February 14th 2015 Bacolod City- Day 3

SM City Mall in Bacolod city.

Bought a new laptop at an Acer store inside SM mall in Bacolod city.

Signs like this are on every outside wall of SM City mall. Are they worried about it falling over? It doesn't give me a lot of confidence in Philippine construction :).

Walking back from SM Mall.

The cap from my cologne bottle accidentally fell down the bathroom sink drain and clogged up the sink. Just doing a little plumbing repair on the old hotel for them (free of charge).

This morning in McDonalds at 5:30am  I saw these 2 young teenagers fast asleep after drinking their 2 small coffees. I thought they looked so cute holding each others arms. They were probably out late into the wee hours this morning and needed a nice air conditioned restaurant to catch a much needed nap.

So the burned skin is now much better as I have stayed inside for the past couple days. Still need to buy a hat to protect myself from the sun or maybe I will do what the filipino women do here and buy an umbrella and walk around on a sunny day with my umbrella fully open? 

Filipinos are very friendly and respectful people. I notice that 20% of the people I walk past say to me "Good morning sir" or "Hello sir" and it is a genuine greeting with no dollar signs in their eyes like I have experienced in other countries. Maybe they just like seeing foreigners in their country because although I do see the occasional white person that are not a lot. But I definitely get the feeling that I am being treated like a celebrity here as security guards open doors for me and smile as they say "Hello sir" or just people on the street that want to say hi.

Another thing I have noticed is that quite a few of the filipino men are very feminine! One filipino in front of me at McDonalds today I originally thought was a woman and then when I heard him talk I realized it was a guy but was dressed like a women and even had a pony tail in their hair. Philippine women are very feminine but apparently so are many men here. I have noticed many in McDonalds in Dumaguete as well that have that nasal voice and feminine behaviour. Johnny who I met in Dumaguete who was half filipino and half Israeli had told me that 10% of the filipino men are gay. With what I have seen here I tend to believe it. 

A couple days ago I was on my laptop when some filipino was knocking on my door. I was just laying down in my gonch so I put the laptop on the bed to put some pants and a shirt on and sure enough it fell off the bed and onto the tile floor. When I answered the door it was a filipino who didn't speak a word of english saying "Extend? extend??". Sometimes I feel my temper rising quickly as I already paid for 3 days in advance and raised up 3 fingers and said "I ALREADY PAID FOR 3 DAYS ALREADY!!" with a raised voice and he smiled and nodded and went away. Of course I went back to my laptop which had just fell on the floor due to the unexpected knock and sure enough my computer screen was malfunctioning. I played with it for 30 minutes and turned it off and on but it wouldn't work. Now I was really mad!! haha. It is a second hand laptop and knew I would soon need another but didn't think I would be buying one in the Philippines so I went down to SM Mall and found an ACER store and bought a laptop there for 16,900 pesos and because I paid in cash they gave me a 1000 pesos discount so 15,900 pesos ($430 cdn) and I notice that it is always the final price as the taxes are included in all prices. I went to another store and bought an adapter so the cord end can fit into a Philippine electrical outlet and also bought a USB cord to connect to both computers to hopefully transfer all the information over to the new computer. Of course when I get home and turn on my old computer and the old computer is now working perfectly fine haha. 

I think I will only be eating street food from now on as it is cheaper and healthier. I buy pork or chicken shishkabobs for 12 pesos (33 cents each) or small bags of cooked rice for 15 pesos (40 cents) and it really fills you up and you feel good and it saves you money!! This is basically the same price as street food in Thailand. These street vendors can't be making anymore than $3-5 a day and even when I bought my computer they had 5 filipinos working in this small Acer store and a couple of them put programs onto my new laptop and I can't see them making much more than $5 a day. You definitely feel rich here as I usually have at least a few thousand pesos ($100 cdn) on me at all times. I also notice that everything opens at 10am from the malls to the street vendors.