Understanding Filipino English

English is widely spoken in the Philippines, in fact it's one of the official languages here (there are 2 - the other is Tagalog).  Almost everyone you speak to will be able to speak back to you in English, and mostly it's flawless.

What I've noticed though, is that there are certain turns of phrase which have a different meaning in the UK to what they have here.

Now fall in line and I'll explain more.  'Fall in line' - I see this sign up everywhere.  I'm used to 'Please form a line' or more simply 'Line up'.  It sounds so formal and always makes me smile.

If you ask someone for something and they don't have it straight away, they say: "For a while ma'am".  I'd been more used to "Give me a sec", or "Please wait while I get that for you" or something to that effect.

Another I've noticed, when people want to explain something that has been going on for a while, they say "For the longest time."

"If ever" is used in the same way that we would use "when" e.g. "if ever your visa arrives" to indicate that "when my visa arrives".

"Already" is used frequently, but not in a way I am used to it.  When we say 'already', generally we mean that an event has definitely occurred.  In Filipino English it is used for emphasis e.g. "He's taking medication for his cholesterol already" where we might simply say "He's on medication for his cholesterol".

Update: 9 December 2013

This past weekend, whilst flying from Manila to Cebu on Air Asia Zest, I was reminded of another peculiar Filipino-English phrase.  Instead of asking you to 'disembark', you are asked to 'de-plane'.  Love it.

Mount Pinatubo

This weekend I climbed another volcano!  Mt Pinatubo.  This is the volcano which erupted in 1991 causing a fair amount of chaos and climate disruption.

I must confess that I didn't really know all that much about it until it was suggested we go and climb it.  I did a bit of reading in the Lonely Planet and on the WWW, but for some reason when we arrived there it wasn't what I had expected at all!

A group of 5 of us had booked to go with Tripinas.  The tour was extremely well organised - from the initial information emails we received from them following our enquiries, to the confirmation emails, to the transport & guides to the crater and even a follow-up email saying 'Thank you' for our custom.  I would highly recommend the company.

My day started with my alarm going off at 3am, to catch a taxi to Quezon Avenue, corner with EDSA, in the Northern part of Metro Manila, for our 4am rendevous.  The rendevous point was in a McDonalds.  One of the lads was particularly excited when, as he was queuing, the menu flipped over to the breakfast menu.  It meant he could get his fix of a double helping of pancakes and hot chocolate to get him fuelled up for the day.  This same lad managed to nip into a McDonalds where we stopped for a comfort stop, to get an ice cream.  All of this before 6:30am.

We were driven from Manila to Barangay Sta Juliana (in Tarlac) where we changed vehicles into 4x4s.  It was quite a sight to see all the various shaped and sized 4x4s lined up along the road.  Some had doors and roofs, others were more of a shell.  We had been warned that there were no seatbelts, so we'd have to hold on tight.  I don't remember being warned that there were no doors.  It all added to the experience.

The 4x4 ride to the foot of the climb was definitely a highlight.  The route took us through a valley full of volcanic rock and almost-rivers (varying between trickles and full-on flowing water).  At many points there was no clear road at all.  The 4x4 drivers negotiated the valley with extreme skill.  It was exhilarating racing through the dryer bits of the valley one minute and then negotiating rock-strewn rivers the next.  I was often surprised that we managed to get through - the slopes looked too steep and the river to be too fast flowing.  But I guess that's what 4x4s are made for.

And then it was a 7km hike to the crater.  It was a very gentle hike until the last 1km, where even then it wasn't particularly taxing.  We had been advised to wear trekking sandals as we'd be walking through numerous rivers.  I'm glad I followed the advice - there were a lot of these river crossings.  Whilst it was a gentle hike, the terrain is rough and uneven.

The crater is much larger than I had expected.  Like really really big.  Swimming was strictly prohibited (our guide told us that he'd lose his job if we didn't take heed of his warning!), even though it did look very inviting to get into, especially after a 3 hour walk.  We walked down the 176 steps to the waters edge and did go for a brief wade.  The water wasn't hot (for some reason I thought it might be).  Then we walked the 176 steps back up to eat our picnic on the grass with a slight view of the crater.  It was only 11:45am!  It's amazing how much you can fit into a day when you get up so early.  Having lunch at that time means that there are still plenty of other opportunities throughout the day for more food.  Surely.

The walk back was quite a bit shorter.  The 4x4s picked us up at the point where the trek got a bit steep on the way up.  This meant for some even hairier river crossings on the way back, as the 4x4s followed the route we had walked up.  I hadn't even noticed that there was a road for a considerable portion of the walk up.  There was an incident of a 4x4 getting stuck at one of the river crossings and later another vehicle lost a wheel!

The journey back to Manila took about 2 hours - a whole hour less than the scheduled time.  We arrived back hot, dusty, tired but happy.  It was a great day out of the city.  And there was time to use the pool whilst it was still light when back at the flat!

More photos from Mt Pinatubo.

Tea to the sea: Malaysia Part II

We made it to the bus station in plenty of time to catch our bus.  We even had time to stock up on a few snacks, including a delicious Portuguese Custard Tart, before boarding our luxury bus to the Cameron Highlands.  I’d heard a lot about these buses – both from, yes you guessed it, the Lonely Planet, and from friends who had been to Malaysia.  It’s true, they really are luxurious.  And so cheap.  The tickets, for a 5 hour journey, were about £7 each.  The seats are huge, bigger probably than British Airways’ Club Europe seats, they recline to quite an angle and are just so comfortable.  The bus was well air-conditioned and there was even a comfort stop about half way into our journey.

I’d also read that the latter part of the bus journey could be quite hairy as you climb towards the Cameron Highlands.  These accounts weren’t wrong.  The roads are narrow, steep and windy.  There were a few close calls with horns blazing, but I guess the drivers must be accustomed to the route and we arrived into Tanah Rata in one piece.

We’d booked to stay in Gerard’s Guest House, but had been instructed to check-in at Father’s Guest House.  This was a short walk from the bus station.  We were met by a French lady who gave us lots of information about the area including some tours.  Cameron Secrets Travels & Tours is owned by the same guy who owns the guesthouses - Gerard.   Gerard himself then came by to give us a lift to Gerard’s Guest House.  It was a little out of town, next to the Heritage Hotel and some apartments which looked like they could have been lifted out of a ski resort.  At first we thought ‘why did we choose somewhere so far out of town?’, but actually the walk didn’t take more than 10 minutes and it was so lovely to be somewhere quiet.

We booked onto a half day tour the next day – the Mossy Forest tour.  For some reason we don’t normally book onto sightseeing tours but in this area, without your own transport, it was really the only option.  The tour included:

• The Boh tea plantation & factory: Endless rolling hills covered in tea bushes and a well designed factory-museum experience 
• Mossy Forest: Interesting flora including the pitcher plant and lots of moss!
• Mount Bringchang: The highest mountain in the Cameron Highlands – but you don’t have to climb it, you get driven to the top where you can climb a viewing tower!  Very lazy way to get to the stunning vistas from the top
• The Butterfly Farm: Where the guide quite happily handled giant beetles and scorpions.  Eugh.

It was a really good way to see the highlights of the Cameron Highlands.

Another highlight of the Cameron Highlands was yet more excellent Indian food!  We must have been missing Indian food more than we realised - out of 3 main meals in the Cameron Highlands, all of them were at Indian restaurants!  But why wouldn't you?  The food was excellent and such good value for money.

From what I’d read and heard about the Cameron Highlands I was expecting endless beautiful scenery, lots of tea plantations and quaint rural life.  It was almost like that.  It just didn’t quite match the ‘quaint rural life’.  It is a hugely popular tourist destination and so there has been huge tourism development – lots of ugly hotels have sprouted up.  The towns that make up the Highlands are unremarkable, and actually quite ugly.  Lots of concrete and very little character.  All that being said, it was still a lovely place to visit.  Perhaps it’s the cooler air.  Or the fact that it’s not a big city.  Or the tea and strawberries.  Whatever it is, it is somewhere I’d recommend a visit to, and somewhere I would love to go back to.

From the Cameron Highlands, the next step was Pangkor Island.  I’ll post about that separately.

Photos from our Malaysia trip

Grand Prix to Tea: Malaysia Part I

A few weekends ago (22 March) we boarded a Cebu Pacific flight to Kuala Lumpur.

Cebu Pacific is one of the Philippines' low cost airlines.  They have a great system whereby you can make your booking online and pay for it at an ATM before midnight of the same day.  This is particularly useful when you don’t have a local debit or credit card.  I can’t help pointing out that there are a few usability issues with the process:

•  The Cebu Pacific website booking confirmation page doesn’t tell you what information you will need to enter into the ATM to complete your booking.  I guessed that you would need the confirmation number and also wrote down the cost of the booking.  It turned out that these were the 2 pieces of information you needed.  But why would you think you needed the cost of the booking?  Wouldn’t the system know this from the booking reference?
•  It took us a few tries, via process of elimination, to figure out where to find the payment option on the ATM.  An example of a not very joined up system between Cebu Pacific and the bank (BDO).

Anyway, the flight was fine.  As it was a low-cost airline, there was no free drink or snack served.  But they do play games!  Granted, at nearly midnight many people were not in the mood for games, but you could tell who’d flown Cebu Pacific before by the fact that they had all the items they needed for the game.  The game consisted of an air stewardess shouting out an item and the first person to hold up one of the said items (e.g. an ID card) won a prize.

We arrived into Kuala Lumpur going on 1am.  Immigration was seamless – we whizzed through.  We didn’t even have to fill in any forms.  Our bags arrived swiftly and we headed to the taxi rank.  Following the advice in the Lonely Planet, we bought our prepaid taxi coupon before we left the terminal.  I explained what street our hotel was on and was given a coupon to China Town.  I could have sworn we were staying in the Golden Triangle, but who was I to argue with a local.

It turned out, I should have stuck my ground.  The taxi driver insisted that we were going to China Town – that’s what it said on the coupon after all.  At one point he pulled over on the side of the highway, turned on his reading light and pointed out 'China Town' as printed on our coupon.  As we neared Kuala Lumpur we managed to persuade him to take us to a stop on the Light Rail Transit line which looked near to our hotel.  This wasn’t in China Town, much to the taxi driver’s chagrin, but he did take us within spitting distance of our hotel in the end.

We stayed in the Lacomme Inn.  It had fairly decent reviews on TripAdvisor, for the price bracket we were searching in.  It was not luxurious by any stretch, but it had a comfortable bed, a working shower and aircon.  It was all we needed.  It didn’t even bother us that night that the windows were so thin you could hear a pin drop outside (not that you would have been able to hear a pin for the beats coming from the nearby club), or that the room door was so flimsy it shook when anyone walked within a few metres of it.

Breakfast was included in the room rate too.  Brilliant.  Again, it was just what we needed – tea or coffee (with condensed milk!), 2 slices of toast with butter & jam and a fried sausage.  Very simple, but it filled us up for the few hours until we needed to eat again.  Although we found that our appetites were strongly suppressed – probably because of the extreme heat and high humidity.  Even living in Manila for the last 3 months didn’t really prepare us for the KL heat.

We wandered up to the Petronas Towers.  They look great from a distance, so too from close up.  They glisten in the sun and dominate their surroundings.  They’re really pretty.  It really was too hot to spend too much time outside, so we jumped on the train and headed to China Town for some lunch.

Coming from Manila, we found the public transport system fantastic.  It’s a token system, similar to the one we discovered in Taipei.  You choose your station on the touch screen map, select how many adults, insert your money into the machine and it spits out a blue coin-shaped token.  You touch this token on the gate as you go through (mine never worked first time) and then insert it into the exit gate at your destination station.  The trains, a mix of monorail and other light rail systems, link up to take you all over the city.  The lines were built by different companies so at some of the interchange stations you do have a fair walk between lines.  This didn’t seem like a hassle at all.  We were just so blinded by the fact that there was a public transport system at all!

Lunch in China Town was delicious, and cheap.  I had Claypot chicken with ginger, and Simon had fried noodles.  We each had a coke.  The total cost was less than £6.

And then it was off to Sepang to watch the Malaysian Grand Prix qualifiers.  We bought transport tickets at KL Sentral which included the Airport Transit train to Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) and then a shuttle from the airport to the circuit.  The system was beautifully organised, from the staff all wearing bright blue T-shirts so you could distinguish them easily, to not having to wait very long for a train or shuttle bus.  It probably took about 1.5 hours to get from KL Sentral to our seat in the Grandstand.

I’m not an F1 fan at all.  I don’t think I’ve ever watched a complete race on TV.  But being at the circuit was really exciting.  We were able to see the drivers’ pits, including Jenson’s & Lewis’, as we walked to our seats (even though we had the cheaper seats along the back straight).  There was a helicopter flying overhead, filming the event.  And we were so close to the circuit!  Simon had done a huge amount of research before we went – which seats were best, how to get to the circuit etc.  He’d also read that we should bring earplugs.  I am so glad we did.  I don’t think we could have sat through the race without them.  The noise was incredible.

Half way through the qualifiers, it rained.  This made it more of a spectacle – to see the cars racing by with the spray coming off behind them.  If only I’d brought my bigger lens, there were some great photo opportunities.

On the Sunday, for the race itself, I must confess that I didn’t have a clue what was going on.  I actually didn’t even realise that Vettel had won.  I was convinced it was Webber as he’d been leading most of the race.  On the Monday we read about the controversy around the final placings!

We didn’t get to see a whole lot else whilst we were in KL.  On the Saturday night we headed to Jln Alor to the ‘Hawker Stalls’ for dinner.  I was expecting lots of carts, with people selling food.  It was more like lots of restaurants.  We sat down at one of them and ate delicious Satay, grilled corn and grilled broccoli.  Delicious.  On the Sunday we found an Indian restaurant.  Simon ate chicken tandoori and I had roti canai (roti with dhal).  They were both absolutely delicious.

Early on the Monday morning we headed to Puduraya Bus Station to catch our 9:00am bus to the Cameron Highlands.  We’d bought the ticket the day before, as had been recommended since it’s a popular destination and it also happened to be school holidays.  It was hassle free – there was a ticket office inside the train station where we paid.  We then took the receipt to the main ticket hall in Puduraya station to exchange it for our tickets.  The ticket hall wasn't as busy or frenetic as the Lonely Planet had led us to believe - it was a really painless experience.

More on the Cameron Highlands to follow.

Our new abode

We've now moved into our more permanent abode here in Makati.  The apartment is in a great location - right next to the Greenbelt shopping area and a 10-15 minute walk from both of our offices.

Here are some photos, which I feel do not accurately represent my camera skills.  Although I've never proclaimed to be any good at internal property photos!  I may have to replace the 'view' one with a better shot if I ever take one.  No balcony with grand sunsets this time round, but there is an upside - the apartment is cooler without direct sunlight ever hitting it.

Dining area, looking through to kitchen.

Lounge

View from lounge.  These are all big houses, with nice gardens, in the gated 'San Lorenzo Village'.

Kitchen.  Small, but perfectly formed.

Our bedroom. 

Our bedroom again, looking towards wardrobes & ensuite.

The pool.

The pool is on the 5th floor this time.  There is a large pool, which can be used for proper swimming if it's quiet enough, and a kiddie's pool.  There's also a kid's playground, a gym and various other amenities including a spa!  I feel so priveleged to have all of these things right on my doorstep.

Taiwan, part 3: Puyan

There has been a bit of a time lag between the last post about Taiwan.  But the second part of the adventure was what really defined our trip to Taiwan.

We had less than 24 hours in Taipei, so we woke relatively early on our second morning there to pay a visit to the Xing Tiang temple which we hadn’t had time to do the day before.  Just outside the temple, there were a few foodstalls – steaming pots of noodles and Taiwanese spring onion pancakes.  These are delicious, thick pancakes about 10cm in diameter, finished off on an ‘omelette’ (basically, the cook breaks and egg onto his hot plate, mixes it up and it attaches itself to the pancake) and seasoned with either plum or chilli sauce.  My mouth is watering just typing about it now.

After the temple we figured we had enough time to see one more sight before catching our train to Taichung.  I had planned on going to the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial hall, but somehow got it mixed up with the Sun Yatsen memorial hall.  It was a pretty sight, and gave us another glimpse of Taipei 101.

Next stop, Taipei Railway Station.  It is a HUGE station where both regular and High Speed trains depart from.  I’d booked our tickets online and needed to pick them up at the station.  It was such an easy process – I queued at the ticket desk, handed over my reference number and 2 tickets were produced.  The whole process of travelling on the High Speed Railway (HSR) was remarkable.  The trains are immaculate and very comfortable.  The platforms are also immaculate and clearly labelled so you know where to wait for your carriage.  And it was so fast – I guess they don’t call it ‘High Speed’ for nothing!

Petula, Jianyu and Viola met us at Taichung station and drove us to Jianyu’s family home in Puyan District, Changhua County.  His family live in a lovely rural spot – the town complete with 2 beautiful temples.

On the first night, Jianyu’s mother had prepared a wonderful dinner for us to eat – a variety of dishes including chicken, fish and veg.  Delicious.  Jianyu’s dad cracked open the whisky which Simon enjoyed!  After dinner we were taught to play Mahjong.  I’ve often seen Chinese ladies playing this game – moving tiles with pretty pictures on at lightening speed, with the odd yelp of joy when they get a good tile or proclamation of disgust when they don’t.  It turned out to be a competitive, fun game not dissimilar to Rummikub.  We played it well past midnight with a mix of cousins, friends and whoever else seemed to be passing by.  Great fun.

We spent the next morning wandering around the village, enjoying the sunshine, the rural scenes and just catching up with friends.  For lunch we were taken to an outstanding Japanese restaurant nearby.  The food was plentiful and delicious.  That afternoon we ventured to a town called Lugang which had some lovely temples and a great street/night market.  We were so full from lunch, otherwise we may have tried even more than we did!  We did buy some delicious ginger tea and eat some sweet biscuits flavoured with coriander.

Taiwan really captured our imagination and we’d love to go back and explore more of the country.  Simon discovered an open-water swim which takes place there, so perhaps we’ll make it back that way in September for that!