Hello again,
Still here in Manila. We today broke what was becoming an indistinguishable morass of
PowerPoint slides, questions and answer periods and polite applause- for everyone!- with an hour long trip to the beach for a water safety course. We fit 6 or 8 onto wooden over sized canoes with outriggers and motors called 'pump boats', motored 100 yards off shore and jumped out to practice water emergency techniques. Depending on where I'm posted (we find out tomorrow), I'll have to do some regular travel in these crafts. 
Otherwise, all else is good. It's like summer camp here, lots of young people being shuttled from one sessions to the next, with meals in between. My roommates in Rm. 215 of the Island Cove are both nice guys. After returning from the beach we went to the mall, an institution of which Filipinos have much pride, and walked around. We got there in these cartoonish mini-buses called jeepneys, which are usually aluminum and adorned with all sorts of decals and paintings, sort of like the women painted on the side of WWII-era bombers. If I had to choose a cartoon from which they would hail, it would probably be Hong Kong Fooey, but maybe that's just the Asian thing. I bought some much needed books at the mall, realizing after breezing through 150 pages of The Constant Gardener that I hadn't brought nearly enough reading material and that I'd need to restock. I got George Eliot's Adam Bede, a Paul Theroux travelogue on Patagonia, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. With a small library in my possession I feel much better about leaving for training on Friday morning. Anyways, hope all is well at home. I expect real updates, not just, "oh you know, the usual". That does nothing for me. Anyways, I miss you all and love you.
William
