Preperations are being made as we speak. I'm trying to pull something off that I haven't been able to do in a long long time...have one and only ONE birthday celebration. I have several different groups of friends and they all don't really know each other so in the past they would all want to celebrate my birthday seperately. This resulted in having to attend about 5 parties often in one weekend.
So this year I decided to take a more active role in setting things up and bringing everyone together for a big celebration. There is one official evite. Dinner will be at Buca Di Beppo in SF on Saturday the 25th with the bootyshaking to occur at The Glas Kat.
We are already running into some problems though. Buca doesn't want to have a group larger than 25 people and we are already pretty much at that limit. I guess we will have to tell people that they can only come to the club. It kinda sucks but I understand how making room for 25 people at a restaurant that is very busy can be a pain in the ass.
I got a private guest list going on at the GlasKat. The limit is supposed to be 50 people but they will let me fudge a little. Originally they were going to set up our group on the main stage of the club. They were going to put some sofas and tables on the stage for us. It would have been truely P.I.M.P. We would have basically been on display in the club. Then the "Men of Exotica" got pissy because they come in on Saturday nights to do a quick 15 minute weenie shaking show. ACK. They want the stage even though they are only there for 15 MINUTES! So they called last night and asked me if I mined moving upstairs to the private booths. I didn't have a huge problem with it so I accepted. We went from P.I.M.P. to V.I.P. but that's ok.
The guest list is still wide open for anyone that wants to come out and party.
Along with my birthday I'm also coming up on my 2 weeks of vacation. At this point I have no plans whatsoever. I'm probably just going to wing it. If there is something insanley cheap to Mexico or Hawaii I will take it. If not I will sit at home in my underwear downloading porn. I still have dreams of taking the Corvette down the coast and this would be the perfect time but the Vette needs new tires ($700) and needs several gaskets changed ($insane).
IslandGrl is also going on vaction but she is going a week earlier than me. Actually it starting this Friday. She is going back home to Hawaii for her brothers big football game. It's homecoming or something. It would have been nice to go with her but now it would have been too weird. I still have feelings for her and she says she still has feelings for me (even though I still haven't actually seen her for a couple of months now).
She called me yesterday to let me know that she wasn't going to be back in time for my birthday. I was actually relieved because I didn't want to make a fool of myself in front of everyone. She won't be back in time because she agreed to take her grandmother back to the Philippines.
I told her to be careful over there and she said that everyone she has mentioned it too has said that and she didn't understand why she would need to be careful. IslandGrl has never travelled outside of the United States. In fact she was born and raised in Hawaii and never left the Islands until she went to college. That really hasn't left much for worldly experience.
I explained to her that first of all any time to go to a foreign country you need to be careful. American people have a bad habit of thinking America owns the world. Things that are acceptable here are not acceptable in other countries, and things that are unacceptable here are perfectly ok in other countries. This awareness is especially important if you are a female travelling alone.
There are really a mountain of things that IslandGrl needs to be careful of. For one she doesn't speak the Tagalog or the local dialect of where she is going. She can count on being ripped off from absolutely everyone from taxi drivers to restaurants and department stores. She really has no one with her on this trip. Her grandmother is making this trip as her "last chance" to visit the area where she grew up. She does not know her relative in the Philippines in any way at all. She has never met them, never spoken to them, and wouldn't be able to tell who around her is a relative or not.
She also has no idea that they will be making a big deal about their American relative coming to visit the area. It will be big news. My friends go back to the Philippines every year and it is always a big event with tons of people anticipating their arrival. Part of the reason is because in their eyes my friends are extremely rich and they want to be in good favor to them.
This is going to be amplified for IslandGrl by the fact that she is female. Single men go back to the Philippines frequently. There are plane loads of them landing all day long. A single, good looking, young, rich, american girl coming for a visit is going to bring out a whole lot of people (horny men).
If the natives won't be bad enough the tourist might be worst. Those plane loads of single men landing all day long have sex near the top of their list as the reason why they are in the Philippines. They will see any young brown skin female as for sale.
Then of course there is the culture shock she will experience. She told me she is going to Pangasinan in the Visayan Islands but she didn't know that Pangasinan is a provence not a city. It encompasses a large area. Some of the nicest resorts in the Philipines are in the Visayan Islands area but there are a lot more areas that are impoverished. She will see things she has never seen in America. Things like entire shantytowns. Nothing like the relatively tiny homeless encampments that you may see in America. These are whole families living in shacks that have been put together with scrap found anywhere. She might see people (lots of people) digging through trash heaps.
She doesn't even know how she has to get to the area where she is going. She has to fly to Manila first. Then she probably has to get to Boricay since that is the only area in the vicinity that has an airport. Then depending on where in the provence she has to go to she might have to take a ferry or hire a driver to take them where they need to go. They could spend the entire day travelling just to where they want to go AFTER they get to Boricay.
I don't want to make the Philippines sound like a bad place. It is a beautiful country. I want to visit it someday and not just to hump tiny brown skinned women. I actually think that a lot of the experiences that IslandGrl will have there are for the best. Everyone should truly experience different cultures, not just in the classroom or on TV. Everyone should see what poverty and hardship really is.
I'm going to give her my friend's phone number so she can talk to him since he is familiar with that provence and can basically repeat everything I told her plus give her some good tips for making her way around the country easier.
8:11 a.m. - 2004-09-15
Recent entries:
Oklahoma - 2005-11-07
Obey! - 2005-11-03
Back From Boston - 2005-10-27
Lots of Updates - 2005-10-24
Back to Work - 2005-10-10
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