[exlrrp]

Well, I'm back and I feel like a new man. A new man thats just had a looooong plane trip and a hellride before that.
Did I say that it was 4 hour ride to the airport??? It was almost 6 hours--120 miles.
The Phillippino roads are as bad as Vietnams but there's a LOT more cars on them. About 1 in 3 stop lights are not functional as are the traffic policemen leaning on their motorcycles having permanent breaks. This is the worse place for shoulder passers I ever saw outside of Mexico--as soon as traffic stops, people try and use the shoulder AND oncoming lanes to get around the traffic, causing permanent gridlock and your occasional headon crash. When we got to Manila, our out of town driver missed his turn and we wound up on the other side of a major parade that was tying up the whole downtown. He kept turning down allies that were absolutely at a standstill. Finally I staryted telling him where to go-had to go stand out in oncoming traffic so he could U Turn twice-this was exciting!!! After swearing and cirsing the little bugger to the airport where he swore he knew where he was, we found he had dropped us off at the wrong terminal--had to hire another taxi to get us right--yer boy was using some spanish words he hadn't used in a while. We got there just in time, not 15 minutes to spare.
So after a 6 hour asskicking ride--this was THE worst ride to the airport I ever I had we got on a the plane for a 12 hour ride and they VCR was out so there were no movies.
It was nice to get back to the US
Nice things:
1)Drinking out of the tap
2) drivers not so Kamikaze, even in San Francisco. This is a SERIOUS danger--we saw one dead body being tallied as we drove by in Bien Hoa--some poor girl just turned into traffic, wound up being roadkill. We were surprised we didn't see more of this.
3) Your own comfy toilet. I won't elaborate

I'm getting the pictures ready to post, there's 100s to go through and we don't want to clog the site.
I'm having trouble getting mine on to my computer--its pretty full and there's not much space but Sue has hers on the computer already so I'll post from her's tommorrow.
I'll have something posted by tommorrow

Souvenirs:
Here's People who are getting em so far:

Paco--hat
Phu Loi--t shirt
Sne3--hat
Keith--hat
Ron--t shirt
David and Bernadette--tshirts
larry--hat

David E, Andy and Fred: Tom's and my presents for you are joint ventures in case he didn't tell you

I got 2 more tshirts and couple more hats. These are 3XL but Tom's right, that would be about 1XL in our country They're big on me and I'm hella tightbodied and muscular (laughs uproariously) I got some more goodies like lbs of coffee to give away, too.--this is really good coffee. Also some tiger beer coasters
Free for the asking--specify what you want. Anybody want, just PM me your address
Then again, I don't mind keeping stuff for myself--this is the trick to buying souvenirs--
Gotta go for now, back tommorrow

James