"My street" in Quezon City
Apparently, I am now a real Californian, having slept through my first earthquake last night. I've been horribly jetlagged, wasn't able to fall asleep until around 4 am, and the quake came through around 4:45, so I must have been completely passed out.
I've generally been feeling a bit disoriented since I got back. Somehow, the disruption to my body flying east in always much worse than flying west. I set an alarm for 11 am, and still didn't manage to get up until after 1 pm when someone called and woke me up. And I could fall asleep right now if I let myself.
I went to the grocery store yesterday and felt like a slack jawed yokel. I had a moment of slight panic faced with the selection of thirty different kinds of olive oil. I was only away for three weeks, there are big modern grocery stores in Philippine cities, and I was in the neighborhood coop here, not some fluorescent lit behemoth chain store, so it shouldn't have been such a shock, but it was. Even the best appointed grocery stores in the Philippines, while they may have a wide variety of products, do not have anywhere near the variety of brands. You can buy vegetable oil in a pouch, a small, medium or large bottle. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you can find a bottle of olive oil. But that's the extent of it.
So there I was, standing in front of an entire shelf full of olive oil, utterly at a loss. In the end, I just grabbed the smallest bottle and called it a day.
Complaining aside though, while I'll never dispute the charms of shuffling through a public market with tarp roof 3 inches shorter than me buying deliciously fresh produce off of blankets and carts, it was certainly nice to be able to push a cart around a bright clean store and pull food I've been fantasizing about for weeks off of the shelf.
