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I moved into my new house yesterday! It’s located on Land Street, off Visayas avenue, about 15 minutes from work by jeepney and tricycle. This morning it was my first ride in a jeepney, nice! It’s a small truck with a bench on each side. The tricycles are motorbikes with a sidecar, not a lot of people go on foot or by bike to work because it’s already too hot here.

The house is really cool, it was even a bit chilly late at night- a miracle! I unpacked my suitcase and got settled in quite ok, thanks to Ophel who took me shopping yesterday. We went to SM, a big shopping complex in Cubao, where you can find everything! I also watched some Tagalog (local language) soap series and shows yesterday with evening Cita and Yuichi, I really have to start learning the language. It’s fun watching but if you don’t understand the whole story, not really interesting.

As for the food, fish and rice are pretty common here. I ate it yesterday evening, this morning and am having it again for lunch. Good thing I bought a lot of sweets and chips yesterday, to have some variation in the food, haha! No really, the food is pretty delicious, they eat a lot of fruit but not a lot of vegetables. I think it would be pretty difficult to be a vegetarian here.

Today I also moved office, my previous one was on the terrace, now I share one with Frances, a Philipina who works for 11.11.11. We had a party on Sunday evening with everyone from the office and Arnold from Broederlijk Delen. He normally works in Davao, Mindanao (big island in the South of the Philippines) but just came back from Belgium and dropped by. He’s been here for about 23 years and speaks Tagalog fluently and another local language too, really impressive. The people here are very nice; some short info:
- Hanneke is the coordinator of 11.11.11 and has been here for 13 years. She’s married to a Philipino named Joel, I will go to their place one of these days to have dinner and meet him
- Citas does admin for 11.11.11, she’s married to Bert and has 3 kids (14 years old, 11 years old and 9)
- Bert (the husband of Citas) works for the Province of Antwerp, does something about environmental issues (they have a ecological farm in Palawan, an island in the Visayas region). He has been here for 18 years.
- Frances works part time for 11.11.11
- Gudrun is the coordinator of Trias, has been here for 11 years, lives in Borocay (beautiful island with white sandy beaches and pale blue water) with Jango (Philipino) and has 3 kids (4,5 years old, 3,5 years old and a little baby). They were here all weekend, I went to the park with them, they are really a lot of fun. Jango will probably open a music shop closeby, he also makes fantastic leather bags. They flew to Belgium on Monday for their annual holiday.
- Jozef works for Trias as well, he’s been here 1 year (but previously lived in Vietnam for 4) and has a Philipina girlfriend (Babs, who’s totally into tennis- we watched the final of Roland Garos together).
- Herme (short for Hermione) is the last member of Trias, she only comes from time to time and travels around to support the local partners

So I’m surrounded really well! I'm going to a party with Frances tomorrow, and Citas invited me to go watch Ocean's 13 one of the days, so my agenda is slowly getting filled.

PS: on a local TV network they had a news item on the elections in Belgium, it must be quite an ordeal! The ruling parties (Liberals and Socialists) took quite a blow on Sunday and lost seats in parliament, the catholic party is now the biggest in Flanders and the Liberals are the biggest in Wallonia. The green party (Groen! and Ecolo) did also well and gained 5 seats. And the Flemish Blok (extreme right) lost 1 seat!