It's official...

I'm unemployed. It kind of sucks, but I also got to knit at 2 p.m. on Monday with some other unemployed crafters, so there are some perks to the situation. I know it's been a while since I last posted, but it's been a weird time, time which included a trip to my mother country, the Philippines.

So instead of talking about how it sucked to get laid off, I thought I'd share some photos from the trip.




At the Taipei airport. I was born in the year of the ox, so I totally loved these paper decorations. I wish they sold them in one of the stores, but no luck. However, they did have what seemed like an entire wing devoted to Hello Kitty.

This is my uncle burning the trash. Not the most eco-friendly way to dispose of your waste, but there isn't a nice garbage truck coming every week either, so you got to do what you got to do.

This is the Jollybee bee. Jollybee is the Filipino version of McDonald's, even though they have McDonald's there. I think Jollybee is way more popular. And while I'm here rambling about fast food trivia, instead of referring to McDonald's as MickeyD's, Filipinos refer to it as Mac Dough.


This is my dream house. And it belongs to my great uncle Ben. He is a scientist who specialized in rice. That's right, Uncle Ben studied rice. And actually he does look like the guy on the Uncle Ben's Rice box. I tried to find an Uncle Ben's Rice box in the grocery store to see if they made the 'Uncle Ben' figure with Filipino features and if that 'Uncle Ben' would look more like my Uncle Ben, but alas, no box of rice. It might have something to do with the amount of rice you can fit in a box is a little unpractical to the typical Filipino family, since they like to get there rice in huge woven bags.


Statues in the gardens around my great uncle's house.


This is a shrine set up in the house my father grew up in. The house was built in the 50's when there wasn't indoor plumbing in the Philippines.


This is a sign at a 'resort' (a term I use pretty loosely, it was really just some simple cottages on the beach, with a nice pool) near a piece of property my parents own in the little town where my father grew up. It was pretty sweet to pick up a rock on my parent's lot and saying this is part of my parents' place on the beach.

I took tons of photos, so I'll share more tomorrow.