Jet Laaaaaag why must you torment me so?!

Day 2 in PI! (that's apparently what everyone calls the Philippine Islands here)

I could not feel more at home here. And apparently I am royalty, so step aside Kate Middleton. Lauren Jansen has arrived. After waiting in the airport for 2 hours for baggage claim we made our way to Kawit, a smaller city outside of Manila (the capital) where we flew in. The plane ride was pretty cozy, and they would not stop feeding us. I got up to pee like 12 times which was terrible since I had the window seat. But for such a long ride, it wasn't bad at all.
Once we landed, everyone was complaining about how humid it is here but Alex and I just scoffed because we are so used to it from living in Houston for so long. It's exactly the same, except gorgeous. I am in paradise. Not only that but upon pulling through the gate to see that I was going to be living in a palace (of which I made videos of)...I basically wrote off any signs of me returning to the states. My only complaint is the mosquitos. Holy. Crap. Do they suck. Seriously. I mean, I hourly have to spray myself with off. It's just the fragrance down here. Pretty soon it'll be seeping out of my pores.

This is just the front of the house and not even the entire front yard. Im standing in the middle of it. It's ridic. We also have our own chef! The food is AMAZING. I am definitely going to gain weight here, but I'll be running every evening on this track you see here. So that should help. Anyways, so we all arrive and immediately eat, go swimming, get the grand tour, and then the chef brought us some fresh coconuts that were cut down by a guy who works on the grounds here and we had fresh coconut water! So good. Since it was 1am in Texas but noon here, I laid down for a nap, and didnt wake up until 6pm. CRAP! Screwed up my sleeping schedule. So I woke up and it was pitch black outside, so it gets dark really early but of course dinner is ready so I ate me some grub and tried to stay up as late as I could, since it was 5am Texas time it was pretty challenging. But one of my best talents is sleeping, so around 11pm here, I went back to sleep. To my enjoyment, around 4am there was some crazy monsoon that hit, but I kept sleeping until 6am to which my cousins lovingly woke me up by jumping on me. The coffee here is DEE-LISH! I love it. But the best part is all the fresh tropical fruit. Let's face it. Im getting spoiled and I don't mind it one bit. Now I'm about to go shopping in the Mall of Asia, the third largest mall in all of Asia and it's 30 stories tall. My humanitarian side just wants to give all my money to the poor people I see everywhere who live in houses the size of my closet. This has truly been an eye opening experience thus far. Pretty soon we are going to go to the GK village, a village that is a mix between the ones you see in Slumdog Millionaire and the poor countries in Bourne Identity (just to give a visual) and my family has started this village to help support the poor people. Their income goes straight towards their families and they dont have to pay for their houses. Their jobs just include bettering their community and working in their area. Which is quite an improvement from their poverty stricken area they had before. It's incredible.

Anyways, I just found out there is a bamboo bike here and I MUST test this baby out.