KAPATID

TOTAL

The small city I'm next to is named Lucena. The biggest thing they have at night is Central Park Garden Cafe. As a club, it's known as Total, adopting the name of the gas station next to it. It was fun. They play a lot of Black Eyed Peas here.

MANDATORY

While planning this trip, I found out it takes a lot of money to volunteer. It could cost up to $3000 for a few months stay, plane ticket, lodging, food, and work placement. Luckily, my distant cousin happens to be a social worker, and her husband too. They are letting me tag along.

These humble heroes are my Ate Cecil and Kuya Carlos. They work hard at helping people, but in different ways - Ate Cecil is a manager at Child Fund Philippines, which sponsors poor children so they can go to school. Kuya Carlos is part of an organization that doesn't hand out any money at all. He is piloting a self-help approach, empowering people to take care of their own community development.

In the next few months, hopefully I'll have a better understanding of their work and the situation in the Philippines. I see a lot of things, but I don't really understand what's going on. I just know it can be very difficult for many people living here.

LOL

Family Day for Child Fund. The kids played, the adults listened to a lecture on children's rights, and also played.

HI

There aren't many posts here because many of my experiences have been things I don't feel like sharing with the internet.

Tomorrow, I'm going to Batangas, a place 2 hours away, for my volunteer work. I've received a small introduction to the type of community development taking place there, but I still don't know what to expect. I'll bring my camera.

Take care everyone.

MANILA

Last week I finally spent a few days in Manila, which I don't care much for, as this post shows. I have three pictures - I looked up and thought those buildings looked nice, saw a cool Derrick Rose display at the Adidas store, and we were on a bridge so I took an obligatory photo of the street below.

I do think Manila is an amazing city, I was surprised by much of what I saw, I'm just not interested in the material things it has to offer. It's not why I came to the Philippines.

I'm sure I'll be visiting the big city again, I will try to explore more next time.

FB

LOW TIDE

PHILIPPINES

I'm much more culture shocked here than from when I was in Japan. I can't speak for Manila yet, but being in the province makes me realize I'm hardly Filipino. I'm an American Boy and liking chicken adobo doesn't give me any cred. I'm working on it.

Hopefully I'll be posting here often, for now I just wanted to let people know that I made it here safely, I'm experiencing new things, and eating good food. Everyone take care!

CAMERA

Soooo, I think I'm buying a camera soon. That will help greatly with this photo blogging business. I've never actually owned a digital camera, the one I used in Japan belonged to a friend.

I also tried to be hip and migrated these posts to a tumblr page. After going through some fresh themes, I thought it silly to try and make this look cool. So all you're going to get are some pics of interesting places(hopefully), interesting people, and the wild thoughts of Bryan Santos, on this here blogspot.

I have plans to cross the oceans again, but I'll have to finish schoolin' first. In the mean time, I'll try my best at documenting my life as a weekday scholar, weekend warrior.

DOG PARK

This weekend I learned San Diego is a nice city. My cousin lives in a cool neighborhood and it makes me jealous. I didn't expect a place named Normal Heights to have so much charm. I also didn't expect us to make so much use of a funnel and tube named beer bong.

After waking up from a night of random events, we used the day to look at the city with sober eyes, taking a walk through downtown, Seaport Village, and a dogpark to be lurkers. San Diego encompasses everything that is great about Southern California. but overall the weekend sucked because we didnt go to sea world

WEST

A couple friends and I went out to Downtown LA to check out a Cornel West lecture at the LA Public Library. Unfortunately, we were 10 minutes late and weren't able to get in, there just wasn't enough space in the auditorium. Sad story, I know.

Already out of Simi, we decided to make a day out of it, and a good one it turned out to be.




inside the metro, a glimpse of brother West, nice guy Marc in front of the library, jazzman, and the mexican dive bar we spent a couple hours in. also not pictured are the awesome 50% off sushi and the one of a kind garlic butter edamame we had for lunch

I need a camera, this cell phone isn't cutting it.

I'll post the podcast of the lecture as soon as I find it.

LABOR DAY

Labor Day was my birthday. We had a nice dinner at my house with the cousins

cheers and thank you for the birthday wishes

LABOR DAY WEEKEND (pt3)

Sunday night was a midnight beerpong birthday celebration at my friend's new house in Irvine. The majority of the small get together consisted of Simi people that attend UCI and a few that will do anything to get away from Simi Valley boredom.

LABOR DAY WEEKEND (pt2)

Sunday was a picnic at Lemon Park in Simi for the Unisan Association. Its a group of people, including my parents, aunts and uncles, that lived in a small town called Unisan in the Philippines, but now live in a big city called Los Angeles. The current mayor of Unisan was also in attendance.

Volleyball, filipino food, matching T-shirts, and the gathering of the Unisan Dogs Association

LABOR DAY WEEKEND (pt1)

Saturday was FYF Fest, formally known as Fuck Yeah Fest! It was tiring but well worth it considering a beer was one dollar less than my ticket.

4 bands that I went to see - Mika Miko, Lightning Bolt, No Age, The Black Lips.

she finally forgave me for stealing from her secret candy stash 16 years ago

FIL-AM

I called a friend and asked if he wanted to attend the Philippine-American Exposition at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I tried hard not to laugh. Pinoys and pinays, if you weren't there, shame on you.



On the way to the convention center my cousin Kenny discovered that Japan was trying to battle and were throwing a festival of their own in Little Tokyo



These plans were very spontaneous, and it was the perfect end to my summer vacation