Settling In

Here's us settled into our new home. We love our room. It is cool and tiled with a good ceiling fan and mosquito proof screens. Our small front porch is good for eating green mangoes,which are a local fruit--crunchy like an apple and quite sour but not messy like orange mangoes.

Our resort is like a small neighborhood in a small village and we are getting to know a lot of our neighbors. Last night we went to the local disco--a Saturday night ritual throughout the Philippines. Our village's disco has a mud floor and a tin roof, but there is a huge sound system and a DJ and an MC. There are all kinds of etiquette we are just beginning to understand. For instance, if you are the last one on the dance floor when a song ends, you have to pay. You can also pay for a private dance. All the money goes to the village. Everyone is there: grandmas, grandpas, little kids, dogs, pigs, rural drag queens. The atmosphere is of pure fun. The Filipinos are excellent dancers and even better hosts. They do everything they can to make outsiders feel welcome. Everyone buys a liter of coke or rum or beer and contributes it to a communal pitcher. There is one glass on every table and if you are offered it you have to drink it fairly quickly because everyone around you is waiting to use the same glass. Sometimes you get a nicely balanced rum and coke, sometimes you get its foamy and less potent cousin--the beer and coke, which isn't as bad as it sounds. We had a blast, alternating cooling of in the rain and sweating on the dance floor. The highlight was Peter dancing with an eighty-year-old woman to My Humps by the Black-Eyed Peas. Maybe tied with that was the same woman doing an amazing tango with one of the drag queens.