Hello from Tarlac province, Luzon island

This is where I will be living for the next three months, during pre-service training. During this time we are kept very busy with classes six days a week, including four hours a day of language lessons, education and community entry skills, and soon, a teaching practicum. Also, we are living with host families, which immerses us and makes it imperative for us to understand the Filipino culture and study the language. Myself and eight others in the same city are all studying Tagalog (aka Filipino), the national language of the Philippines. Tagalog is going to be hard to learn. One thing that's nice for me is that sometimes the words are close to Spanish but spelled differently. (For example: "cuchara" in Spanish, which means "spoon," is "kutsara" in Tagalog.)

My host family is pretty cool. They are part of a large, extended family which has taken in three other PC Trainees at houses throughout town. In our house live my host parents, who are both about 60 years old, one of their 18 year old nephews, a son in his late 20s, and their 13 year old daughter. Various other relatives come in and out of the house all day long, and I'll have to work hard to learn everyone's name. I think that my host father and some of the other men in the family drive "tricycles" (kind of like rikshaws in India or tuk-tuks in Thailand, but the cab is attached to the side of a motorcycle instead of directly behind it). My host mom says she's "a housewife," and the children are all on summer vacation until next month. There's no shortage of kids to play Uno with and people who I can speak English to. I have my own bedroom, with a nice bed and an essential fan. Under our kitchen table live an orange mama cat and two teacup kittens (probably about five or six weeks old). My host mother thinks it's very funny whenever I look at or pet them, she always laughs and says, "they're just cats." She also thinks it's funny that I like eating spinach. Oh well, cross cultural experiences often force me to laugh at myself anyways.

The food is pretty good. We eat rice and juicy, sweet mangoes at every meal - two of my favorite foods. There's also a lot of fish and pork (sometimes in the form of hot dogs). My host mom seems to be making an effort to make veggies for me, but I don't think Filipinos like them in general. There's usually soda or cookies or some other sweet on the table, too. We eat five meals a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus morning and afternoon "merienda" ("snack" which actually turns out to be a large meal in of itself). I am very well fed here, no doubt!

The heat is very intense. I think it was more humid when I was living in Phuket, in southern Thailand, but this is pretty hard, too. A lot of the people in our group are continually pouring sweat and red in the face and a few have developed heat rash. I'm hoping that in about a week or so we'll have adjusted and won't be quite as uncomfortable as we are now.

Tomorrow evening we are having dinner with the mayor (ooh la la!) who we met in his office yesterday. An important part of Peace Corps is definitely attending formal functions and getting to know local community leaders. On a similar note, tonight we are marching in a parade for something called Santa Crusan. I don't understand what this holiday is all about, but it will entail me marching through town wearing a gray prom dress. (We had to go to the next town over to find gowns big enough to fit us Americans - so much bigger than the average Filipina, hehe.) Getting stared at, lots of picture taking... should be a fun time!