But it’s a dry heat ...

NOT! I’ve officially been in California too long and gotten way too used to a near-desert climate. It’s really hot and humid here today (there’s a typhoon sitting off the southeast coast) and I’m about ready to melt into a puddle of my own sweat. Even the stiff breeze isn’t really helping the situation much. It just teases your brain into thinking you should feel cooler. Then when you don’t, it’s all that much worse.

Church wasn’t air conditioned either. But as promised, it was in English – mostly. The priest spoke with a heavy Japanese accent (for a very long time – you’d think he would have been hotter than the rest of us in all of his robes, but apparently he’s part African jungle rat). All the ministers spoke with heavy Filipino accents. And the songs were in some language I don’t recognize (presumably one of the two). So to answer my own question of last week, if you speak Tagalog, you want a mass in English because your only choices are Japanese and English.

In general, mass was much the same as at home, except that at the sign of peace, everyone bows to each other instead of shaking hands. If you could have seen it from above, it must have looked like one of those town square clocks with figurines that come out every hour and perform jerky little dances before they go back inside.

And after mass, everyone went out to the mini-van in the parking lot, packed FULL with bananas and mangos and cakes and presumably all kinds of other Filipino delicacies. I’m not sure what the currency of choice was – I did see a couple of kids change hands.

I stopped at “Just One” on the way home (curiosity finally got the better of me) – it’s an artist’s studio. Presumably named that because there’s only room in this world for just one copy of each of the items he had there.

Today’s tip: if you’re down to your last $100 and frantically looking for an ATM that will accept your card, much less one that will talk to you in English (for all I knew, they weren’t giving me money because XDirtPusher had emptied the account to buy car parts), try the post office. It’s also a bank here, is open on the weekends, and the ATM has an English menu option. You can only take out $100 at a time, but there’s nothing stopping you from standing in line multiple times in a row.