Hi, I am am dreaming for 3-6 weeks stay in Phl. with my family, but due long time I obviously would need work remotely. Do you know any good places to look for that? I am mainly interested in chance to immerse with local community and discover Flipino way of living (cooking, art, fun!) I fot wife and 5 years old son (will be 6 next year) and we are traveling on polish passports.
Internet can be lousy in some areas, but I stayed for a while in a Condo in Manila (near Manila bay) which was a really nice area where the internet was passable, had a lot of families attending Manila bay for the live bands, children's fairground and the restaurants that line the bay, plus opposite is the new Mall of Asia! But would you want to get out and about the country? See some amazing beaches? Maybe even live on a beach (with the super slow internet that will come with it)?? I recommend it, at least just to see the difference in culture to how it is here in Europe.
Well living on the beach is an 110% accomplishment of my dream! is july-august good for that i read that Phl. got great weather all day. From practical point of view, what sort of cost I have to be prepared for (excluding flights)
Marek July-August rainy season has just started and it gets a bit windy in southern latitudes, however it can still be nice, this is surfing season for foreigners, high summer is late Feb-April, I will post a bit more detail when I get home in a few hours. Kite boarding is popular too.
You can get adequate 3G coverage in the cities but with very variable speeds, as a programmer if you are working and submitting compiled deployable work back to your office it's do-able, if you are trying to work on servers remotely using one of the Remote terminal programs (MSTSC, VNC, Teamviewer etc.) then it will be painful, things that would take me minutes in the UK took hours when I was having to work from Manila, connections constantly tripping out. Internet cafe's generally have lousy bandwidth, usually a simple standard ADSL line with a couple of meg total bandwidth shared across 10 or more computers, if you are on a Smartbro 3G dongle (which you can buy cheaply once you get there) the 3G signal will be 400 kbps one moment and 33 kbps the next, painfully variable. We are back to having a fixed line again with 1Mb download and about 400kb upload, I'm looking forward to using that when I get back home in a few months. When we lived in the Condo seven years ago we had a fixed line with roughly the same speed I mention above about 1Mb it was much better for remote work, still painful but definitely practical.
I just realised that at azimo.com we can top-up to: GLOBE, SMART, SUN which dongle provider will be the best? And ultimately how much money I have to take with me for 3 person family in order to live there for 6-8 weeks. And when I can look for renting condo, beach hut to live there?
As far as using USB dongles is concerned, the best provider for any given area will vary with the area you choose. Sun (part of PLDT, the main teleco) is highly rated in the major cities but has sparse to zero coverage in rural areas. Smart has probably the best coverage but its IP address range is flagged for high spammer use. Globe is fairly universal except in some remote areas. Be aware though that usage is very high from around 5pm until 1am and data rates will suffer as a result - with Smart being the slowest. UMTS/3G connections are adversely affected by the weather. You will have difficulty in renting a condo for less than six months but if you are lucky and find one, bear in mind that it is normal to charge 2 months' rent as a deposit plus one month's rent in advance. That may be acceptable to you until I tell you that the majority of rental contracts permit the property owner to retain the deposit for up to 3 months from the end of the lease period. As you live abroad, you will encounter difficulties in getting your deposit refunded. There are, however, nice clean hotels that have monthly rates and most will have either free broadband connections in the rooms and/or WiFi available. Examples include "KiwiLodge", run by a New Zealander, and "Alpa City Suites", managed by a Belgian. Both are in Cebu City and have web sites. Both offer monthly rates which are cheaper than paying on a per-night basis.
Guys you are very thankfull! I am starting getting a picture. So last two factors is how much I have to spend on daily basis and what is the best routes to fly to Phl. from uk? I am starting considering moving dates more towards this xmas and new year Marek
Christmas and New year are the most expensive flights you could try for, Oversea's Filipino Workers return home in droves at Christmas so the flights are almost always sold out, also hotel's are at premium rates that time of year, in the old days hotels were incredibly cheap but that is no longer the case sadly. Weather is more acceptable for Europeans in December very nice at night and not quite so wet during the day (at least in the North in Manila) Daily basis with a family in tow it all depends what you want to do, you could spend 5000 peso a day easily (75 quid) if you like to eat out a lot on the other hand you could get by on 1000 a day depending on what you are doing. In reality in some places some days you could spend a lot more than this, other times you might get as low as my lower end limit, all depends what you want from a 6 week break.
