From the Australian Outback to Urban Manila

Nine weeks! That’s how long it has been since we left Australia. I checked the calendar on my phone to count the weeks and had to do a double take. It’s feeling a little bit more like home for us here in such a short amount of time.

We’ve found a kind of rhythm to our day. Homeschooling has resumed for our family. We’ve eased into it slowly for the sake of our learners and the teacher. Although somewhat tricky, not having any of our books with us – they’re all in our Balikbayan boxes (special packing boxes that cost USD$140 or AUD$190 each to send back to the Philippines with no weight restrictions, perfect for sending books), we’ve made adjustments (we’ve switched to audio books, thanks to https://librivox.org/) and are getting used to our new learning and living routine.

The first thing we had to sort out when we moved into our little apartment was the internet connection. We were using mobile data the first few weeks we were here but the reception was spotty and slow at certain hours of the day. In other words, it drove us a little bit crazy. My highly organised mother called the local provider (https://pldthome.com/) and organised for a technician to come and hook us up. My mum had to pay about USD$77 (AUD$100) to waive the 36-month-contract, as we were uncertain how long we would be staying in the city, and we had high-speed internet within the week (unlimited plan for USD$40 or AUD$56.70 per month with speeds of up to 100Mbps). And because my parents’ apartment is right next to the one we’re in, we only needed one line and connected via wi-fi. This was very economical for our two households.

One of my parents' one-bedroom apartment was tenanted up until about a month before our Australian departure and then without warning, the tenants left without a word. Coincidence? Well, I don’t believe in coincidences. This turn of events has given us a place to stay once we got out of quarantine back in February. The apartment we’re currently residing in is very small, only 28 square metres. It’s tiny! Our house on the Gold Coast is 200 square metres and the house we lived in back in Karratha is just a little bit smaller than that so this was extreme downsizing for us -- a family of four. We’ve had to reconfigure the way we occupied space. Instead of a couch, we have bunk beds where the children sleep. Donovan and I sleep on a mattress on the floor in the small bedroom (we haven’t got around to getting a bed frame). The kitchen, just like the rest of the place, is cozy with very limited storage and bench-top space. There’s a little balcony where I can have several pot plants, a small outdoor table and a couple of chairs. This is the spot I use to sit and type away and also paint when I find myself idle on certain afternoons. Ikea, which is a ten-minute walk away, has been very convenient. Instead of a dining table, we got a long office desk to fit all our laptops on when in use, and enough space for all of us to sit down and eat during meals. We got some shelving units to store our notebooks, art supplies and all the little things we tend to accumulate in a very short amount of time. There's one built-in closet for all our clothes and shoes which surprisingly fit everything we packed in our suitcases. The washing machine is a snug fit in the bathroom and we use a folding laundry rack to dry our clothes. It was surprisingly fun (and exhausting) setting up a micro-home and a great exercise in mindfulness.

It’s been a very big adjustment for all of us. The first couple of weeks of being here, all of us got so many bruises from bumping into table corners and open doors. We’ve stubbed our toes and knocked our elbows and bumped into each other so many times. When I asked the children about their thoughts on living in such a small apartment, I was glad to hear that they have been enjoying the close proximity. They said they really liked sleeping almost in the same room as us and being so close to us at all times. I’m taking that as a win and I will enjoy it as long as it lasts even though it drives me bonkers every now and then.

Having a limited amount of storage space in the kitchen and in the fridge means we do our food shopping several times a week. We have been getting most of our supplies from Walter Mart, a local supermarket chain with a store only 200 metres away. Although prices here are very cheap compared to Australian standards, prices of whole foods are even lower at the palengke or farmer’s market. We’ve been enjoying all the tropical fruits like mangoes (we have them all year round!), bananas, papaya, mangosteen, durian, guyabano (soursop) and many others. Milk and dairy products here are slightly more expensive than in Australia as the dairy industry is virtually non-existent and most of what is available is imported – all the way from guess where? Australia and New Zealand! So we’ve switched to powdered milk and instead of yoghurt and keffir, I quickly figured out how to ferment our own probiotic drink using Yakult as a starter. It’s delicious in our banana and spirulina smoothies. The international section of the supermarkets here is extensive compared to the one of two shelves I was used to at Coles and Woolworths and so much more budget-friendly. I’m going to have a lot of fun growing my repertoire of things to cook.

Our apartment complex also has pretty much everything we need. There are three mini grocery stores downstairs that carry a small selection of essentials (frozen meats and fish, eggs, milk, fresh fruit and vegetables, toiletries, cleaning products, cosmetics, over-the-counter medication and everything else, even alcohol).

Tap water here is generally not fit for drinking and is commonly bought in small bottles or, in larger quantities, from water refilling stations (they use reverse osmosis to filter the water) which we also have at our apartment building. For USD$5 (AUD$7) each, we purchased two large 20-litre bottles which we bring back to the refilling station to be refilled for less than USD$1 (AUD$1.35) per bottle. It gets delivered to our door about an hour later.

There’s a little bakery that sells freshly-baked pandesal, our local sweet bread rolls, warm and fragrant every morning as well as an assortment of rolls filled with sweet and savoury morsels of delight. There are also two restaurants that serve Chinese and Thai cuisine.

One of the best things about our apartment building is the massage place! For less than USD$10 (AUD$13.50), you can have an hour-long massage of your choice. They offer Thai, Swedish and Shiatsu massage and going by the rave reviews my mother and husband (they are veteran massage enthusiasts) have given me after numerous visits, I can confirm that the therapists there are very good.

At the courtyard, there are five swimming pools and a splash pad for smaller children as well as a playground. There are tables and chairs where we can do our nature study and plenty of trees and greenery where sparrows and dragonflies take refuge. The courtyard is our favourite thing about our apartment. It’s nice to be able to go for a swim whenever we want. All we have to do is put our bathers on and take the elevator down.

Our apartment is situated very close to SM Mall of Asia, currently the third largest mall in the world. That says a lot about what Filipinos do in their free time, especially on weekends. We like going for a stroll during the week when it’s not as busy and get our 10,000 steps for the day. There’s a skating rink on the third floor and an indoor, double-storey carousel. We’ve been on it twice.

These last nine weeks have been busy, and stressful, and messy, and wonderful. We’ve had to go through so many changes and experience all sorts of new and sometimes uncomfortable experiences, and I am certain there will be many more things to get used to. But we seem to love that, and our children are having a blast. We’ve been catching up with family we haven’t seen in years, getting reacquainted with cousins I only remember as wide-eyed little boys and girls too shy to say a word; we’ve gone on long drives through excruciatingly slow traffic, to arrive triumphantly at the seashore with black volcanic sand – as black as my hair – peppering our toes, gentle waves kissing our feet and the most gorgeous sunset tinting the skies; we’ve been exploring shopping malls and visiting our favourite comic book and pop-vinyl shop to browse and make mental lists of what we would like to add to our collections; and we’ve been designing a new multi-generational home for all of us, away from the city -- which we are about to start building.

We can’t wait to move to the province, where fruit trees grow wild and bamboo groves are a common part of the landscape; where we can hopefully try our hand at raising chickens and goats, perhaps grow a veggie patch and a small orchard. But in the meantime, we’re going to be here, grateful and absolutely loving it.

(Long holiday in Nasugbu, Batangas, about 100kms from Manila; it was worth the long car ride.)