The Gaerlan Family finally had our outing to La Union last weekend. A long planned and oft postponed trip, but at long last it happened. Maia had been nagging at us to take her to the beach, and it had been a long time since we visited Daddy Toming’s grave. My camera, although a year old now, has never shot San Juan, the Gaerlan hometown, and so there were several reasons for going.

Accommodations was never the problem, it was finding a way to get there that proved to be difficult. We appreciated the Gaerlan house, although partially unfinished and did not have any Kohler kitchen faucet, which was quite comfortable and convenient as well.

From there we could walk to the Plaza Amparo and to the Church of San Juan, and it was only a short ride to the beach and the watchtower.

We didn’t spend as much time there as we wanted. We left Manila early in the morning of Saturday, stayed overnight into Sunday and was back in Manila shortly after midnight on the following Monday. Next time we should plan a longer stay.

My daughter and youngest child Maia, now five years old, learned to read on the internet. It was on a site called starfall.com which I now recommend to all of my friends with pre-school kids who have access to the internet at home. She learned not only to read, but to count and to do simple addition through its online math tutoring section. The only disadvantage to online tutoring is that my daughter did not learn to write by hand, actually holding a pencil to paper, because she had become accustomed to typing her letters and numbers out on a keyboard.

But that’s been remedied by going to kindergarten school, starting June of this year. Now her handwriting is quite legible, and coupled with reading on her books and on the internet I believe she has taken in far more information than her classmates who are less exposed to the internet. Of course, internet learning should not completely replace parent- or teacher-supervised learning. Human interaction, after all, is probably the best teaching tool a young person can have.

Maia is representing Austria in her school’s United Nations pageant late this month. Preparation for her costume involved quite a bit of internet research as to what the national costume of Austria looked like, and how to find such a costume in any store in Manila. Having one made to order was already out of the question. Most tailors required a month’s notice for such jobs.

Last week I tried the malls. I spotted costumes for Korea, Japan, the US and some Polynesian ones but ziltch for Austria. In fact the malls had more Holloween costumes than United Nations costumes. Holloween in the Philippines is something I am not very keen about but that’s another blog post.

Cris did some research himself and came upon this mom’s support forum where one Mom mentioned a store in Quiapo that specialized in United Nations costumes. She could not recall the street it was on, but gave enough directions to her co-forumers that Cris knew where to find it.

The store was on what used to be Echague Street, parallel to Hidalgo, on the farther side of the Quiapo Church. In fact from Sta. Cruz, following Echague Street will take you into Quiapo Ilalim. Echague Street is now known as Carlos Palanca St.

We found our Austria costume at the Echague Bazar, ran by William Uy and Christine Cheng. They sell all kinds of embroidery, barong, ladies bags, kimonas, long gowns, costumes, wedding gowns and table cloths. They also accept made-to-order barong, gown etc. I got that bit of information from the business card the owner gave us. Maia’s Austria costume cost us P350.00.

Echague Bazar is at 163 Carlos Palanca St. with phone numbers 314-7890 and 733-6357. It’s on the same side as Excellent chain of stores where people in the know get their hams and quezos de bola for the holidays.

Additional directions: from Manila City Hall take España Bridge which will lead you to Plaza Lacson. Immediately after the bridge on the right is Carlos Palanca St (Echague). At that corner is Plaza Fair, behind it is the old SM. Just keep going past the camera shops, looking to the left and you will see the Echague Bazar.

The cleanup has started. Three days after Ondoy struck, signs of life from the local government has been detected in the form of a water tanker and hose held by the barangay street sweepers as they attempted to clear mud and debris from our streets. This is more than I can say for some places in Cainta, San Mateo, Pateros and Marikina, still inundated by flood.

Water was chest deep inside our house, which meant it was neck deep in the street right outside the house, and consequently way deeper than that in the area that one must pass in order to enter the area. This is where most of the informal settlers have two-storey houses. They know about the floods that visit the area. The second floor is not so much as an extension of the house as it is an evacuation area when the floods hit.

My husband and I decided to leave the house when the water was chest high inside, in order to bring our daughter and our helper to the covered court by the barangay hall which was on higher ground. The flood started at around 9am, and was highest at half past 1 in the afternoon. When the water was obviously subsiding around 4pm we decided to bring Maia and Bebing back to the house. There was one bed that was more or less dry. We retrieved whatever was usable from our furniture that had been floating about for more than three hours, had the earliest dinner we recall and was asleep before 7pm.

When Bebing and I woke the next day at around 4am the water had subsided, but most of the furniture had been rendered useless. Most of our tables were made of wooden pulp, the kind that didn’t take kindly to inundations.

But we are luckier than most. We still have the house and most of our appliances have been found working after two days of drying out. We are all healthy, none of us have been adversely affected by standing and wading in the flood for several hours. We received several calls from Cris’s brother Masons, and text messages from my photography group the D60KREW. We are fortunate that people care for us, and have been praying for our safety. We thank them from the bottom of our hearts.

My husband and I stayed up to watch the UEFA Cup Finals game between Barcelona FC and Manchester United.

It’s a good thing my boss updated me on the actual game schedule. I was thinking the game would start at 1am, but he corrected me and said it was going to be around 2:45am, on ESPN. The thing would be to have an early dinner, then off to bed with the alarm set to 2am. Plenty of time to shake the sleep off, open a beer and a bag of chips and position our butts in front of the tube.

Barca won, with splendid goals from Samuel Eto’o and Lionel Messi. VISCA el BARCA!!!

I’m going to catch up on my sleep now, and I don’t mind not having a sleep number bed. I’m just going to shut the blinds, turn the fan on high and zzz …