18 September 2005.

So here I am again writing about another day. Today was well ok. Nothing terribly significant happened today. It started out at about 8:00am; guess that 6:30 thing didn’t work. Went down and got some breakfast and returned to my room. Jim and Let were going to the mall again to do some shopping and meet some of Let’s friends that lived there in Cebu. I opted out as I was felling kind of tired and I had already seen the mall once or twice. The only thing that I had seen in the mall that interested me was some paintings of local scenes from the islands done by local artist. All the paintings were originals and some of then were quite nice. If I have the time on my way back through Cebu I may stop by again and check them out, but how I would transport them is a good question. The hotel has some decent channels that we don’t get in Diego Garcia so I thought I might surf the channels for a while and see if there was anything on worth watching. I ended up watching the discovery channel for a half hour or so and then the cartoon network for maybe another half hour before I fell asleep again. I was woke up shortly by something on the TV, and decided that being as my body wanted to sleep I would go ahead and let it. So I turned the TV off and went back to sleep again this was about 10:30. Next thing I knew it was 2:00pm, I needed to eat lunch, and go check my email from a local internet café. Our check out time from the hotel was 3:00pm and we would be leaving the hotel at four. So if I wanted to eat and check my email while my bags could still be safely stored I needed to hurry. Now being the almost respectable person that I am, and that I should maintain that level of respectability I decided to take a look in the mirror before I ran out of the room. It was a good thing I did, my hair and beard told me I needed a shower, so there went another 15 minutes so now I got 45 minutes to check out. I went to the internet café and checked my email, there was nothing of terrible consequence, and so I paid my hourly wage of 15 pesos for about 20 minutes time. I then walked a short distance to a local inside shopping center where there were a few restaurants and ate a quick lunch of what I haven’t a clue, but it tasted alright. I then made my way back to the hotel to retrieve my bags from my room and bring them down to the foyer. Jim was already waiting in the foyer with all his bags and so I took the elevator to the third floor. I retrieved my bags and brought them to the elevator. As normal I then pressed the down button and waited for the elevator. The indicator said that the elevator was moving down from the fourth floor and it stayed that way for about 5 minutes. Now the day before the elevator had quit working with me in it, but it had quit at the second floor and the doors would still open and close, you just couldn’t get it to move. It seemed it was stuck again today, I was about to walk up to the fourth floor to see if perhaps something were blocking the door or someone using it. As I was about to go up the stairs I heard a knock on the inside of the elevator door. Thinking that it could just be the elevator making noises as it seemed stuck I knocked back. One of the hotel custodians walked by me as I was doing so, and tried to pay no attention though I could tell he thought me knocking on an elevator door just a bit strange. Well after I knocked on the door someone knocked back. Yep there was someone stuck in there, and that elevator has no air-conditioning and is small to boot. I went and alerted the custodian that had walked by me that the elevator didn’t seem to be working and that I thought someone was in it. Well he got a couple of other people working on it so I took my leave and carried my bags down the 4 flights of stairs. Yes I was on the third floor, but there was another floor between the ground floor and the first floor. About an hour after I had checked out of my room we caught a couple of taxies down to pier 3 to catch the ferry from Cebu to Leyte. The ferry is about a 3 and half to four hour trip. There is little air-conditioning, and for some reason they kept all the windows closed so there was very little air movement. There is also no access to the top of the boat as it is not made to have passengers on the roof. This all equates to a long hot sweaty trip. For my own part I faired it well enough as I had enough water to drink and I don’t really mind being hot as long as I’m not also dehydrated. Eva Jean on the other hand while not a fussy baby did not so much enjoy the trip, and spent most of her time being fanned or fed. After arriving here on Leyte, Let and Jim arranged for a couple of the side-carts as they are called to carry our luggage and ourselves, first to the Lyra Pension House where I will be staying while here. And then on to Jims house after making arrangements for myself. A side-cart is simply one of those motor cycles you’ve seen in the movies that has a roof and side car that two or three people can sit in. Ill just have to take a picture but you probably know what I’m talking about. After stopping by Jim’s house and dropping off all his baggage and Let and Eva Jean, Jim and myself walked down to the local night eatery. A small outside affair that doesn’t really warrant being called an eatery or a restaurant, more so of a street vender. We ordered a couple of chicken shish kabobs and two plaits of rice, Jim had two beers and our total came to about 138 pesos or about $2.80. After I finished eating Jim walked me back to the Pension House so that I would know how to get around a bit, and to insure that they would let me back  in. The pension houses are a bit different from hotels, for one the people that own them live in them, and secondly they tend to lock things up at night when they go to bed. So far as of this evening I find this pension house to be in generally better condition than the hotel. It has more of a homey feeling and you seem a bit more welcome even though you woke the people up to get a room. The room I am in is also much better maintained then the hotel, and much cleaner, as the whole pension house seems to be. The only little annoyance is that the shower is a far cry from being great, or even good. You can however get wet, soap up, and rinse off, or you almost can. The shower is mealy part of the bathroom that is tiled with a drain in the floor with a wall mounted instant water heater. The water heater has three settings off, medium and high, only two of them work, off and medium. The shower head may have once functioned well, but is now clogged nearly completely with mineral deposits so that only about 10 or 15 little streams of water that are barely more than a mist come out. Now if all theses streams were in one direction perhaps all would go well, but there not. They shoot in every which direction but  never the same as any other one, or in downward direction. This makes it so that; you can stand directly under the shower and stay dry. The water heater is self is no marvel of magic either. Hopping that I could do a little better I removed the shower head and figured that I would stand under the water coming out of the hose. Well this proved to be way to much water flow for the little heater which then pored forth cold water. So I placed the shower head back on the hose so that my little fine mist of water would a least be warm. The good thing about this shower though is that you are almost dry by the time you’re finished rinsing off. That’s pretty much it for tonight, so I’m off to bed, more on the marrow.