Photos

During my 2.5 years on international assignment in the Philippines, I lived at the Holiday Inn, Clarkfield property for just over a year and a half.

During that first month at the Holiday Inn, I had not yet met many people or made friends, so I spent most of my time when not at work in and around the hotel property. And the Holiday Inn became my friends. I I ate, slept, played and relaxed in this new home.

The Holiday Inn was once one of the Officer's buildings on the base, and after the evacuation of the US Military from the base in 1991 when Mt. Pinatubo unleashed its' wrath and shed ash and mud throughout the area, the Holiday Inn came in and renovated part of the base in order to create a resort approximately 90 kilometers north of Manila.

Although I had traveled far and wide many times in my life, until I moved to the Philippines, I did not know what true warmth was. The people of the Philippines will remain in my heart forever and the lessons I learned from being a guest in this remarkable country about patience, living in this world among people of a different culture, and about how to adjust to things that are so foreign to an expatriate spending more than a vacation far from home will live with me forever, no matter where in the world I find myself sleeping at night.

People live different worlds than us -- by that I mean any of us. When we uproot ourselves to live in another country, we experience countless differences, geography, climate, language, religion, food, smells, medical care, extreme poverty, extreme wealth among extreme poverty, natural disasters, man-made disasters, and too many more to note in this small box.

I looked out my window one evening at dusk and saw the sun setting with the mountains in the background and a Holiday Inn staff member perched next to the gazeebo. One of those mountains in the background leads up to Mt. Pinatubo and in those few kilimeters between the hotel and the mystical mountain, are coconut palms, and tropical flora and fauna of all types.

As you travel the world, I hope that you have the opportunity to experience something so different from your own homeland that it changes you as this first expat experience changed me.

For this shot I used a very early digital camera -- a Sony. There were few to no manual choices, and this was the best I could do with this shot. In post-production, I sharpened the shot a bit and cropped out some leaves on a bougainvillea that was growing outside my window.