Bradley's Old Fashioned Weblog

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  • Beginning Japanese and Beginning Japanese Workbook

    I picked these books up in Singapore before leaving for the Philippines so I can start my adventure with learning the Japanese language.  I’ve also been using Smart.fm to help build vocabulary and familiarize myself with hiragana, katakana, and some basic kanji, but you can’t learn a language without understanding the grammar, conjugations and particles. …

  • Spring Kyushu Fair

    These are pictures from the Spring Kyushu Fair held in late March to early April of this year in Singapore.  This is what I meant about being agitated about not having a Japan blog, because I should have posted them then.  This is a bit dated, but I thought it was worth sharing anyway! The…

  • Using Geisha Imagery To Sell Modern Products

    The following image is of a soap that appears to be popular in the Philippines, where most women (and quite a few of them men) are obsessed with whitening their skin and maintaining a fair complexion.  The image of a painted geisha face very effectively communicates the idea of a fair complexion and the purpose…

  • The Manananggal Demon, A Filipino Superstition

    This morning I saw something bizarre going on up the street.  The men of a family were holding machetes and were busy chopping the branches off trees in their yard and shaving them down. My father-in-law was outside and when I asked him what was going on, he said that they thought they saw a…

  • Rapists on the Rooves

    Not quite what you were expecting, is it? I don’t know the name of those cats, but we call the black and white one Rapist #1 and the orange one Rapist #2.  It was actually my sister-in-law that came up with those names. There are a few female cats in the house here.  Common knowledge…

  • Typical Treatment of Family Members Returning From Overseas

    I’m sure not every American’s experience is the same, but when I go home to visit family, events usually play out in pretty much the same fashion.  I’m sure most people would recognize this as their typical experience as well.  You call ahead to let them know you’re coming home.  When you arrive, you can…

  • Carabao Chicharon

    Since moving overseas I’ve made it a point to try to be more adventurous in what I eat.  There are certain things that I still can’t bring myself to try, like balot, but I’ve just added something new to my list of snacked-on animals: carabao.  This is sort of cheating, because it wasn’t a carabao…

  • How I Got a 1 Year Visa For Free in the Philippines

    When I entered the Philippines on June 1st I entered with a tourist visa stamp with the intention of filing for a resident visa and possibly extensions to hold me over until it was approved.  When we went to the Bureau of Immigration satellite office in Makati, however, we were told that filing for a…

  • The iPad 3G is for sale in Manila, but WTF?

    While we were out in Manila last night at Megamall we wandered into the electronics area to find some speakers for my laptop.  Some of the ‘specially priced’ movies we’ve been picking up have low volume so we needed something to give it a bit of a boost.  While we were there we saw this…

  • Squatters in Manila

    Something I noticed on my first visit to the Philippines two years ago was that people seem to live anywhere there’s room enough to set up shelter.  I thought that there must be no sort of zoning regulations or building codes, both of which would prevent this sort of thing in the US.  I still…