Today, after 3 nights of not sleeping due to the screaming chickens in the surrounding area, I am in a lot of pain, I am dragging myself around doing survival kind of things, trying to move on towards my goals in spite of the deep tiredness that my body feels. As I go around today in this pain something different happened. It's almost as though, because of the state I'm in I'm finally able to connect to the local people. They are starting to not treat me as a tourist, they st

For those of you who don't know, I'm currently in the Philippines. I came here because my Taiwanese visa was expiring (I have to renew it every so many months), and I needed to get out of the country for a while. I didn't have any particular plans of any places I needed to visit, and so I was suggested to go to the Philippines, as it is very near, and has a reputation of being a little paradise - with idillic white sand beaches and coconut palm tree forests. Somehow I did not