Posted on 12/06/2004 9:12:18 AM PST by MississippiMasterpiece
By the way, did you choose your name because, while in the Philippines, everyone called you Joe? If I had a dollar for every time I got called Joe, I would be rich.
Full exposure. I lived on the local economy while I was there so I was in the markets haggling, in the bars drinking, in the movie theatres, etc.
Not evil, neurotic. Evil is easier to put up with.
I got my Filipina.
You sound as though you just obtained a new car.
You are exactly right - mostly what I saw was dirt and rubble and pigs wondering down the streets and trucks using charcoal for fuel.
In that desperate situation one certainly couldn't blame the little Japanese lass and as young as I was at the time, I fully understood it wasn't "love at first sight."
P.S. Nice pictures of present day Japan - quite a contrast. We managed a cultural tour during our brief visit, to the Buddha of Kamakura (?). Is he still there? I have an old B&W snapshot.
I take your word for it that the married people you know are unhappy, but that may not be her experience with the people she knows.
He's (still) there alright. He'll be sitting there for the next 2000 years, too, provided there isnt a massive earthquake there.
Unfortunately, wave upon wave, generation after generation of young American came back to the US after a couple of years posted to Asia...having 'sewn' quite a bit of 'oats' there. problem is, many, many of them only with transcient, obscene or crass relationships (often for money) with Asian women who were generally gravitating within a five mile radius of the military base front gate, leeching off the PX and GIs, and ergo, a high percentage of the Asian females in the total universe(in the GI's minds with limited exposure)simply ='wh*res' and 'sl*ts'.
This would be anything but the truth. The US military were meeting only a relatively small, unrepresentative, bastardized/jaded tip of the social iceberg, not mainstream Asian females. Many US GIs would come back with a highly aberrant, skewed and limited impression of Asian women so totally unrepresentative of the whole..but it fueled a whole cottage industry, urban legened of the image that Asian woman = wh*re = all too easy.....such as popularized by the overused "love you long time"....this is a bum rap for the great majority of Asian women....i agree there are vast segments of Asian women who would have nothing to do with American military or bases or bars nearby them...and have and had just as conservative morals if not more conservative than the average American blonde teenage girl back stateside in the 1960s or 1970s.
That's what I had heard at the time - earthquakes, floods and the old guy lives on!
I'm all ears. What advice would you offer?
You think this approach will drive women away? Convince them you are a jerk? It's just the opposite, my friend.
Tell her she's beautiful and she's just going to think: "Yeah, right. I know what this guy wants. What a loser. Maybe I can get him to buy me things for a while." ;)
Convince them you are a jerk...Has this approach worked well for you?
Let's just say women don't think I'm a jerk. ;)
Go get em killer.
BTW nice pic on your profile page.
It is a pretty simple language actually, at least Tagalog, Cebuano, and similar are. Others, like Ilicano are tougher. There are many languages and dialects, some of which are quite divergent. My skills have actually more or less rusted away at this point.
One thing that makes Tagalog easy to learn is that many of the words they use are Spanish transliterated into their alphabet/soundset. I discovered very early on that if I was reading a Tagalog word that I did not know that was not obviously pure Tagalog, I would try to map the sound of it to Spanish in my head to determine its meaning. This works far more often than you think it would. I don't really know much Spanish, but I knew enough that I bridged a lot of gaps with it. The structure and form is not Spanish, but many of the words in the language were taken from Spanish.
I laughed out loud when I read that. That is exactly what my husband did with me and it worked wonderfully. He was never mean or arrogant, just playful. And I responded in kind. And we still do it now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.