How are you all? I'm back from the weekend safe and sound. As I'm writing, most of you are tucked away all nice and comfy in your part of the world, so this freshly-baked blog should be ready for serving together with your morning coffee, or however else you like to enjoy my ramblings.

Power was back on at around 3 AM Friday night. As most businesses were closed and it was raining, I turned in early instead of the usual weekend nightly outing with Jacob. Something woke me up, which pissed me off as I lay blinking angrily, thinking what the fuck was going on. Then I realized I was staring at a switched-on lightbulb illuminating the room. I briefly 'yay'ed to myself at having power back, then half-ambled-half-stumbled across the floor to switch the fucker off. Never occured to me to check the house first. Jacob, who went out earlier and found himself some bar (or bars) and proceeded to get himself wasted, arrived home later and found the TV blaring and the house otherwise lighted-up with me snoring upstairs.

The Philippines got relatively quickly up from it's knees after that. Despite the typhoon damage, daily life seemed slowly click into gear again.

Saturday night is a hazy recollection for me... the Paseo was back to business with liveband action and hunnys in red latex outfits going from bar to bar selling Marlboro cigarettes, and doing some promotional work on something or other I couldn't have cared less about. Not with so much else to catch one's attention. On Sunday my friends Ana and Julie came to visit and we went malling and saw a movie. Title was John Tucker Must Die. Might as well have been David Christensen Must Die... I cringed and cried in my seat the whole way through, such was the torture of having to endure this gods-awful teen chic flic. Dudes out there, don't force yourself to watch this one even to get laid. It's not worth it.

I found that Jacob and I were extremely lucky with regards to the typhoon's impact. Most of the people we've spoken with have had flooding at knee-height inside their houses, and some don't have either electricity or water yet as of Monday morning. Here are a few pics that show the impact of Milenyo as we saw it.

Inside the SunPower compound:







Out in the street:



Inside the subdivision where we live (I would have taken a picture of the tree inside the swiming pool, but they went to work quickly on that one and cut it up and removed it):



Finally, this is how it is to stand in line at an ATM machine after a typhoon has hit. It's the stupidest thing ever. People need to release funds fast to do immediate repairs and otherwise do some damage alleviation. What do the banks do? They make their ATM's go offline, creating bottlenecks at the few that do work. I don't know why they do it like that. Maybe its a macroeconomics thing. Something about too much money being spent and redistributed too fast not being good for the economy and the central bank. Somebody please explain why I had to wait an hour to withdraw 10,000 pesos?




And today's cookie is an example of McDonald's doing some local market product adaptation. Ladies and gentlemen, here is the McRice Burger. :p



In other news, our professional work at SunPower has more or less gone on standby while we await supervisor feedback. Also, there have been some key absentees at the Environmental, Safety and Health unit as people need to tend to their homes because of flooding, etc. We need the help of these guys for what we're doing, so until SunPower is 100% operational again, I can waste my time at work and blog freely :)

I have been productive in the meantime. I'm working on planning my 10th and last semester, where I would like to do some data collection abroad (read: get the fuck out of Denmark). I've been speaking to some lecturers and some personal contacts of mine, and going to Costa Rica or working for COWI have been some of the ideas I am developing.

Until next time, kiddos.