visiting is Tree Top Adventure, set in the virgin rainforest around Subic this is primarily aimed at tour groups and team building but is one of the few places that you could visit and enjoy in a smaller group or even on your own. As it happens there were around a dozen of us, which does help with the atmosphere.

There are a few different things you can do here, they have a canopy walk — essentially a nature walk on bridges suspended 100ft in the air — and a canopy ride which is basically a mini-cable car. We didn’t have time for the canopy walk and the ride looked a little tame, we were here for something that would generate slightly more adrenaline.

But we started slow with the ‘Trekking Adventure’ which was a wander through the forest with our guide pointing out various things and demonstrating survival techiniques. Stuff like starting a fire with bamboo, make utensils out of bamboo and getting water out of bamboo as you can see demonstrated to the left. Yes, there was a lot of bamboo use. To be honest it’s nothing you’ve not seen Bear Grylls, or someone similar, do on the Discovery Channel, but it’s pretty cool to actually see it working in front of you in real life.

After that we headed to the superman ride, which is a zipline with a harness set up so you’re hung horizontally and can fly out like superman. If you can find the courage to stretch your arms outs rather than hugging the bar like your life depends on it.

That’s not me in the pictures but I can confess that I also wrapped my arms round the bar. Finally we headed to the Tree Drop. This is exactly what it sounds like, you’re roped up at the top of a tree and then dropped off trusting the guy at the bottom to pull the rope to slow you down. It’s good fun but it is scary as hell. I’m not fond of heights at the best of times but with four of my team following me, and one videoing, there really was no backing out. Still it took a supreme force of will to step off the platform, even though there’s still a guy holding on to you, worse was resisting the temptation to grab onto something while you’re just hanging there being lined up for the fall. But it’s over in seconds, and it’s fun. It did certainly get the adrenaline flowing, and I look forward to getting the chance to do something similar again.

Overall the Tree Top Adventure is good fun, run by friendly staff and pretty cheap. You can do everything for under a tenner, each individual activity is around two pounds. Safety-wise it seems OK, they do seem to be careful about everything, much more so than I’ve seen in similar places abroad. Although the state of the safety bolt after the superman ride was worrying. At least they noticed and changed it, and I think there were at least two safety systems on that ride.

And yes, you can make jokes about my being too heavy and almost breaking the ride.

More options for what to do in Subic in a later post, more pictures (including a preview of the other place we went) are on Flickr.

But since today is St. Valentines day I thought I’d bump my planned post (although the pictures are already up on Flickr) and say “Happy Valentines” to everyone. I hope the day finds you happy with the hand fate has dealt you.

I can’t remember a Valentines day when I wasn’t single — I’m sure there’s been one or two but they’re lost to the wasteland of my foggy memory — which gives you a good idea of how successful my relationships generally are . Regardless I’m not one to mope around on Valentines, I just tend to let it pass me by. It’s just never been that much of a big deal for me.

I had thought that today would be a big deal in the Philippines as they went all out on Halloween and the Christmas decorations, festivities and music went on for around six weeks. But Valentines here seems refreshingly low key, a few hearts and cupids pinned here and there, roses in the local shops, but not much more. I don’t really know why, maybe it’s just not a big deal here, the country is very family oriented so perhaps the holidays that are more aimed at children get a bigger reaction.

It does look like there’ll be fireworks as I can see them setting up on the roof of the building opposite, this is good because when they fire them from the ground it often doesn’t look like they clear the top floors of the tallest buildings before they go bang. I’m still going to make sure the windows are shut before they set them off.

As for what I’m going to do today, nothing much. I’ve foregone my traditional steak and a bottle of wine, mostly because I can’t be bothered going out to buy the steak. Although I’m still having the wine. I might fire up the second season of True Blood and start watching that. That’s my rock and roll lifestyle.

Today is also Chinese New Year, which I think is the real reason for the fireworks.

So, happy Year of the Tiger to everyone too. I was born six months too late to be a tiger, I’m a rabbit.

Expect a proper ‘something to do in the Philippines’ post next Sunday. I promise.

It did highlight a couple of things, first travelling with a guide is invaluable. I’d been planning to go to Subic on my own and I’m glad I didn’t — it would have taken a weekend just to work out where everything was and even knowing where we were going we got lost several times. Now I know where everything is I feel comfortable going back on my own, and since I’ve done the tourist stuff I’ll not feel bad lying on a beach for the day and sitting in casino all night.

Secondly, I was glad there was a crowd of us. I could have gone to the places we did on my own but it would have been a lot less fun. I think I might write another post about travelling on my own in Manila. and I’m coming to accept that I’ll be doing most of my travelling along.

But there’s one final thing I realised during the trip, and that is that having a car would be really handy. Seeing all the signposts and roads leading to little villages, beaches, and resorts made me realise how much easier it would be to get around if I had my own transport. Sure I could get around using buses but it sacrifices a lot of freedom, I’d need to check timetables and plan journeys in advance. Having my own transport would give me the chance to change my mind on a whim.

The Philippines is a big bunch of islands, so there’s a limit to how far you can go in a on land, but I live on the largest island and there’s plenty to explore. So for the first time in many years I’m seriously considering getting a car.

Be afraid motorists of Manila. Be very afraid.

Although, frankly, the motorists of Manila are all mentalists it might just be me that needs to worry.