Zosima Bayoy, or “Osing” is Feyma’s Mom. I call her Mama, or “Ma” most of the time. Ma is nearly 80 years old now, and her health is not good, but over the 17 years of my marriage to Feyma, I have known Ma during many years of good health. Mama speaks virtually no English […]
Adventures in learning
I mentioned a few times on the site now that I have been taking some language lessons recently. Actually, this is third time to start taking lessons to learn how to speak Bisaya. The first time I started taking lessons, after about 2 months my teacher quit, because he had other things occupying his time. […]
What to do with your retirement time
I hear from so many people that once they retire, that’s when their life gets real busy! They can’t figure out how they ever managed to work a 40 hour week, because they seemingly have no left over time in retirement! I consider myself to be somewhat retired, since I kind of do whatever I […]
Why can’t we understand each other?
Pretty much ever since I have been coming to the Philippines, and especially since I have lived here, I have heard foreigners like myself complain from time to time about communications with Filipinos. I hear some foreigners say that Filipinos say things that are lies, and they intentionally lie. I have heard foreigners complain that […]
Another take on Filipino Time
There is a big discussion going on in regards to another post on this blog regarding tardiness, time keeping and such. It’s a subject that we all know as “Filipino Time.” Generally speaking (very general, OK?) Filipinos living in the Philippines tend to “ignore” things like punctuality and such. At least that is what is […]
Language Barrier
A few weeks ago, I made a post about learning Philippine languages, and communications here. In the comments, I mentioned that people in Cebu don’t care for Tagalog, and some actually are very anti-Tagalog. A few commenters said that they had never heard that before, and were curious about it. For me, I have heard […]