It's happened...

Today is the day when I woke up and it just wasn't fun anymore. I'm over it now, but the first half of the morning, I was ready to pack my bags and get on a plane. Nothing had changed. I just was done for a little bit.

K and A are sick. They are off to see the doctor at the moment. K, I think, just has a cold that is going around. A appears to have something more serious. It's possible he has a strain of dengue. Ahhh, dengue... Apparently, there are 4 strains that you can catch, but once you have them, you are immune. There is a 5th strain that is potentially deadly, but I'm sure that's not what he's dealing with. The symptoms for that strain are mind boggling. He's just got flu-like symptoms. We'll see what the doctor says. In the meantime, we have gotten bug spray and will be diligent with it's application.

Saturday, we went up to Tagaytay. It was so nice to get out of the city for a while. But at the same time, it was rainy and cloudy, and the view of the volcano was completely blocked off with clouds. We didn't even bother to get out of the car, but that's ok, because we have plans to go back this weekend.

There are tons of roadside stands on the way up. And there are clusters of them where they are all selling the same thing. There was one strip of furniture makers, a couple of areas of people selling roasted corn, and lots and lots of people with fruit stalls. We stopped at one fruit stall so A could get this fruit he's been hankering for. It looks like a spiky golf ball, but you twist the rind and the fruit inside is snowy white. You eat it off of the giant seed and voila, yumminess.

This trip was our first encounter with White Tax, too. The lady quoted us a price of 20 pisos per kilo, and after she'd bagged it all, she insisted they were 50 pisos a kilo. So, we halved the order. We should have just driven off, I guess, but there you go. The difference in price was about 75 cents per 2 pounds and the people are living in corrugated steal homes, so yeah. I'll pay the tax now and then.

There are a lot of people here who sell candy and treats. A won't let us get any of those, because there is no way for us to know the conditions they were prepared in. There was a beautiful little boy selling some at a gas station the other day, and K was almost in tears, because A wouldn't let her buy something from him. Thankfully, a car on the other side of the island bought 5 or 6 packets of whatever it was, and K was ok with that. At the fruit stand in Tagaytay, there were two women trying to force some peanut brittle into my hands while we were talking to the fruit lady. The thing is, I probably would have bought some just to buy it if there had just been one, but I didn't want to buy from one and not the other and I didn't have enough pisos on me to buy two packets. They need to coordinate their attacks better. K rolled her window down at one point and they started trying to convince her to buy. K just wanted to be friendly. She wasn't prepared for the onslaught.

This is another reason why we didn't get out of the car when we got to the top of the mountain. I didn't want the kids to be mobbed. Next weekend, we're going up with some Philippino friends, and I'm hoping that our kids will blend in with the herd a bit.

The youngest and I just got in from a swim. It started raining, so we got out of the pool. I know that makes no sense, since we're soaked anyway, but there you have it. It was the strangest rain storm I've ever seen. It would absolutely downpour for about a half a second, and then completely stop for a second. Repeat about 15 times. The youngest was trippin' out.