Moving out, Manila, and such

So it is official, I am now living on my own here in Buenavista!  I moved into my apartment on Tuesday and this past week I have been really busy buying tons of stuff for my place.  It is a really simple apt. with concrete floors, a tiny kitchen, with a smaller bathroom.  I took some pictures and I will try and post them on here at a later date.  My friends had a house warming party in which we cooked fish and rice and we used a cardboard box as a table.  It reminds me of my college days thinking you have almost everything you need for your place, but reality smacking you in the face when you realize you dont even have a table to eat food on.

I have been gearing up for our assessment of our MPA this week to. My counterpart and I went to the site and I did some snorkeling to familiarize myself with it.  However, the visibility was really low and I had to swim a good 400-500 yards to get it.  We will have two boats taking us to the 6 different points of the MPA so we will be assessing those 6 areas in the "core zone" to get baseline data.  I hope the mayor will be able to throw some money at this project because it is my main goal here.  I will start writing a VEG grant starting in April after we have a training.

I was at Morgan's site a few weeks ago which was really fun.  Except for the fact I had explosive diarrhea the entire weekend we managed to have a good time.  We went to this mangrove island one day, hung out at a few resorts, and I was able to meet many of her friends.  They made burritos the last night I was there which was a great meal too.  We ended up going to Manila with this guy that lives down at Morgans municipality on the weekends.  It is about a 2 to 3 hour drive, but 1 hour into the ride his car started to overheat and we had to stop every 5 mins to put more water in the radiator until we reached a mechanic.  We finally made it to Manila and we stayed at our favorite pension house and I ran into this British guy that I had met through another PCV.  So, we all went to this reggae concert thing because apparently it was Bob Marleys birthday.  It was one of the cooler experiences that I have had here in the P.I. because usually Filipinos like 80's rock and pop music like Lady Gaga and such.  Morgan almost managed to put her cigarette out on my knee which extremely unpleasant, I still have the blister to prove it... We got our butts out of bed early the next morning to watch the Super Bowl which was a great time too, started at 730 in the morning.  Overall a good time was had by all and am looking forward to my next trip back to Manila.  Gotta cut this post short because I was only able to grab this computer for 30 mins.
Dason lang-
Robert