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In my experience (2 years now), for the average household that depends on city water rather than pumping it up themselves, a simple setup with storage tank, waterpump and pressure tank works quite well to beat the sadly very underwhelming water pressure from Metro (formerly Dumaguete water district).
If you pick a storage tank that holds two to three days of water use (say 750 liters), a trustworthy pump (Pedrollo is a good Italian brand), and a fair sized pressure tank (say 150 liters, to limit the number of times to pump needs to run), and a good installer, then you end up with something like below and no more worries about water pressure. Obviously, you do need to spend some money, I would guess around 50,000 peso now.

 

Part of the problem with mail in this country generally is obviously that just about nobody has a proper address.
Many roads/streets have no name, many houses have no house number.
Every time regular mail actually gets delivered I am surprised. How the couriers manage to find where to deliver documents/a package shall remain a mystery to me.

 

It is tough to describe the madness I witnessed, but it was in July as I had a flight on the 15th to the UAE. Sorry, I just figured many read my rather long set of posts on the subject.

As we arrived, there was a crowd of people, large enough to make walking in through the ambulance access driveway difficult without shouldering people. As it turns out, "most" of these people were waiting for evaluation by a 30 strong force of nurses/doctors that were situated in booths separated by 5 foot partition walls. These were people that feared they had COVID and were there to see if it was true. They were questioned and if their description of events/symptoms held up to scrutiny, they were actually tested. I saw many leave without being tested. So when I said "evaluated", I meant just that.

In what way was I lucky? I ended up spending a couple thousand dollars to stay in a hotel, get tested, and change flight dates due to last minute changes. Was I lucky that I didn't catch a disease that would have robbed me of my sense of smell for 2 weeks in exchange for all of that wasted time and money? I suppose some view it so.

 

I had an accident on a motorbike and was not able to travel, staff in the immigration office was very helpful, think this is the standard procedure, you write a letter why you can't travel, your doctor signs it and it will be sent to Manila, where the standard is they give you 3 months and if you are still unable to travel you do same again and get another 3 months. Go to the immigration office in Dumaguete they will guide you on how to make the letter, good luck with it

 

Apparently a young boy drowned there this afternoon, please look after your kids when going swimming anywhere.