Greek sunbathing holiday is finished. Back to Manila.
1. Goodbye to Greek salad, welcome to arroz caldo de Antonia
2. Last mid-April, I shipped a big brown balikbayan box from London but it has remained unopened since it arrived two months later. Last August, I shipped a balikbayan box from California and it apparently arrived while I was in Greece. I had both of them opened on the morning of September 24 after we arrived from Greece. I asked our maid Charina to sort the stuff out. She likes to be called Cherry but Edmund calls her Aling Charing which she abhors.
I saw things I didn’t even remember I bought.
I have to be the one to wash the tea cup so I don’t blame anyone if it breaks.
3. Among the items from UK box is this Breitling ashtray in a nice original box. I forgot that the store manager gave this supposedly for Edmund.
Ayy made in China. According to the Rolex store owner in Santorini, the Chinese had bought a majority stake in Breitling for billions of dollars.
4. The maids reported that the two drivers stole a box of electrical wires belonging to Edmund and that the two stayed up late to peel the wires off. When I asked how certain they were and what made them so sure that the two guys stripped the wires, they gave me these two paper cutters as proof. Evidence rejected.
5. I totally forgot that I have many vintage plates contained in the UK box. I washed them one by one.
6. I bought a bottle of Sabon room fragrance. It could only make a small room fragrant, like the powder room or a small ronfined room. It can’t make our living room smell good. 
7. Stella misses me 
8. I feel guilty that I am one contributor to global warming but sometimes I am thinking, no matter what I do I would continue to be a major contributor. I switch on the lights every night, I use the computer, the phone charger, the tv, and the aircon has become synonymous to my existence, not to mention that I consume gasoline every day.
9. I had a short meeting with a British expat at my office in Makati. I had difficulty comprehending his sentences because of his thick British accent which sounded more like Irish or Scottish to me. If I am right, he is married to a Filipina and he’s been living in Manila for a few years. I was expecting that his pronunciation would now be tamed with the American diction influence and with our matigas na Tagalog. Hindi pa rin, ang hirap intindihan ng salita nya. I was glad we understood each other and in 15 minutes our meeting was done. I no longer engaged in kumusta-mumusta kasi I got so tired. Come to think of it, he was probably thinking of the same thing. How come my English pronunciation is so bad despite the fact that I travel to English speaking countries a lot and speak English frequently.
