On To The Philippines

I left Las Vegas on February 9, 2006. After passing through Los Angeles and Seoul, I landed in Manila on February 11. I was met at the airport by my wife's younger brother, who is a singer in Manila. He came with a friend of his from the National Bureau of Investigations (Philippine version of the FBI), so we went right through everything very quickly. My wife arrived on her flight from the Emirates a few hours later.

We spent the first few days in Manila, getting acclimated to the Philippines before continuing on to Davao. She had been working abroad for a few years and I had actually never been here, so we wanted to get use to things a little. Plus it gave her time to visit with her younger brother before leaving the island of Luzon. So, we stayed through Valentines Day and then continued on to Davao.

When we arrived in Davao, we stayed at "White Mansion". It is a nice place, but costs about twice as much as it should. But it was easy to find online and to book from the US, so I figured it was ok for a couple of months, which would give us a chance to find something for a longer-term stay. If you will be coming to Davao, post a comment to let me know and I'll give you some info on better places to stay.


This is the chapel that was across the street from our first apartment

We did not do anything about arranging our wedding plans for the first couple of weeks. Our time was spent settling in to our new place and visiting a never ending stream of relatives, her parents, Kuya (older brother) and his wife, aunts, uncles, and enough cousins to fill a fleet of greyhound buses.

When it did come time to start making all of the arrangements, we found that our initial obsticles were not from the US Government. They would give us plenty of visa headaches later on. The initial obsticles came from the Philippine Government, but I will cover all of that in my next post, since this one is already so lengthy.

More to come...