Well since I am on here blogging for my mother's birthday I figured I could do a short blog about our recent Philippines trip.  It was a very busy trip as we were doing wedding stuff the entire time except for the last day when the typhoon came in.  It was a low level typhoon so nothing too exciting, but we did lose power all day (which they call a brown out over there).  I had never heard of a brown out.  I am only familiar with a black out (as in it gets black when there are no lights because the dark is black).  I asked Ronna why it was called a brown out and she said this is because brown is the darkest they (Filipinos) can get.  I don't know if she was telling the truth or joking with me, but anyways that is the only reason I have.  Anyways, like I said we were very busy taking care of wedding stuff like the venue, caterers, flowers, etc.  We were able to get done everything we needed to and we only have a handful of small details left which we can figure out from SIngapore.  So it was a very productive week.  We even bought Christmas decorations for our apartment as Christmas is not too big in Singapore and everything is much more expensive in Singapore.  I was very surprised that the stores would carry Christmas stuff already in September, but Ronna told me that Christmas is huge in the Philippines and I even saw some houses with Christmas lights up already.  I thought that was pretty crazy considering it was still only September, but I loved it.  I mean I do love Christmas after all.  Since we were so busy driving all over the place to do wedding stuff we didn't really do much else.  The only other thing we did worth blogging about was meeting Ronna's family on her dad's side.  In fact the only pictures we have of the entire trip came from this day.  On Sunday we drove around Manila all day visiting 3 different houses and of course you stop and eat at eat house.  They were all very nice and some of them were a bit shy, but I enjoyed getting to meet all of them.  Anyways, here some pictures from the different gatherings throughout the day.



Above is one of our flower girls.  Her name is Rain.



Here I am with Ronna's cousins.  An interesting story about the house we were in was that the entire neighborhood has been in a legal battle with the city for like 20 years and because of it they can't do any house repairs or modifications.  So the house is very basic, but what can they do???



Next we're eating at Pizza Hut with more cousins.  You can see Ronna's sister and dad in the front.  We're eating Pizza Hut because the cousin of Ronna who we were visiting wasn't able to prepare for our visit because her son just recovered from denegue fever (I don't think I spelled it right).  Don't worry he is okay now.



FInally, here we are at the 3rd stop of the day with more cousins.  It was a long and tiring day, but also a very nice day as I got to meet even more of Ronna's loving and accepting family.  Well that's it for now.