Geeky Yet Waterproof

On Friday afternoon, we met up with Uncle Rick (who came in from Japan) and left Tita Peewee’s house in a van to go stay with some other relatives, the Agbayanis, in Quezon City. Quezon City is only 30 miles from where we were staying in Alabang, but it took us two and a half hours to get there. Do you ever get impatient when traffic slows to a walking speed on the freeway? Maybe the congestion even lasts up to ten minutes sometimes? Well, we might have gotten to where we were going faster by walking, because it was like that for the whole drive. And I’m starting to realize that the cause of the traffic in the Philippines is not the number of people, but the divider lines on the road — or rather lack thereof. I’m amazed that I haven’t seen any wrecks at all, but no matter how careful the drivers are, you can only go so fast like this.
But even though the trip was long, this one scene made it all worth it:

Before I go into detail about our arrival, you must understand that the Agbayanis are very rich. One of them used to be the mayor of a town, another used to be the governor of a province, and his father also used to be a governor.
So now that that’s done, I can explain the next thing: the Agbayani house is very big. When we first arrived, one of the first things we did after trekking over the hills and through the woods (within the house) with our luggage was to go swimming in the pool in their backyard. And this is not just a dinky little foldable pool like some people have; this is a full-fledged, 40ft square, 10ft deep pool. Only it’s not square — it’s triangular with rounded corners and one crescent-shaped edge.

And now that you know how big the house is, I can mention the final aspect of the Agbayani residence: we’re still trying to figure out how many people live in this house. Besides us (being Grandma Nini, Grandpa Dan, Uncle Rick, Christopher, and myself), there’s Tita Teresing, Tita Pia, Miggy, Robbie, and Viktoria whose real name is Yeyet. These are the people who live in one wing. In the other wing are Tito Vic, Tita Jammy, Tito Joey, Apa, and a few more kids.
These are just the ones who are our relatives. When you count all the servants and drivers in the house, the number of people is at least double of those I just mentioned.

Eamon, Christopher, Tita Pia, Apa, Yeyet, Tito Joey

I apologize that this entry is several days late, but we spent our first day at the Agbayanis’ trying to figure out the internet. They have broadband at least, but I’ll just say it’s Weird broadband which demands a mythical username and password and an Inconvenient setup requiring a Mac sacrifice.
But the other reason it took us the whole day to figure out the internet was that Christopher and I, to our relief, found a guitar. Need I say more?

That night, Yeyet/Viktoria took Christopher and me out to see what clubbing is like in the Philippines. Yeyet, our aunt (or something like that), is 38, but since she’s a pop singer, she still looks and acts like she’s 25.
We went to several clubs; the first two were a bit boring, but the last one we stayed at for a few hours. When we finally decided to go home it was about 3am, but Christopher and I didn’t go straight to bed — instead, we went swimming. After that, we went sneaking around the kitchen hunting for Ensaymadas to eat, video chatting with our people in the US, and playing around on our Macs.

By the time I finally went to bed, it was 5:15am. That was a fun day.

Yeyet, Christopher, Eamon