Male Call: Jim

Hello, Rik!Your photos are great, and I even have stolen a couple to use as desktop backgrounds; if you don't want that, just let me know and I'll erase them. If you can, or want to, send me your e-mail address. For the reason, see my blog published just recently as "Dual Citizenship" by JimEdris, screen name jim. Lily and I have a good relationship, even if a little stormy at times, because of the differences between cultures. Unlike Celine, she is extremely jealous, and so I expect there will be some sparks when we move to Mindanao. There were none previously when I was there for 33 days, but the "new" probably influenced that. And of course, we went everywhere together. It is a blessing to me and many others that we can now obtain dual citizenship in the PI. As I understand it, that allows Lily and I to own property and do business as if we were original Philippinos (Filipino’s: Rik). Some of the Real Estate sections of the law have not, as yet, been tested. Is it your experience that the Property listings on www.IslandsWeb.com are a reflection of the real value of the property, or is it that the values are grossly inflated for the international market they are advertising to? Many of them seem very reasonable, and in line with your comments on value, and others seem wildly inflated. Beachfront property, especially, is quite inflated, as in P2,500 per square meter.You mentioned your banca. Is that one of your business ventures? I would like to buy one for personal use when we get there. Is yours operated using nets, or lines with hooks?I'm interested to hear your response to the question about buying and carrying a pistol, in regard to the raid Celine was exposed to. I understand that it would be futile against 20 men with full military equipment, but what about the occasional single criminal who will see me/us as an easy touch?Thanks for your good heart and ability to communicate!Jim
...Second Email...
Hi, Rik!I have one comment on the local transportation... Everything is made for people who are 5'6" in height or less. Even the tricycles have roofs that are too short for me. I am 5'10",
and have to sit bent over always in jeepneys, and almost always in tricycles. I have learned to watch for the highest tricycles and wave them down when traveling. Also, it makes it uncomfortable to try to see the scenery when you must bend down, and then bend your neck sharply up to be able to look. The city buses in Manila seem to have absolutely NO springs! And the tires are square! Much worse than your motorcycle... which I intend to get when we arrive in the PI. Our land is in Siay, West of Pagadian City, and is a good fishing area, according to Lily, my Honey Ko. We have planted 300 Coco Palms there, so as to have Copra to sell soon after we get there. They are about 3 years old now. How fluent are you in Tagalog/Visayan/Cebuano/Muslim Vernacular? I want to learn at least Tagalog, but Lily is not willing to put forth the energy to cope with speaking only Tagalog in our house for the few weeks it willl take for me to learn. I guess I'll just have to wait 'til we arrive!Anyway, blessings until next time...Jim

...Rik...

Hello Jim, and welcome to ETP.
Before I start to reply to your messages I want to ask you not to get angry with me as you read through it. I’m going to seize the opportunity some of your questions have offered me to address all of my readers with insight, opinion and, yes, even advice. So I won’t be talking directly to you in everything I write. That said - read on…

You’re welcome to copy any or all of the photos. Heck, I’ve stolen most of them myself. Not stolen, really; they’re open domain pictures I’ve found on the Internet from various websites. Although I enjoy photography and can take some pretty fair pictures, because I have back problems plus live solely on SS disability, I can’t physically and financially afford to travel around the Philippines taking all the wonderful pictures you see on my site.
Jim, I’d like to see your website, but can I just type in, "Dual Citizenship," and get there? I think you’ll need to send me the complete address.
I’m happy to know you have a good relationship with Lily. It always helps when you have a good partner. Since you didn’t actually say so, I’m assuming that Lily is a Filipina.
I’m not surprised there’s some steam mixed into your relationship; many Filipina’s can be extremely jealous, to the point of being downright dangerous to your health. One girl I lived with when I first moved here was always threatening to do a “Bobbit” on me if she ever caught me with another girl. She had no reason to accuse me or distrust me. I guess she was just building her perimeter fence around me and claiming ‘land’ rights. She went back out the door permanently rather quickly. You might say she cut her own throat when it came to having any relationship with me.
One suggestion I need to repeat throughout this endeavor is that it would be best for the readers planning to live in RP (Republic of the Philippines) to come here first, even if you have to keep renewing your 59-day visa, and give yourself plenty of time to find the RIGHT Filipina for you. I can almost guarantee that you will go through a number of girls before you find the right one. And the search itself can offer some great fun.
If you get married to the first one you meet, you’re begging for trouble, and you’ll pay a high price for the privilege of causing yourself that trouble.

I am very fortunate that Celine is not jealous. Having written that, I have to share a funny story. Just a week ago, Celine, playing with the Cell-phone, (now I have to enlighten the readers that Cell-phone ‘texting’ is a very big thing here because it’s so cheap, so you’ll see people everywhere furiously pushing the phone buttons, writing text messages to each other) sent me a text message while I was sitting next to her and watching the news on the TV. The phone beeped, and Celine handed the phone to me, “There’s a message for you.”
I read the message, “Hello Darling, I LOVE YOU!”
“Who the heck sent that to me?” I said aloud. Celine laughed and said, “Me!” and gave me a kiss. Yeah... that was sweet; Filipina's are very loving.
Fast forward two days. Celine was cleaning out the phone by deleting all the messages while I was once again watching BBC News. Suddenly Celine said in an angry voice,
“Who wrote you this message, and why are is telling you she loves you?!” She handed me the phone with anger in her voice and in her facial expression, so I could read the offensive message.
I read the message, “Hello Darling, I LOVE YOU!”
I looked at Celine and said, “You crazy woman, you sent me that message two days ago!”
Celine’s eyes rolled around in her head for a moment, then her face turned red and she laughed. “I forgot all about that!”
Hmm... at least she gave me a chuckle instead of a headache.

Back to serious:
You know, you have a responsibility to train your wife/girlfriend how to behave. Because of the cultural differences you will find, if you don’t take the initiative to set rules and standards, that a Filipina can go wild and quickly become uncontrollable; next thing you know you’ll be flat broke and wondering how you ever got into such a mess.
Many foreigners come to the Philippines and treat their women the way they were trained to treat woman in their home countries. The thing is… Filipina’s don’t come from a Western society or culture, but from a distinctly Asian culture, and the differences are innumerable.
Filipina’s, like so many other Asian cultures, look to their husband to lead them, to be the decision maker, to set the standards and rules of the house and relationship. If you look around at the Pinoy and most of the foreigner's relationships, you’ll see that the woman will ask permission to go anywhere, do anything, even to allow people into the house, let her family come over for a visit, or just to go outside to water the plants. They’ll ask you what you want to eat, make you coffee upon request, massage your feet, take out the trash - do anything and everything for you. In other words, they’ll take excellent care of you, and do it gladly -for the husband/man and marriage is seen with a perspective almost unknown in Western society any longer. Understanding and living by your Honey Ko's culture and ways will be a major key to your success. Remember, it's all she knows.
Culturally, Pinay (Filipina’s) expect to live that way. When you, the foreigner, come along and take a Filipina woman, she will watch and wait to see what you expect of her. She expect you to tell her how to behave, and she'll behave the way you teach her. She’ll do everything in her power to make you happy. Serving her husband is in her nature. Unlike the self-important and aloof Western women, to her, there's no shame in it.
If you treat her like liberated and independent-minded Betty Sue from San Francisco, you could soon find yourself in a major nightmare. Filipina's can't relate to American culture except for the money and spending money part. So if you hand her a credit card and/or put her name on your bank accounts, and give her free reign, thinking she'll behave like a responsible American woman, you can kiss all your money goodbye. Before long, all of her relatives will be driving new cars to their new houses while talking on their new cell-phones, and you'll be left to pick up the shattered pieces of your life.

Taking care of her family and helping them financially is also a big part of Filipina culture! If you give her the opportunity, she'll give most of your money away to them.
If you’re like most Foreigner’s, you’re fed up with the “Don’t call me ma’am!” and “I can open my own damn door!” and “If you’re nice to me, maybe I’ll reward you tonight” women of the West. Let’s be honest - Western women long ago figured out they could have whatever they wanted by manipulating men, and men’s importance have become secondary – or worse - to women’s desires for money, power and husband/boyfriend/lover financed rampant consumerism.
When an American or European’s eyes turn to the East for love and happiness, it’s because he’s sick to death of the attitude of the women of his own country.

Contrary to what Western women are so fond of telling men how there's only thing they really want; men want to have a happy, shared, meaningful relationship with a woman who is with him for more than what he can provide to her. Sex is wonderful, but it ain't everything. Western women tend to believe that if they hand out a little of that stuff once in awhile to their man, she can rule the roost of the marriage hen-house. There's very little of the, "I'll love you until death do us part" aspect of marriage, but an abundance of, "You just can't support my needy lifestyle."
So we come here for something different, better, more satisfying. And if we do things properly, we get it. But neither you nor I will find a truly good relationship if we don’t make it happen. And that requires planning and know-how, effort and work.

Treating Filipina’s as if they’re just short, brown versions of Western women is simply self-defeating.
Filipina’s will go every bit as wild and become every bit as nauseating as any Western woman if you create the conditions for her to do so.
But, Filipina’s, as strange as it may seem to a Western man’s perspective, not only expect to be bossed by her husband, but trained how to behave.
Yes - trained. And she will not look at you as if you’re crazy if you use that word. I use the word 'training' with Celine all of the time. She doesn’t become angry, or pack her bags and run off to her mother’s, or even open her eyes wide and cock her head to one side as if she’d just discovered that her man is totally insane. When Celine came to live with me, she expected that I would train her how she must behave, what she’d be allowed to and not to do, what was acceptable and unacceptable, tolerable and intolerable.
If I didn’t do those things, relative to Asian culture, I would be acting irresponsibly, and I would not be fulfilling my duties and obligations to her. A Filipina needs to know what to expect, and expects to be told what to do by her husband. Don’t do that and you’re looking at real trouble and problems in your relationship.
In America, who will be the boss (the decision-maker) of the house and of the relationship is decided by, at the very best a 50/50 vote (although I have yet to see a relationship like that actually work). Too many chiefs and not enough Indians means nothing much ever gets accomplished. And the next decision to be made will follow the example of the last with fighting for position and power and for who will get to have the final say - the decision itself getting lost in the anger and the bickering.
In reality, except in rare instances in America, who will be the boss is decided by the woman. She will either be the boss outright or she will be the boss, but let the man think he’s the boss.
That’s just the way things are in America (absolutely), and other Western countries (more or less absolutely). How many times have you heard a man say to you or to another when asked to go somewhere or if he will buy something, “I’ll have to check with the boss first?.” It’s as common a practice as eating hamburgers in the USA.
All right, that may be the way of things in America. But we’re talking about the Philippines. And it IS NOT that way here, with a few exceptions when the male prefers to be the weaker partner. The biggest mistake foreigners make when they move here to live is to bring their own training on the treatment of women with them and attempt to apply it to Filipina’s and Asian culture.
I am the undisputed boss of my house, and Celine looks to me for every decision and for permission for anything. Sometimes I get tired of having to decide what I will eat for dinner, but if I don’t decide, she won’t cook and will just keep asking me until I tell her. It’s not that I ever demanded the right to decide my dinner; it’s her culture. And that’s what Foreign men need to understand – the cultures of East and West are vastly different.
I have never once yelled at Celine, or threatened her, or beat her, and we have yet to have, in two years together, a single disagreement or argument. Neither none of us has ever gone to bed angry with the other.
Being the boss doesn’t mean one has to be bossy. I ask Celine for something, and she does it or gets it for me. I say, “Thanks, darlin’,” and we give each other kisses and hugs all of the time, and dance around the kitchen, and laugh and joke with each other daily. We’re both happy. I’m happy; happier than I ever dreamed I could be, and in a relationship with a woman that I never dreamed back in America could ever be possible.
I need to be repetitious about this point: This is the Philippines, not America, The planet IS NOT America-The-World. This is the East; this is the land of Asian culture: This IS NOT the Western World.
Bring your Western ways here with your programmed ideas about how a relationship should be maintained and you are only going to find yourself in a Western-style relationship with a Filipina, and you will wind-up being just as miserable as if you'd stayed married to your Princess. But then, you'll also miserable and 8000 miles from your homeland.

You’re going to move to Mindanao to live? Jim, you’re a brave man; much more brave than me. That’s Muslim territory; that’s rebel (pronounced Re–bell, with emphasis on the second syllable) territory; that’s let’s-kidnap-the-foreigner-for-ransom territory. Jim, I wish you well, and I fervently hope you have no trouble. But I wouldn’t live there under any circumstances. Even many Pinoy are moving away from Mindanao to avoid the bombings the murders and the bloodshed. Are you aware of the problems there? Do you know the Muslims are in a 100-plus year-old war for separation from the RP, and that they want their own country? That’s where the American Army fought back in 1900 against the Moro separatists. We didn’t when that war either.
Here in Palawan there is a constant influx of families arriving from Mindanao to live. Even Celine’s family moved here long ago to avoid the fighting and the Rebel “taxes” (forcing you to pay protection money) and indiscriminate kidnappings and rapes.
If you haven’t made an absolute decision on living in Mindanao, you might consider checking out Palawan as a potential place to live. It could be argued that it’s the safest part of the Philippines. Sitting by itself and separated from the rest of the Philippine Islands by the Sulu Sea, Palawan is considered to be the last frontier of the Philippines. You also might make a stop off (and do some Internet research) on Camiguin Island, just east of Cebu. There are quite a few foreigners on both Islands. Here, the foreigners pretty much keep to themselves; that is, we don’t visit each other much. I can’t speak to the sociability of those on Camiguin Island.
About dual citizenship: Now there’s a subject I know nothing about. Would you be willing to write an article about dual citizenship for me to put on my Blog? I’m certain there would be many people interested in knowing about that – myself included.
I’m living here on a Permanent Residence Visa (13-A). I can live here forever with that, but I have no citizenship rights.
To the extent of my understanding, I can own one property in my name, however, no bigger than 600 square meters (6,458 square feet or 1.6 acres). Any Filipina can own land, and you can own all the land you want through her. However, the downside is that it must be in her name. If you leave her, or if she gets pissed-off at you, she can sell it and take the money and run, and there’s nothing you can do about it – short of a good beating or murder. Not very reasonable choices.
About property prices: It is my experience that, if you are a foreigner, and the seller knows it, the prices will double, triple or go even higher. The best way to buy property is to have your Honey Ko go alone to the seller or to the real estate office and do all of the enquiries as if you don’t exist. Only after she has a commitment of the seller’s asking price on paper should she divulge your existence.
Most real estate sales-persons don’t even have a real estate license – something to look for in the office, and to ask to see – and most are devious and unscrupulous. You can’t assume you can trust business people the way you can back in the USA. It just ain’t so.
You may buy a property through than agent and still learn later that you don’t own the property. Going to a lawyer won’t help, either. You have to rely on yourself.
Things to do:
Checking the real estate broker’s license number against the name at the City Hall is a good idea, and also enquire about any legal claims or cases (legal charges) against the real estate agent. Check the public records to learn who actually owns the property you're interested in - it may well be the agent. If so, will he be serving his own or your best interests?
Another way to consider buying property is through the banks. I think that’s the best method. There is a huge turnover of properties in the Philippines through loan defaults leading to repossessions.
The bank(s) won’t try to cheat (though I wouldn’t bet my life on that). They’re usually interested in getting their money out of default and freeing it up to make more loans and more money. So the price you pay will reflect to cost to the bank. And banks, even in RP, don’t like to make loans on properties for more than the property is really worth.
A word of advice: NEVER EVER buy land from a private party without going to City Hall and finding out if the person actually owns the property. Who pays the taxes on the property? Talk to that person about whether he/she is even selling the property. More foreigners than you can shake a stick at have bought properties from caretakers or neighbors to the property, or relatives of the owner. When they tried to move onto the property, they found out they didn’t own it. And forget expecting to ever get your money back – it just won’t happen. The money disappears as fast as you lay it in the seller’s hand. All you will ever get whenever you ask for your money back is the Tagalog word, “Wala,” which means “nothing.” No truer or precisely spoken word ever left a Pinoy’s lips.
It’s impossible to be too careful. But, if you’re very careful, you may actually wind-up owning the property you paid for.
You can’t even trust your wife’s relatives. Two of Celine’s uncles tried to sell me land they didn’t own. One property had been sold five times to different people (onetime to another American). Another man sold his sister’s property while she was on vacation. It’s a sad but common story in RP.
Beach-front property will always be inflated. The best thing you can hope for is to make a ridiculously low offer and wangle back and forth until you find an acceptable meeting of the minds. Offering cash, is always a big incentive to sellers to lower the price, but, again, the above cautions apply.
You will learn that because of the harsh poverty in RP, people very often sell their properties to pay for medicines or for an operation or to send a child to college. If you keep your eyes open and your ear to the ground and, more importantly, have a little patience, a good deal will come down the pike before very long.
And because of that, I wouldn’t suggest being in a big hurry to buy land. One property of 15 hectares might be selling for 5 million pesos, three months later the same property might sell for 1.5 million so the owner can go to hospital in Manila. You just never know.
One thing I do know; wherever you live, you will soon be receiving visitors at your door trying to sell you properties. People will try to sell you things in tricycles or anywhere else you go. You can expect to be asked for loans over and over; they’ll offer to let you hold a lien on property (they don’t own), and on and on.
If you ever give a loan to anyone, including your wife’s relatives, understand and accept that the emphasis will be on the word “give” because you will never see that money again.

You asked about my banca, Jim, and about my other business ventures. Yes, I had a fishing banca built. It’s a big one, maybe 40-45 feet-long. It cost me P125,000 pesos to build a P85,000 banca. One on Celine’s cousin’s, a very honest and moral Christian man who would never cheat me, according to him, cheated me at every turn. That’s just the way things are here. You learn to live with it or you go crazy.
You can have a smaller banca built for far less if it’s just for your own use and you don’t plan to use it for business. Although, at the price, why not build a larger, safer one that will handle the ocean waves? P125,000, at current exchange rates, is only about $2,300.
When buying anything here, such as an engine for your banca, which is a Briggs and Stratten or Kohler-style single-stroke engine like an American gas lawn-mower engine, you have to make sure you are buying the real McCoy. Everything you can imagine has a Chinese or other Asian country knock-off. It may work and it may break-down. Probably, it will break-down soon after purchase. Be wise and make sure you’re getting the real thing when you buy things you need to last. Usually the truth of real versus fake will show up in serial numbers and guarantee cards and written information on your sales receipt. Knock-off’s have no serial numbers.
If there was no black market in RP, there’d almost be no markets, as you’ll soon discover.
My banca doesn’t use nets, but uses pole-and-hooks wielded by four fishermen. It makes very little money. In the last month I’ve only cleared about $30.00. But, hey, that’s better than a kick-in-the-head. Many months have gone by when I made nothing or lost money. It’s not a very productive way to make a living. As always, one has to be very careful about stealing and cheating.
Lately, because of Red-Tides in the local seas, my banca has gone farther a-field and the crew is now diving exclusively for squid. Unfortunately, two weeks ago one of the squid divers, the Kapitan’s brother, lost his leg to a shark. When the Red-Tide is gone they’ll go back to hook fishing.
You can have a very large banca built, if you’re interested in making money, which does only net fishing. They are large, 80-feet and more and go far out to sea. They are known to make excellent profits, especially if you use power gear as opposed to old-fashioned hand labor. A hand labor banca will have as many as thirty fishermen on-board to hand release and pull-in the nets.
I’ve found that rice buying and selling is far more lucrative. Filipino’s are a rice-eating people, and act as if they’d die if they missed rice in their meals one single day.

Coconut and copra farms are everywhere in the RP. Hope you do well, and I would appreciate if you kept me and my readers in touch with your on-going enterprise. It would help them to see what you go through with your new crop, your learning experiences, labor problems, profitability, etc. If you do well, it may encourage others who otherwise might talk themselves out of moving here, take a chance and come here after all.

About firearms: I really as unsure what to tell you about carrying a gun. I don’t carry or own a gun, and have never felt the need to. If I were farther out and living in a more rural setting, I believe I would buy several guns – a pistol (maybe two), a shotgun and a semi or fully automatic machine gun. You and I are foreigners and will always be a target for kidnapping or robbery by rebel gangs. But there are several rural foreigners who don’t own guns.
One American, retired from the navy, lives in Narra, some 40 kilometers from the city of Puerto and owns many hectares of land that he uses for growing rice and he also has a large scale piggery set-up. He protects himself, apparently, by hiring all of his wife’s relatives and, because he provides a lot of income into the area, no one wants him dead. There’s a Frenchman who lives in a small village in the mountains and has never had any sort of trouble or threats to his life.
About common street criminals: In Manila, that’s something you definitely have to worry about. It’s a big ugly city full of small and starving and drug addicted desperate people. You have to watch yourself and your possessions constantly if you’re on the street, day or night.
However, I’ve yet to hear of a single case of street or house robbery by force in the four years I’ve been living in Palawan. There’s the odd burglar and what-not, just like everywhere else, and the occasional cell-phone or purse snatching. Mostly the Pinoy steal from each other. Local Pinoy worry about what will happen to them if they go after the foreigners, like a harsher sentence. We bring a lot of money to our local areas. The police and the gummit people like to protect us like an investment – corruption being the way it is in RP.
I guess you have to go with how your spirit – and your intuition – moves you. Life is a gamble. Play and maybe you’ll win, or maybe you’ll lose. Don’t play and you can only lose. In other words, you lays yer money down and you takes yer chances. That’s life.

Transportation: You’re right about the transportation. In the States or Europe almost every single Philippine 2-4-12 or 18- wheeled vehicle would be banned from driving on public roads; they’re just not safe. And it’s for darned sure they’re not comfortable!
Springs? What springs? Seat padding? What seat padding. Recliner seats? What recliner seats? The seats are hard and the seat and the back are built at a 90 degree angle to each other. After an hour or two of riding one of those buses, suicide can seem like a pretty attractive alternative.
I’m lucky – I’m only five foot, five inches tall. So I fit in real well here. But even so the tricycles are cramped and the bus seats are small torture devices. And the wheels, while maybe not really being square, sure seem like it. I think it’s all of those holes in the roads, which there seems to be more of than pavement, that make the bouncing and neck breaking jarring so routine an experience in public travel.
My worry goes more to the safety and reliability of both the buses and the tires. They are not safe; the tires, more often than not are bald or close to it, and the buses are almost never safety-checked or given any form of maintenance. A bus is only fixed when it breaks, and that only after the bus is pulled up out of some ravine with dead and mangled bodies hanging out of the windows. Often on bus trips, two or more tires will blow-out and have to be replaced.
One can also easily see many trucks and buses rolling almost sideways down the road because of the incredibly bent frames caused by accidents and crashes.

I could not ride a tricycle one more time. With my bad back it was the worst sort of torture. I resorted to buying a motorcycle with a very soft seat. Getting around is much more satisfying and enjoyable. But, there’s a dark-side to driving in the Philippines. And it’s scary! The scary part is the way Pinoy drive and how the rules are not only broken, but ignored. But that’s going to be the subject of my next article. This is already too long.

If you’re tall – over 5’8” – and you want to live here, you have to just grin and bear it. In the case of the Philippines, the statement, “It’s a small world after all.” is the absolute truth. But those short Filipina’s make it all worthwhile.

I’ll end with your last question about speaking local languages.
You may find you have problems learning the languages of Tagalog or Visayan - then again, maybe not. It all depends on your learning ability. I thought I was pretty good with language, and was getting pretty good at Spanish some years back. But I haven’t done well with the two mentioned languages. Maybe I’m just getting too old.
Finding people to practice with, believe it or not, has been difficult. Most Pinoy are more interested in learning English than in teaching me their language. All of the Filipina’s I have been with made virtually no effort to help me learn, no matter how hard I pushed them to try. Even Celine doesn’t want to teach me, or can’t. I ask her constantly what the meaning of a word is, and she is seldom able to translate, and gives up.
I have learned to appreciate the simplicity and the beauty of English since living in the RP, and have come to realize that English is an exquisite language. We English speakers take for granted ‘ing’, ‘ed,’ ‘er,’ ‘s,’ ‘ful,’ etc., like watch, watches, watched, watcher, watchful. watching, watchless, and don’t give it any thought. The true beauty of it is in its simplicity.
We can use the same word repeatedly, yet change it’s meaning with the addition of a few letters: heart, hearts, heartache, heartless, heartfelt, and so on. Not so with all of the 179 known Pinoy languages in the Philippines. Each meaning has is own different and distinct word, and they are seldom spelled or sound anything remotely like another word of similar meaning. There’s no equivalent to those wonderful ‘add-on’s’ in any Philippine language.
And each Pinoy language is distinct and different from each other.
Tagalog or Visayan words can often have fifteen or eighteen or more letters in them, and twelve of the letters may be ‘a.’ There’s a word I’ve seen in Palawan, the meaning of which I can’t recall at the moment, that has five A’s in a row; and each one has to be sounded separately.
Tagalog was created when the Spanish conquered the Islands that today make-up the Philippines. Each tribe on each island, or on the same island, being remote from each other, could not talk to each other, and the Spanish couldn’t talk to any of them! So Tagalog was created like ‘Spinglish’ was in America so the Gringo’s could talk to the Mexican’s.
Celine has promised me that she’ll teach me Tagalog and Visayan, her own language, after she learns English. I don’t really believe her - mostly because she’s not very adept at teaching. I, on the other hand, am a very good teacher – to my surprise – and Celine is progressing rapidly. My style is to teach 24-hours a day, at every opportunity, and she’s learning well from all of my constant explanations of how and why things work the way they do in English.
Everyone who can or thinks he can use it wants to learn English, and they’ll want you to teach them instead of the other way around.
Thanks for writing, Jim. Please continue to visit ETP, and write more about how your new life in the Philippines is progressing, sharing your own insights and experiences. I’m very interested in how other writers can describe to the wannabe’s what they can expect when they come here, and how to deal rewardingly and effectively with their own Honey Ko.
Lastly, Jim, I sent you an email giving you my own email address. If you didn’t receive it, please let me know here on the Site, and give me a good email address to send it to again.
To all of you who are thinking of or researching living in the Philippines – keep coming back as time goes on. I believe ETP will continue to improve and add a lot more knowledge about the Philippines and its culture.
Rik