Life abroad: As Robert sees it

I used to have three turkeys and a clutch of 15 pouts. Not anymore thanks to diligence of the Philippine Health Service. In their infinite wisdom they declared it was not sanitary to have the turkeys living on our property and we had to get rid of them. The tenets below us also had to get rid of their dog. You know how dirty they can be. The funny thing about this is that the mayor’s cousin lives down the street and he didn’t have to get rid of his turkeys. I guess chickens and pigs are ok because our neighbors still have those animals.

I think it was a politically motivated move by the barangay captain. A barangay is kind of like a neighborhood in the main city and a very small town in the rural areas. Kabankalan has 32 total and 10 that make up the city center. The captain is just the elected leader of this entity and he answers to an elected council. Anyway, it seems that in the last election the family we live with did not vote for the current captain so he has been out to punish them. Little things like visits from the health inspector and social security office to not putting lights on the road leading to our house. This is just what I know of though but I’m sure there are more instances I would think petty and get mad at but the Filipinos just accept it as fate and move on.

So my turkeys had to move to a farm. I guess the little ones are doing fine. I have not been to see them since they left. I have been too sad. The male, Whitey, committed suicide last month. He jumped from the top of the barn (which is a strange way to go if you can fly). I think he missed me gobbling to him every morning and giving him a bug squeeze before bed. My family thought I was insane. We got enough meat from him though to feed us for three days. He was nice and fat with all the corn I was stuffing down his little turkey neck. Everyone was happy about that.

That leaves the two females, Vixen and Ms. Fozzy, which I think might come home. Well, they will be staying with the Zayco’s turkeys, The Rasta Brothers, Mama Zayco and one I haven’t named yet. She really has no personality except she likes to eat a lot and is always gobbling outside my window in the morning waiting for food. As for the pouts- baby turkeys- they will be divided up as payment to the guy who has been looking after them. The Rasta Brothers will take good care of the girls when they come home. I’m sure they will get the prime roosting spot in the high rafters.

Maybe once we have the turkeys back we can get another chicken. Big Fat Baby Chick was the best pet we had here. He would follow us around and wait for food. He loved to be stroked on his back and would sit on our feet as we did it. That was his problem though. He was just too trusting and not scared of anything. So one day the dog came along and had a nice snack. No more Big Fat Baby Chick just a little fat puppy with feathers in his mouth.

The Philippines is great for getting just about any digital media you want for about a $1 a disk. Last week I went to my DVD Pirate dealer with my list of cartoons I wanted, she found 15 of them for me. It was great! Rasa and I now have a collection of about 35 cartoon movies. Our little house brothers love us because they have a ready supply of movies to watch. In addition to the cartoons, we have over 200 movies we have collected from China to the Middle East to Eastern Europe.

On average, about 10% do not work but here in the Philippines we just bring them back and return them for another copy or different movie. The local movie rental chain, Quad-Tech, rents exclusively pirated movies. When they tell you it is a real copy, they just mean it is a copy of the original DVD. Sometimes the copies can be really bad. You will see the people in the theater getting up and sitting down. The best is when you have a running commentary from the person sitting next to the camcorder. You even get a good laugh track this way when watching comedies.

One time when in China we bought Lord of the Rings 2 and 3 before they were even out in the theaters. They turned out to be other movies entirely. One was Tom Cruz in Legend and I cannot remember the other. The DVD jacket was all done up with the Lord of the Rings title but the picture looked an awful lot like Tom. It was funny. We still have them. These days we are more discriminating with the titles we buy. Surprisingly, we get many art house films that we would never even hear of in the States. I guess that is kind of good promotion.

Considering it costs 70 pesos to go see a movie and 75 pesos to buy a DVD, it really is not a hard decision to get the DVDs. We have bought about 60 movies this past year and have been sending them home with each guest that comes to visit us. We are on our fourth book of 25. WE will probably start getting a lot more with the laptop Rasa just bought. We can just go rent movies for 15 pesos each and record them on the computer in 15 minutes to burn later on disk. Now that is a bargain! With a 300GB hard drive, we can have quit a collecting on the go.

I just downloaded a list of all the cartoon movies ever made. I am going to give it to my dealer and let her round them up. Our kids will never leave the TV. Or maybe by then we’ll have our 300+ movies all on the hard drive? Think about it. Just going over to a friend’s house and copying his entire DVD collection in an hour. All we need is the increase in hard drive space, which will be up to a Terabyte in 3 years time. That is enough to store about 240 movies. That is plenty for my taste and viewing time.

Do you remember when we had 3GB drives and people said you could never fill those? Then came along mp3s and suddenly I had three drives in my computer all filled with music. Well all that music (40+ CDs) will now be transferred to our 300GB hard drive. We will just have to wait to copy the movies I guess. I waited 5 years for the music so this will not be long and besides, the DVD’s are not going anywhere. Just wait until the 100GB Blu-Ray next generation disks come out. Sony PS3 will be using them. Technology is great!