I’m back (from somewhere)

May 6, 2007

Okay… i haven't been here far too long. Much has happened over the past couple of weeks. Just to give you an idea of just how much… I'm writing this post from Thailand. Cool huh?

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I realized how I hate flying when I flew from Manila to Jakarta. I knew something bad was gonna happen when we encountered an ominous cloud. The plane was jerking around from too much turbulence, I was still calm because the seatbelt sign wasn't on. Then suddenly we hit one of those air pockets and the plane dropped 10 feet from the sky!

The captain was all cool and collected and addressing the passengers in a calm voice: "Fasten your seatbelts please." 

Yeah, right! Was that supposed to make me feel safe? We were bungee jumping 35,000 feet up without safety cords on and to make you safe the captain advises you to strap your butt on a 2,000-ton plane! I think that's a conspiracy. I think that as the big bosses plan on commercializing the air industry back in the early days they decided that if the plane was gonna go down in flames, let's take along all its passengers because hospitalization expenses would be costly. While in death, they can just fix an exact amount for burial expenses.

I was there thinking that instead of life vests under our seats, why couldn't the airline just put parachutes instead?

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I'm here on a fellowship to foster better relationship with colleagues from all over. On the same fellowship are the Burmese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Malaysian. We were supposed to have Thai and Vietnamese participants but they begged off in the last minute.

I think it's great. Learning from the others' culture and teaching mine as well. I even taught the Burmese fellow a touch of Filipino hospitality and what better way to teach our culture than our language?

So I taught him a tagalog phrase which I said means "I'm kind, you can trust me."

I taught him to say: "Maliit ang titi ko."