June
Unlike last month, this month has to be a bit “wordy” as a lot happened. We began this month still in our rented studio apartment in Macasandig. The one with the papaya tree outside our window with that lovely greeny brown lizard in. We were expecting our container to be arriving in Cebu this month with all our worldly possessions in so we still had our two choices. Rent a place big enough to get it all in while we search for a suitable home/building project or buy a home big enough for it all and move in pronto! The second choice was now looking unlikely as we were running out of time to buy and move in within a week or so! So we decided to go with the first.
We hit the road on the bike and cruised south, away from the sea along the river valley and upwards. Then more upwards and then seriously upwards! The poor bike was being treated a little harshly for one being run-in but our search came first. We found a great school so high the kids almost needed oxygen! No idea why they would build that there but the catchment area must exist somewhere. No idea where it was though.
We have been hugely assisted by the iphone’s, both having GPS even when no internet connection is available! Street names, shopping information and even builders merchants noted on it too! We hunted all of those down already and trawled the materials trying to work out what we would use given the chance in the future. We navigated our way to the Palaez Bridge and really enjoyed the brilliant road surface, twisting and turning through small villages up and down. It was like being in North Wales but without the rain! :-)
We saw a sign saying “apartment for rent”. That’s how places are rented and sold here – a hand pained sign! This was a new build block of five two bedroom apartments and one was occupied so they let us in the gated courtyard :-) It looked like a mango cake as, typically, if a building does have any decorative finishing, it is an awful colour choice (IMHO of course). Remarkably, there is a real “functional” attitude to wards architecture here and appearance is simply not important to the majority. If it does what it’s intended to do, job done! I have always designed with the well know “form follows function” attitude and nowhere is that more the case than here. It seems there is still much to be learned here about the benefits of a tidy appearance in architectural and all other terms too.
Many areas appear scruffy, unfinished, dilapidated and colourless. But when you look closer you realise that this “view” is a relative one to environments in the west and all is not what it seems. The concrete and stones are actually being swept daily, the litter that is there today is only today’s litter and will be cleared up (sadly to be replaced with the next days as there is no “Keep Philippines Tidy” school campaign here and everyone throws rubbish anywhere). People and clothes are clean, plants are watered and you soon realise that the continual harsh heat of the sun is responsible for the initial view that the place is scruffy. Applied finishes to anything, especially buildings, will be lucky to last a year. There are no clay bricks here. Concrete is the building material of both choice and necessity and we all know how ugly raw concrete is. But, unsightly as it is, it does the job and that’s why folk here are entirely happy with it. Huge homes, of thousands of square feet, are large concrete blocks. Balconies have shapely concrete balusters, doorways have detailed surrounds, windows have canopies to provide shade from the sun, all in grey concrete yet, somehow, ornate. The attitude here is there is really no sensible nor practical nor affordable way to apply a finish to buildings so, why bother.
However, there are housing developments that accept the need for continual maintenance ( I met a man here who employs a full time maintenance man!) and paint the walls and stain the doors regardless. The question is, can this maintenance be, erm, maintained? Year after year. I fear not and see the sun having its wicked way with anything that is not marble, ceramic, aluminium or gold coated! It’s a real challenge.
But, back to the apartment. New build and so you would expect all to be great. Wrong. 2.7m ceiling height on the ground floor so, obviously (surely), its going to be similar upstairs right? Erm, sloping from 1.6m at the back of the apartment to 1.8m at the front, I cannot stand vertically upright anywhere! Go figure. The ground floor is a large living space with kitchen area and shower room at the back with stairs up to the two bedrooms for dwarfs. I calculated that all our stuff would fit. Not sure if we would though so accepted that a couple of things would need to stay outside like kayaks, bikes, table tennis table etc but a nice covered area in the courtyard meant this was a great place for us. £100 per month (7000 pesos) was spot on so we signed up for a few months.
We contacted a Filipina and hubby in Xavier Estates, a couple Love Mae had met on Facebook some time ago, to ask the contact details of a broker who could get us past the super secure gatehouse to see some properties inside. The broker showed us a new place that wasted 50% of the floor space trying to appear more grand than it actually was, another new place that did the same, another new place that was bigger, more expensive but featureless and then they showed us a ruin! Love Mae walked in and promptly walked out again. I found this both predictable and very amusing and whilst she was chopsing outside with the broker for half an hour, I stayed inside and fully assessed its potential. I walked out and said “I love this place!” Love Mae would take some convincing.
You look through a window in two directions. Only looking in can you control what you see. So that was all fixable. Looking out I saw very large, perfectly maintained residential properties that are all delightful to look at. This was a great location! The next day we made an insulting offer some 25% less than the asking price which was refused. We agreed a price 17% less and my bully boy property developer mind was very pleased with that. We agreed to pay the incurred expenses of the seller (not the immense 5% brokers fee though!) and we felt great to have a potential home/project lined up :-) We immediately went out and bought a clipboard, a steel tape, some paper and a pencil (yes, all of ours was still at sea!) and surveyed the place. I then laid out some refurbishment and extension proposals and Love Mae decided she liked the potential of the house a whole lot more than the existing!
Using the brilliant iPhone4 GPS software we noted that there were two routes of similar distance between our Mango Cake apartment and our “building site”. As I am expecting to make daily visits to the site to oversee the refurbishment and extension of the house, I needed to know the best route. The apartment is east of the river and the house is west! There is a bridge to the north and a bridge to the south! The northern route takes me through the city for 15 minutes and up a steep hill full of traffic. The southern route takes me on a brilliant undulating, twisty, turny traffic free cruise along the river valley for about 10 minutes until I reach the security gate to the estate. I can’t wait!
We attended a few functions this month (forgetting we attended a wedding last month (oops – the pictures are on this website here:- http://www.clevercaptures.com/Weddings/Tan/Images )). Joey was 30 and he got engaged to the lovely Marianne. They had a big joint celebration and all the images from there are on this website here:- http://www.clevercaptures.com/Formal-Occasions/Joey
We had a great time at the Tambacan 2011 Fiesta where an assortment of games took place with even more of the usual amount of enthusiasm and smiles as is typically found here The images will be available here and I will link them up shortly.
I put some time into searching for a kayak slalom venue. I’m looking for a section of fast flowing/white water river no more than about 30m wide in a heavily populated area to ensure I have a large uptake and a large public awareness. This is proving very difficult because here near the city the river is HUGELY wide and flat and impossible to suspend slalom gates over. Upstream it gets narrower and steeper but either has poor access or no paddler catchment area or both! My target audience are young people who have time on their hands to paddle and these are unlikely to have any transport. It really is a case of me, quite literally, “bringing” slalom to the people here as they are unable to travel to slalom! However, I’m sure I will find somewhere.
Whilst Skyping with Chairman Rob from VKC he pointed out a spillway on Google Earth not far from where we live. Love Mae and I accepted the challenge to find this place and after leaving the made up road a few kilometres behind and asking a handful of locals (including the pictured schoolkids spilling off the back of their “school bus” – a coca-cola truck!) we found the spillway that allows access to Balulang Island in the Cagayan De Oro River. Very interesting place. I will not go into the slalom aspects of the place here but I have opened conversation in this regard with the local kayak guys and also met one in a shop by accident (Harry) and I am going out with him next month exploring! Love Mae and I explored Balulang on the bike. Well, she actually jumped off before I headed off on a personal challenge to cross the 1.5m wide hanging bridge on a motorbike! The video of this can be seen here:-
http://www.clevercaptures.com/General/Various/5977926_CbVMh#1349354869_nDzXwtJ-A-LB
How much do I need to report here about the “receiving our shipping container” adventure? Oh my goodness. Let me try to simply record the salient issues. After getting an email saying the container had arrived in Cebu, we took the ferry with Ana Marie and Chris. 9 hours overnight to arrive at 7am on Friday. The container had NOT arrived. It did, however, arrive at 7pm that night after the customs offices had closed. We stopped in a seedy hotel overnight, concluded there was nothing we could get done until Monday and spent 9 hours on the overnight ferry back to CDO. When we got back to CDO we realised we had no bed. We had moved into the mango cake apartment on the Thursday before we left for Cebu and expected to return with all our stuff, including our beds! Wrong. We stayed in the Three Sisters Hotel in CDO. We had stayed here when we first got here and we like the place. Then, unexpectedly, a HUGE bonus! Channel hopping (I’m male ok!) I found the grid lining up LIVE at the Canadian Grand Prix! Oh my goodness, I was over the moon! I had not seen any TV at all since leaving the UK (its all junk here) so I made myself comfortable. Then, DOUBLE BONUS! It was the best race for years :-) I was SO happy we had all the problems just so that we could check into the hotel :-)
Back on the ferry for 9 hours to Cebu on Monday night and finally, we got to SEE our container. How seeing a rather shabby looking blue metal box with a number on that you recognise can bring so much excitement is very difficult to explain. It was actually hard to imagine all our worldly possessions being inside. For six weeks it had gone from UK to Singapore, offloaded to another ship to China, offloaded to another ship to Cebu and then offloaded onto the rather tired looking truck in front of us. The best news was that it did not look like it had been dropped, fished out of the sea or otherwise badly treated. Even the numbered security seal that I fixed in place myself was still there. The reason that this was the best news was because we elected not to insure it. It was stupidly expensive and the small print seemed to exclude all the likely disasters so we just said, ship it! Our only insistence was that it was stowed below deck. No idea if it was.
We spent a whole day doing paperwork. Love Mae did all the dealings with the customs officials and did a good job. Discovered we should have got her a tax exemption certificate in Manila to avoid paying any tax at all. However, brow beat customs down to about a £140 tax bill which we then found we can possibly reclaim later anyway. All good.
Our UK shippers told me from the outset the container cannot go beyond Cebu as they fear if it goes “into” the Philippines, it may be gone forever! It must be emptied in Cebu for onward transportation of the contents via another means. So the plan was for Ana Marie’s super helpful brother Marlon to arrange men and transport to empty the container at the dock to his truck before driving it to our home. I was never really happy with this after our BRILLIANT container loading crew in England had effectively discovered the 4th dimension by getting everything into a container that was only big enough for 95% of it! Also the prospect of damage through handling was not attractive. I favoured shipping the container onto CDO and returning it to Cebu. I was shouted down by everyone saying it’s not possible but I have learned that, in the Philippines, “Everything is possible”.
So I brought this up for the tenth time in an office where we were signing more papers and hey presto! “Yes we can do that”. Wow! This was a HUGE bonus. It took a couple of hours to sort out, including hasty emails to shippers in the UK to get confirmation of certain facts, but it was done! The only downside was that this time set us back and we “missed the boat”. Literally! We arranged things for the next day and stayed in a much nicer hotel in Cebu for one night. Cebu is hot. Very hot. Unpleasantly hot. Glad to leave.
We sailed back to CDO with us in bunks and our container in the hold below. Huge smiles. We went straight home and the container arrived complete with a couple of offloaders! This was unexpected as Love Mae’s brother, Tebor, had arrived with five pals to help us with this. We loaded the dwarfs bedrooms entirely with boxes and created the ground floor into a living, dining, study, kitchen, bedroom kind of set up. I doubt I could have laid out the eventual floor plan in AutoCad but its maximising all the space we have! The table tennis table and various other bits and bobs remains outside under a covered area so all is good. Now we can concentrate on the house project!
We are doing so much every day. We found a regular supply of fresh milk! HOORAH! Those zillion PG Tips tea bags we brought here will taste great now! We found some great BluRay suppliers so we have all the latest films on hand. We are still investigating cable TV and broadband suppliers, both seem pretty good actually. We found a drinking water supplier who delivers. Result! Busy, busy, busy but all fun, fun, fun!
ENJOY!
Peter & Love Mae :-)
Read MoreWe hit the road on the bike and cruised south, away from the sea along the river valley and upwards. Then more upwards and then seriously upwards! The poor bike was being treated a little harshly for one being run-in but our search came first. We found a great school so high the kids almost needed oxygen! No idea why they would build that there but the catchment area must exist somewhere. No idea where it was though.
We have been hugely assisted by the iphone’s, both having GPS even when no internet connection is available! Street names, shopping information and even builders merchants noted on it too! We hunted all of those down already and trawled the materials trying to work out what we would use given the chance in the future. We navigated our way to the Palaez Bridge and really enjoyed the brilliant road surface, twisting and turning through small villages up and down. It was like being in North Wales but without the rain! :-)
We saw a sign saying “apartment for rent”. That’s how places are rented and sold here – a hand pained sign! This was a new build block of five two bedroom apartments and one was occupied so they let us in the gated courtyard :-) It looked like a mango cake as, typically, if a building does have any decorative finishing, it is an awful colour choice (IMHO of course). Remarkably, there is a real “functional” attitude to wards architecture here and appearance is simply not important to the majority. If it does what it’s intended to do, job done! I have always designed with the well know “form follows function” attitude and nowhere is that more the case than here. It seems there is still much to be learned here about the benefits of a tidy appearance in architectural and all other terms too.
Many areas appear scruffy, unfinished, dilapidated and colourless. But when you look closer you realise that this “view” is a relative one to environments in the west and all is not what it seems. The concrete and stones are actually being swept daily, the litter that is there today is only today’s litter and will be cleared up (sadly to be replaced with the next days as there is no “Keep Philippines Tidy” school campaign here and everyone throws rubbish anywhere). People and clothes are clean, plants are watered and you soon realise that the continual harsh heat of the sun is responsible for the initial view that the place is scruffy. Applied finishes to anything, especially buildings, will be lucky to last a year. There are no clay bricks here. Concrete is the building material of both choice and necessity and we all know how ugly raw concrete is. But, unsightly as it is, it does the job and that’s why folk here are entirely happy with it. Huge homes, of thousands of square feet, are large concrete blocks. Balconies have shapely concrete balusters, doorways have detailed surrounds, windows have canopies to provide shade from the sun, all in grey concrete yet, somehow, ornate. The attitude here is there is really no sensible nor practical nor affordable way to apply a finish to buildings so, why bother.
However, there are housing developments that accept the need for continual maintenance ( I met a man here who employs a full time maintenance man!) and paint the walls and stain the doors regardless. The question is, can this maintenance be, erm, maintained? Year after year. I fear not and see the sun having its wicked way with anything that is not marble, ceramic, aluminium or gold coated! It’s a real challenge.
But, back to the apartment. New build and so you would expect all to be great. Wrong. 2.7m ceiling height on the ground floor so, obviously (surely), its going to be similar upstairs right? Erm, sloping from 1.6m at the back of the apartment to 1.8m at the front, I cannot stand vertically upright anywhere! Go figure. The ground floor is a large living space with kitchen area and shower room at the back with stairs up to the two bedrooms for dwarfs. I calculated that all our stuff would fit. Not sure if we would though so accepted that a couple of things would need to stay outside like kayaks, bikes, table tennis table etc but a nice covered area in the courtyard meant this was a great place for us. £100 per month (7000 pesos) was spot on so we signed up for a few months.
We contacted a Filipina and hubby in Xavier Estates, a couple Love Mae had met on Facebook some time ago, to ask the contact details of a broker who could get us past the super secure gatehouse to see some properties inside. The broker showed us a new place that wasted 50% of the floor space trying to appear more grand than it actually was, another new place that did the same, another new place that was bigger, more expensive but featureless and then they showed us a ruin! Love Mae walked in and promptly walked out again. I found this both predictable and very amusing and whilst she was chopsing outside with the broker for half an hour, I stayed inside and fully assessed its potential. I walked out and said “I love this place!” Love Mae would take some convincing.
You look through a window in two directions. Only looking in can you control what you see. So that was all fixable. Looking out I saw very large, perfectly maintained residential properties that are all delightful to look at. This was a great location! The next day we made an insulting offer some 25% less than the asking price which was refused. We agreed a price 17% less and my bully boy property developer mind was very pleased with that. We agreed to pay the incurred expenses of the seller (not the immense 5% brokers fee though!) and we felt great to have a potential home/project lined up :-) We immediately went out and bought a clipboard, a steel tape, some paper and a pencil (yes, all of ours was still at sea!) and surveyed the place. I then laid out some refurbishment and extension proposals and Love Mae decided she liked the potential of the house a whole lot more than the existing!
Using the brilliant iPhone4 GPS software we noted that there were two routes of similar distance between our Mango Cake apartment and our “building site”. As I am expecting to make daily visits to the site to oversee the refurbishment and extension of the house, I needed to know the best route. The apartment is east of the river and the house is west! There is a bridge to the north and a bridge to the south! The northern route takes me through the city for 15 minutes and up a steep hill full of traffic. The southern route takes me on a brilliant undulating, twisty, turny traffic free cruise along the river valley for about 10 minutes until I reach the security gate to the estate. I can’t wait!
We attended a few functions this month (forgetting we attended a wedding last month (oops – the pictures are on this website here:- http://www.clevercaptures.com/Weddings/Tan/Images )). Joey was 30 and he got engaged to the lovely Marianne. They had a big joint celebration and all the images from there are on this website here:- http://www.clevercaptures.com/Formal-Occasions/Joey
We had a great time at the Tambacan 2011 Fiesta where an assortment of games took place with even more of the usual amount of enthusiasm and smiles as is typically found here The images will be available here and I will link them up shortly.
I put some time into searching for a kayak slalom venue. I’m looking for a section of fast flowing/white water river no more than about 30m wide in a heavily populated area to ensure I have a large uptake and a large public awareness. This is proving very difficult because here near the city the river is HUGELY wide and flat and impossible to suspend slalom gates over. Upstream it gets narrower and steeper but either has poor access or no paddler catchment area or both! My target audience are young people who have time on their hands to paddle and these are unlikely to have any transport. It really is a case of me, quite literally, “bringing” slalom to the people here as they are unable to travel to slalom! However, I’m sure I will find somewhere.
Whilst Skyping with Chairman Rob from VKC he pointed out a spillway on Google Earth not far from where we live. Love Mae and I accepted the challenge to find this place and after leaving the made up road a few kilometres behind and asking a handful of locals (including the pictured schoolkids spilling off the back of their “school bus” – a coca-cola truck!) we found the spillway that allows access to Balulang Island in the Cagayan De Oro River. Very interesting place. I will not go into the slalom aspects of the place here but I have opened conversation in this regard with the local kayak guys and also met one in a shop by accident (Harry) and I am going out with him next month exploring! Love Mae and I explored Balulang on the bike. Well, she actually jumped off before I headed off on a personal challenge to cross the 1.5m wide hanging bridge on a motorbike! The video of this can be seen here:-
http://www.clevercaptures.com/General/Various/5977926_CbVMh#1349354869_nDzXwtJ-A-LB
How much do I need to report here about the “receiving our shipping container” adventure? Oh my goodness. Let me try to simply record the salient issues. After getting an email saying the container had arrived in Cebu, we took the ferry with Ana Marie and Chris. 9 hours overnight to arrive at 7am on Friday. The container had NOT arrived. It did, however, arrive at 7pm that night after the customs offices had closed. We stopped in a seedy hotel overnight, concluded there was nothing we could get done until Monday and spent 9 hours on the overnight ferry back to CDO. When we got back to CDO we realised we had no bed. We had moved into the mango cake apartment on the Thursday before we left for Cebu and expected to return with all our stuff, including our beds! Wrong. We stayed in the Three Sisters Hotel in CDO. We had stayed here when we first got here and we like the place. Then, unexpectedly, a HUGE bonus! Channel hopping (I’m male ok!) I found the grid lining up LIVE at the Canadian Grand Prix! Oh my goodness, I was over the moon! I had not seen any TV at all since leaving the UK (its all junk here) so I made myself comfortable. Then, DOUBLE BONUS! It was the best race for years :-) I was SO happy we had all the problems just so that we could check into the hotel :-)
Back on the ferry for 9 hours to Cebu on Monday night and finally, we got to SEE our container. How seeing a rather shabby looking blue metal box with a number on that you recognise can bring so much excitement is very difficult to explain. It was actually hard to imagine all our worldly possessions being inside. For six weeks it had gone from UK to Singapore, offloaded to another ship to China, offloaded to another ship to Cebu and then offloaded onto the rather tired looking truck in front of us. The best news was that it did not look like it had been dropped, fished out of the sea or otherwise badly treated. Even the numbered security seal that I fixed in place myself was still there. The reason that this was the best news was because we elected not to insure it. It was stupidly expensive and the small print seemed to exclude all the likely disasters so we just said, ship it! Our only insistence was that it was stowed below deck. No idea if it was.
We spent a whole day doing paperwork. Love Mae did all the dealings with the customs officials and did a good job. Discovered we should have got her a tax exemption certificate in Manila to avoid paying any tax at all. However, brow beat customs down to about a £140 tax bill which we then found we can possibly reclaim later anyway. All good.
Our UK shippers told me from the outset the container cannot go beyond Cebu as they fear if it goes “into” the Philippines, it may be gone forever! It must be emptied in Cebu for onward transportation of the contents via another means. So the plan was for Ana Marie’s super helpful brother Marlon to arrange men and transport to empty the container at the dock to his truck before driving it to our home. I was never really happy with this after our BRILLIANT container loading crew in England had effectively discovered the 4th dimension by getting everything into a container that was only big enough for 95% of it! Also the prospect of damage through handling was not attractive. I favoured shipping the container onto CDO and returning it to Cebu. I was shouted down by everyone saying it’s not possible but I have learned that, in the Philippines, “Everything is possible”.
So I brought this up for the tenth time in an office where we were signing more papers and hey presto! “Yes we can do that”. Wow! This was a HUGE bonus. It took a couple of hours to sort out, including hasty emails to shippers in the UK to get confirmation of certain facts, but it was done! The only downside was that this time set us back and we “missed the boat”. Literally! We arranged things for the next day and stayed in a much nicer hotel in Cebu for one night. Cebu is hot. Very hot. Unpleasantly hot. Glad to leave.
We sailed back to CDO with us in bunks and our container in the hold below. Huge smiles. We went straight home and the container arrived complete with a couple of offloaders! This was unexpected as Love Mae’s brother, Tebor, had arrived with five pals to help us with this. We loaded the dwarfs bedrooms entirely with boxes and created the ground floor into a living, dining, study, kitchen, bedroom kind of set up. I doubt I could have laid out the eventual floor plan in AutoCad but its maximising all the space we have! The table tennis table and various other bits and bobs remains outside under a covered area so all is good. Now we can concentrate on the house project!
We are doing so much every day. We found a regular supply of fresh milk! HOORAH! Those zillion PG Tips tea bags we brought here will taste great now! We found some great BluRay suppliers so we have all the latest films on hand. We are still investigating cable TV and broadband suppliers, both seem pretty good actually. We found a drinking water supplier who delivers. Result! Busy, busy, busy but all fun, fun, fun!
ENJOY!
Peter & Love Mae :-)
