Visas

We passed another major milestone in our trip yesterday. Four hours and $350 dollars later, Lindsey and I successfully renewed our visas. Now we are legally approved to stay in the Philippines until November 4th!

Fact of the Day No. 4

There are only 3 species of vampire bats and they all live in Latin America. Contrary to popular belief, vampire bats do not suck blood, but actually lap it up like kittens instead.

Image obtained from topnews.net.nz.

Fact of the Day No. 3

In terms of land area, the Philippines is slightly larger than Arizona.

Fact of the Day No. 2

There are over 1200 known species of bats. As a result, bats make up about 25% of all known mammal species!

(Image obtained from decktheholidays.blogspot.com)

Fact of the Day No.1

We have decided to post a daily "fact of the day" on the blog so that there will always be something new to read. This way, even if we have nothing new to post about our adventures you can still learn something new about the Philippines, bats, etc. Hope you enjoy these and maybe even learn some things you didn't know before.

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FACT OF THE DAY:

• The Philippines is made up of 7,107 islands.

This picture was obtained from the CIA World Factbook website.

Kadayawan

First off, let us apologize for the lack of activity on the blog recently. We have spent almost an entire week at Norma's house in Davao where we generally do not have internet access. It was a very busy week; we went to two press conferences, a rotary club meeting, a photo shoot in the rain, watched a parade from a famous Filipino fashion designer's house, and attended a fashion show.

The parade we attended was for the Filipino festival called Kadayawan, which celebrates the country's bountiful harvest. The parade was basically like a mini Rose Bowl parade full of dancers, drummers, celebrities, and floats. We watched from the balcony of a house instead of from the street so we had an amazing view of the parade.

It was quite an amusing experience for Lindsey and I. Our favorite moments were when celebrities would approach in a float and the crowd would practically start to riot around us - meanwhile Lindsey and I were busy trying to figure out what was going on and who the famous people were.

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Based on our experience, Lindsey and I were able to determine the following basic rules of a Filipino parade (hopefully, these will give you an idea of how to behave if you ever find yourselves attending such a parade):

1. It is 100 percent okay to jump in front of a float to take up-close pictures of said float and have your friends take pictures of you standing in front of the float.

2. It is okay that Rule Number 1 forces the float to stop and the parade to temporarily halt and become divided into sections that independently travel the parade route sometimes 20 minutes apart from one another.

3. If you see a celebrity in a float do the following: scream your lungs out, run down the street to the float, push through the crowd, throw yourself at the float, take tons of pictures. That is all.

4. Feel free to just walk directly through the middle of the parade at any time you please - it is definitely more important that you cross the street than it is for the parade to keep running.

5. If you want really good pictures just climb onto an available roof to take them.

6. If the crowd or heat becomes too much for you and you feel the need for a bit of a rest, just grab a few friends and lay down on the the street in a puppy pile to take a nap.

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I leave you with the best pictures of the parade...

Dangerous Discoveries

Being the unbelievably busy people that we are, Ambre and I had not been to the beach recently so we decided it would be a good idea to spend some time down there. Yesterday and today we made some venomous, yet incredible, discoveries. Yesterday, we were walking around the pier when Ambre found a dead sea snake hanging out of the side of the wall. We got to see its flattened tail but it was so stuck that we were not able to remove it in one piece. We are not one hundred percent sure but we think it is most likely a banded sea krait and even though we would have preferred to see it alive we were still very excited. Today was even better. We went out early this afternoon to wander around at low tide. As usual, we were checking out the chocolate chip sea stars when we reached an area that was so thick with seaweed, rocks, and sea urchins that we had to turn around. On the way back to shore I saw something strange in the water. I was almost positive that I knew what it was but when I told Ambre what I thought she didn't believe me; this came as absolutely no surprise since she frequently questions my judgement. After standing there for a few minutes, she became more convinced and I ran back to the house to grab the dust pan and a camera. When we pulled it out of the water it was the most amazing thing ever, a crown of thorns starfish! The very thing I have been most anxious to see since we got here! We carefully carried it back to shore and proceeded to take way too many pictures of it. When we were finally done, I got to be the lucky one to return it. On the way back up from the beach we also saw a dead, headless bat hanging from one of the cabanas. However, I'm pretty sure that no one would appreciate seeing the pictures of it.


A banded sea krait, alive and in one piece

Our banded sea krait...

Crown of Thorns Starfish