Born and raised in Cebu, a tiny island in the middle of the Philippines, I was used to the laid back island kind of living. After college, I moved to busier Manila for work and decided to pursue an exciting but rather exhausting career in Sales and later ended up working for a government agency, with guaranteed tenure and rather uneventful, predictable work days.

The Philippines, like most tropical countries, is pretty laid back. Things tend to move at a slower pace and time is not a big deal (hence the term "Philippine Time"). Filipinos like to come "fashionably late" for any gathering, be it for business or pleasure. For foreigners however, this could sometimes be an inconvenience, if not an annoyance, at times. However, for the rest of the Philippines, this is part of the Filipino mentality :(

I decided to move to Japan to study for four years and eventually ended up working for various companies (at least 5 or 6 of them for the last fifteen years or so). Translations used to be my after-office activity (although I sometimes do it at work). I do mostly Tagalog to English (and vice versa) as well as Cebuano (Visayan dialect) in various fields and topics. I used to do a lot of Tagalog song translations for a karaoke company in Tokyo (back in the day when karaoke was such a big thing in Japan). Occassionally there would be some Tagalog letters and documents that need to be translated to English.

For me, language proficiency is a never-ending process and perhaps the best way to master it is not just to communicate with people in their native tongue but also to understand their culture, history and way of thinking. .