I have started talking to the girls a bit about how neat it would be to be able to live in the Philippines should the occasion present itself. K is open to going for ONE DAY and being back home by lunch. The youngest, on the other hand, is open to anything.
Last night, I began investigating some software to learn Tagalog. I think it may end up being a little easier than my experience with French in high school, given that all the sounds in Tagalog are found in English already. It will be a test of my memory skills, of course, and getting the cadence right. My husband observed that even though many people speak English over there, it's heavily accented, so I will need to retune my ears and be ready to attempt "Taglish" pronunciations if people look confused when I speak.
I have begun to look around the house for items I can get rid of right away. There is quite a lot, really. As a Good Mormon Family we have quite a bit of food storage, for one. We will be attempting to eat through it in the coming months. It will not only use it up, but save us a lot on grocery bills as we sock money away for the move. I've listed some books on Amazon, and I think I'm going to start listing my craft books on Ravelry, too. I think I will start listing things on Craigslist, too, like bookshelves and whatnot.
I really wish that we could tell people. I would like to start rolling on the purge of the house, but I don't want people asking if I'm renouncing all my worldy possessions to support a drug habit or something.
We have a Christmas tradition where every year, I get the girls a pewter ornament engraved with their name and the year. I ordered their ornaments for 2009 today. They are on sale from 2008. I guess Christmas trees aren't a tradition in the Philippines. Not a huge supply of pine trees, dontcha know. I figured I'd go ahead and get their ornaments for next Christmas and they can go into storage with everything else or we'll take a little fake tree with us.
Good thing Santa always knows where to find us!
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11 years ago
4 comments:
Well, Christmas is a bit thing here! Malls and roads are decorated and people like to sing carols. Christmas season starts at September as every month ending in -ber is a Christmas month. As much as they try, however, they don't match the extravagance of the west.
You will find christmas trees (artificial ones, don't even bother with the real ones, you can find them but are already dead long ago and shedding needles like crazy...) and ornaments. And music.
So there...
Esther
oh, about the language... Everybody speak english. They are not very good with the "f" "ph" sound, it comes out like "p" and when you ask them something and they mean "no", they tend to say "yes".
But you will have no trouble getting around and making yourself understood.
If they children are going to play with the local kids, they are going to pick up tagalog in no time. But I haven't find it necessary. You can always pick up the odd phrase from your friends etc.
I wouldn't worry about it...
My husband served a mission in the Philippines for 2 years in the mid-90's and he still gets wistful for Christmas carols around September. :) Glad to know we can find a tree. I was thinking of taking a little artificial one we have, but I think the shipping on it would be 3 times it's value, so it hardly seems worth it!
I found the webpage for ABS-CBN a few minutes ago and have been watching news stories and looking up words in another window as I listen. Thanks to a story about the cost of flowers increasing for Valentine's Day, I now know that the word for flower is bulaklak. It's a start!
(Also, I have learned that $10 for a bouquet of roses is considered expensive!)
Ten dollars is cheap if you have an american salary here, but if you try to live with the local salary, you will find things very expensive.. We can't quite manage and we live very frugally
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