Welcome to Manila!!!

Tagalog Word of the Day: Malagayang Pasko! = "Merry Christmas!"

Well, my first semester is finally over!

The last few weeks have been completely insane – I taught all day during the week and graded all weekend. I didn’t visit the Doses at all, or see any new Pohnpei sights… I need this break more than I’ve ever needed a break in my life! Three whole weeks without any responsibilities at all – I need a vacation from my vacation. :)

My classes ended fairly well – I ended up failing about a third of my students, but I can confidently say that everyone who got an F worked very hard to earn it. I collected some 70 grades for every student, so nobody can complain that a bad score on one or two tests drove their average down. Most of those Fs are students who only came to class two or three days a week (we meet for five), and when they did come to class they spent most of it chatting with their friends or sleeping.

On the other hand, I did give four or five students in every class an A, and I can confidently say that these were equally well deserved. Although some of these students were obviously very skilled in math, and may have been taking a course below their level, there were also a bunch who obviously worked very hard and spent a lot of time studying and improving themselves. They will definitely succeed in their next class.

I have already begun putting together my schedule and syllabus for MS 95 next semester – one of the mistakes I made last semester was not doing enough long-term planning, so that I was only really aware of what I planned to talk about the next week. I want to do a lot more activities and fewer lectures with my COM students, like I’ve been doing with my TSP students. Also, I’m giving fewer assignments so I won’t be swamped with grading – I only plan to give my MS 100 section four monthly tests, and maybe a short quiz once a week.

As for TSP, that has been going very well, although it has been completely draining me of energy. The timing of the class really sucks – most of the time, I have just enough time after teaching my COM classes to rest and recuperate, and then I have to rush off to TSP, after which I’m too exhausted to do anything else. If it were right after my regular classes (like it is for Tanja) I would probably be able to do more work during the week, and spend my weekends having fun.

I have made a real connection with my TSP students that has evaded me at COM… because I don’t feel under any pressure to cover a set amount of material, I take as much time as they need and make myself more open to questions. The students really like me, and we usually spend some time before class chatting, so I’ve gotten to know them better on a personal level. On my birthday, they sang to me, and everyone was disappointed when I told them last night that I was leaving for Christmas in Manila.

So, besides classes, what else has been going on? Let me see… it’s been a while since I posted anything here.

I was the Joker, à la Heath Ledger, for Halloween. I died my hair green with Kool-Aid and food coloring – it worked better than you might think (my hair is still a little green actually), although I had to spend a night with my head burning and wrapped in Saran Wrap, wondering if all my hair was going to fall out in the morning. I also got a makeup kit from Yoshie, and I made sure to put it all on before my first class that day. My students got a kick out of it (although most of them didn’t know who I was supposed to be), and fortunately I was just proctoring a test that day – I never could have taught in that get-up.


(By the way, The Dark Knight is officially my favorite movie this year, although there were some parts I didn’t like – namely, those with Christian Bale in them. What was that guy doing in a movie about the Joker anyway? Two words, Christopher Nolan… “more Joker”! Oh, and make a sequel to Memento… or would that be a prequel?)

Pohnpeians do Halloween in style – they’re not exactly big on elaborate costumes (I saw a few kids with just a towel on their head), but the kids love the free candy aspect. As soon as it got dark, they come out in groups of a dozen or so – strolling along the main road without adults (except for the really little ones), gleefully oblivious to the threat of oncoming cars, neighborhood pedophiles and satanists who put razor blades in Hershey’s bars. It’s the kind of trick or treating nobody does in America anymore, and it ran on late – I still saw big groups knocking on doors at ten o’clock.

A few days later, I had my 22nd birthday. Mom got me a giftcard from Amazon, and I bought a bunch of the DVDs on my wishlist. Dad got me the iPod speakers I wanted, much to the annoyance of my poor roommate – now I can watch shoot-em-ups and really feel the walls explode. The day of, I wanted to go to Joy and have myself a Pohnpei Pepper Steak (which is, yes, as good as it sounds) – but I slipped and fell in some mud walking home from TSP, and so I opted against it and went the next day.

Because of the international date line, my birthday here was actually the same day as the election back home. They announced the results in the afternoon (for us), and a group of volunteers met up at Oceanview Café to watch the news coverage. When I walked in, they were already there, beaming from ear to ear. Erin told me she had two great birthday presents for me – Obama won, and Florida went blue. I wonder what the return policy is on those gifts, in case I don’t like them…?

Despite the fact that I think his election is to politics what the Atkins diet is to nutrition (a sexy, celebrity-endorsed quick fix with no real evidence of its efficacy), I wish Barry the best of luck – I hope he is everything the American people hope he will be. All of the other volunteers (raving liberals to a man) seemed excited and relieved, but I told them the results were never really in doubt for me, and shouldn’t have been in doubt for anyone remotely familiar with our love affair with tall, dark and handsome politicians – for me, the interesting part will be the cabinet picks and the first hundred days. I hear he’s thinking about Hillary for state… if he really goes with her, I take back everything I just said.

Personally, I predict that Michele Obama turns out to be an inspiring first lady, the true moral and intellectual center of her husband’s efforts. She will take an active role in the administration, and be constantly derided for it with accusations of her being “co-president” and not spending enough time baking cookies for her children. Barack will have a series of unimportant affairs which will be blown way out of proportion by the opposition, but his charm will still be impossible to overcome, and Obama-Biden will defeat Palin-Keyes to earn their second term in 2012. After they leave office in 2016, Michele will enjoy a successful career as the junior senator from her home state of Nevada.

Meanwhile, the tremendous success of the Obama administration will have left the world a more peaceful and prosperous place, so Americans will naturally stop giving a hoot about politics and elect a Bush again – let’s say Jeb this time, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of Neil. Terrorists will attack us again, and Michele will naturally bow to the political reality of the public’s irrational fears and vote to invade Iran. The war will turn out to be a great disaster, and she will soon begin to speak out against it. Eventually, she will run for president in 2024, when her previous sixteen years of moral but practical opposition will be spun to make her look like a “beltway insider”. She will put up a good fight, but eventually be defeated in the primaries by… Chelsea Clinton.

Which will make my 38th birthday rock.

A few weeks later, the Pohnpei rotary club held a trivia night at the PCR Hotel. I have never seen so many people at a trivia night – there were at least a hundred or so, broken into six-person teams. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear about it until the actual night, so I got stuck with people who didn’t care much about the trivia, and were more interested in buying raffle tickets. We came in around tenth place, but we still won a bottle of wine each. The ambassador from Australia was sitting behind us, and her team won first place – a hundred bucks each, but they donated it back.

Nic (from Kitti) and I have started an unofficial Friday movie night. We usually watch action movies (like Max Payne and Hitman) or nerdy movies (The Neverending Story and Zombie Strippers), because we’re probably the only two people in the group who would enjoy them. Often, this is the only socializing I do during the week, and I’ve come to really look forward to hanging out.

So, that was the last couple of weeks… yesterday, I was finally finished with all of my grading, and just in time to jet off to Manila. I arrived at the Pohnpei airport early, so I only had to wait half an hour or so to have my bags inspected – they do that to every checked back, by hand. Of course, PNI only has one gate… there is an “Arrivals” area, which I’ve been to a couple of times, and a “Departures” area, which I had never seen. Fortunately, it was air-conditioned.

When we flew into Hawaii on our way here in July, I was seated in the exact middle of a 747, so I didn’t get to see any of the island from the air. On all of the other island landings or takeoffs, it was already too dark. So you can imagine how excited I was to get a window seat on all my flights to Manila, since the flight left on a sunny day in the afternoon.

The first leg was a 40-minute island-hop to Chuuk – I got some beautiful footage of Pohnpei from the air on takeoff, and more footage of Chuuk when we landed. Chuuk itself is just a couple of small islands scattered through a gigantic lagoon, and you really got a sense for the size of the island that must once have been there when we flew over the reef that originally grew up along its shore. In a few million years, all of its remnants will have eroded away, and only an atoll will remain.

After that came a 90-minute flight to Guam, which didn’t have nearly as spectacular a view from the air, despite being a positively gigantic island. Partly, this was because it was cloudly, but mostly Guam itself is just kind of ugly. There’s a lot of deforestation that is evident from the air, and most of the land area is urbanized. They have the world’s largest K-Mart there.

When we landed, I had the surreal experience of being back on American soil again. After getting off the plane, we all had to go through immigration… I handed my passport to the Chamorro there, and I was home! Then we had to go through TSA screening again – apparently they didn’t trust the thoroughness of the Pohnpei screeners, who neither made me take off my shoes, nor randomly searched my backpack to swipe my external hard-drive and camcorder for bomb chemicals. God bless America.

When I turned the bend after TSA, I was greeted by the most awesome sight known to man, or at least to a man who has been on Pohnpei for four months... a real, honest to god, Burger King. I made a quick decision on that for dinner (beating the close second of Domino’s) and ordered the largest size of value meal that I could get. I swear I started humming The Star-Spangled Banner while they were nuking my nuggets. As the grease and salt and sugar sunk to the bottom of my stomach like a rock, I began to cry… partly from the indigestion, but mostly from the patriotism.

Then it was time for the flight to Manila, which was about 3.5 hours. We landed at 9:40 local time, on schedule, and I deplaned to find myself in the largest and best-designed airport I have ever seen. The walk from immigration, to baggage claim, to customs, to the money changer, was a straight shot of maybe 200 hundred yards. Then I headed down to the area where people come to meet you, and Evelyn’s sons immediately found me.

We piled into a taxi, and I was soon looking out on the most urban place I have been in a long time. There are neon lights everywhere, which remind me a lot of Miami. Parts of the city are extremely up-scale, with big buildings and casinos and fancy restaurants. But, unlike Miami, there are also the poorer neighborhoods with corrugated tin siding on tiny tenements and people sleeping the street.

I am staying in one of these, with Evelyn’s three sons: John Rieman (JR, 26), John Bernoulli (JB, 23) and Jose Carlo (JC, 16). The apartment itself is the smallest I have ever seen – a sort of townhouse crossed with a dorm room. There is a downstairs and upstairs, each of which is a single room with a bed on the floor filling up half of it. Not much space for four people – I am sharing a bed with two of them. But, it’s free, and I am definitely getting the real Manila experience.

The apartment is on the seventh and top floor of the building, and the hallway is actually open to the air because it has no roof… All of the apartments have windows that open out on the city and in on the building, and when it rains it actually rains right outside the front door. It has the effect of making you feel like you are on a city street, seven stories up.

This morning JB and I grabbed some breakfast at the place right outside the lobby downstairs. I got two meat dishes, neither one of which I can remember the name of, as well as a sausage for JB, each of which came with fried rice and an egg. This whole meal, along with my orange drink, cost me 101 pesos, which is about two dollars and change. Granted, it wasn’t much fancier than a microwave 7-11 burrito, but even those cost more than two bucks if you get a soda. I’m going to like it here. ☺

Anwyay, that’s the time zone I’m in now – three hours behind Pohnpei, thirteen ahead of Florida. Stay tuned!