JDDavao

You were right to complain, Jack. Perhaps those kids have learned *something* but I fear that it's not the lesson they should have. Just the other day my wife was telling me that an older woman had blocked the aisle at the meat counter at the market. When Menchu moved the woman's cart aside (which had a young child in the seat), the woman went mental and started waving her arms and shouting at her. Then the CHILD pinched my wife on the arm! Menchu scolded the child by saying, "You're bad!" Well, the woman went ballistic, screaming that she shouldn't say such a thing to the child. "Well," Menchu said, "She needed to learn that she had done a bad thing." She spun on her heel and left the woman yelling at her. I daresay that had i ever done that to an adult, my mother would have marched me out of that supermarket and all the way home, groceries forgotten. I would have been sent to my room until I reached 40 years or so. What lesson did that child in the cart learn? There's impunity with lola, that's what.

Manners are for you. For me, it's "Do whatever I like". It's the same attitude for everything here, IMHO.

Off topic: OMG! Fiesta in our brgy yesterday. At the end of the day, my wife came and told me we had footprints on the toilet seat in the patio bathroom!

"It seems that the Chinese national cannot speak English and just showed her money to the police officer who feels insulted by the former’s action." There's the problem. You have to make it seem like a gift between friends. You have to talk a bit about the weather, so to speak. A friend of ours trying to open a business was exasperated at the end of a day of running from office to office to office due to misinformation and rules that didn't exist in his research. He finally went to one of the last officials he had to meet who hinted that her rubber stamp would come down faster with the offer of a little colored paper. He impatiently asked, "How much do you want?" She immediately got angry and told him he was "too forward". She was unavailable to him for three days after that.

As long as the enforcers receive 25%, workers will never see the other 75%.

Filipino criminals constantly (apparently) decide to have shootouts with the PNP although hundreds of them have died that way. Jumping out of a moving vehicle while handcuffed is only slightly dumber.

A tragic sentence for a tragic story. Are there no editors anymore? "Last night, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know."

Because I'm going through the 13A visa process, I'm checking the BI website .PDF lists of new grantees. If anyone is interested, the first of this month's lists on the "VISA APPLICATION STATUS ( Agenda Verification 2019 )" page is at least anecdotal to what Gary D. is saying. Just do a quick in-page search (F3 for Windows) and count the applicants with CHN origin. So, even legally, the Chinese appear to be flooding in.

We have a Samsung "smart oven". It allegedly microwaves, broils, bakes and walks the dog. We mostly used it as a microwave. It stopped working.

We purchased a La Germania gas range a couple of years ago because of its Italian roots and its Philippines assembly. We'll never buy another. The burner adjustments are the absolute worst I've ever encountered. They do not have a real "low" and if you get them to the lowest flame setting, a small nudge in the direction of "lower" will *raise* the flame again.

If you don't like how Filipinos drive, stay off the sidewalk!

"[Lt. Col. Gregorio Galsim]...assured the people that there is nothing to worry about..." Just some nutbag tooling around on a scooter, stabbing random people with an ice pick. No worries!

Do a thorough test of prevailing breezes first.

Our neighbor's mother passed away recently and he inherited the dog. He keeps the dog the Filipino way: staked out in the yard. It very literally barks and yips all day. And, brother, if *I* can hear it, it's got to be tenfold annoying to everyone else. I sometimes want to pay our helper to go over and cut the poor thing free some night.

I've seen these ads. They're sometimes worded just slyly enough to not be lies. Nothing will increase your connection speed except paying for a faster connection.