This might not be the typical expat blog, written by a German expat, living in the Philippines since 1999. It's different. In English and in German. Check it out! Enjoy reading!
Dies mag' nun wirklich nicht der typische Auswandererblog eines Deutschen auf den Philippinen sein. Er soll etwas anders sein. In Englisch und in Deutsch! Viel Spass beim Lesen!
You plan to move to the Philippines? Wollen Sie auf den Philippinen leben?
There are REALLY TONS of websites telling us how, why, maybe why not and when you'll be able to move to the Philippines. I only love to tell and explain some things "between the lines". Enjoy reading, be informed, have fun and be entertained too!
Ja, es gibt tonnenweise Webseiten, die Ihnen sagen wie, warum, vielleicht warum nicht und wann Sie am besten auf die Philippinen auswandern könnten. Ich möchte Ihnen in Zukunft "zwischen den Zeilen" einige zusätzlichen Dinge berichten und erzählen. Viel Spass beim Lesen und Gute Unterhaltung!
Visitors of germanexpatinthephilippines/Besucher dieser Webseite.Ich liebe meine Flaggensammlung!
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Showing posts with label Philippine Daily Inquirer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philippine Daily Inquirer. Show all posts
Philippine stocks bounced back on Friday as bargain hunters returned after five straight sessions of losses, while strong foreign buying provided additional support.
The benchmark Philippine Stock Exchange Index (PSEi) climbed 1.67 percent, or 95.95 points, to close at 5,825.97.
Luis Limlingan, head of sales at Regina Capital Development Corp., said market sentiment improved following expectations that local gas prices could decline next week, easing some cost pressures.
“Sentiment was further supported by reports that US and Iranian negotiators are exploring a phased deal that could see Tehran reopen the Strait of Hormuz and Washington lift its blockade of Iranian ports,” Limlingan said.
Foreign investors were net buyers, posting net inflows of P2.85 billion.
This helped lift the market despite lingering concerns over the country’s macroeconomic environment.
Trading activity, however, remained tepid. Net value turnover stood at P5.21 billion as many investors stayed on the sidelines due to persistent downside risks, according to Philstocks Financial Inc.
All sectoral indices finished in positive territory. Services led the advance after rising 3.22 percent.
International Container Terminal Services Inc. was the strongest performer among PSEi members. Shares of the port operator climbed 3.95 percent to P920 each.
Semirara Mining and Power Corp., meanwhile, was the main index laggard. Its shares fell 4.5 percent to P15.28.
Alex Eala | Photo by Matthew Stock-man/Getty Images via AFP
In 2026, we’re reaching a point where Pinoy Pride no longer feels forced onto anyone with a drop of Filipino blood. Alex Eala’s been making tennis history, Olivia Rodrigo’s cemented her pop princess status, while Sophia Laforteza of Katseye and the members of Bini have been soaring to new career heights after their Coachella sets—and yes, ube’s the new matcha.
For a nation whose global news headlines usually revolve around natural disasters and political corruption, these wins are quite the comforting distraction. They also beg the question: Is the Philippines finally developing its own soft power?
Sophia Laforteza | Photo from sophia_laforteza/InstagramBini at Coachella | Photo from @bini_ph/Instagram
Soft power equals cool
Soft power is a term that refers to a country’s ability to influence and persuade people without the use of military or other coercive means. For countries like ours that don’t necessarily have or need strong militant forces, we can consider soft power as a culture of coolness.
Soft power brings in new tourists, TikTok vlogs that romanticize what you may consider mundane about your country, and the priceless recognition of your nation and culture as something “cool.”
All thanks to soft power, Japan exceptionally rebuilt its image after World War II, and South Korea became a global force to be reckoned with through the Hallyu wave after experiencing financial crises. Everyone being in a “very Chinese time of their lives” is another form of soft power—albeit a bit more unserious.
Soft power is more than capable of becoming a launchpad for countries that would otherwise be overlooked or overshadowed. For a country as multicultural as the Philippines, the development of tangible soft power could spell wonders for our already exceptional creative industries—as well as a solidified identity that no longer gets conflated with Latin American or Pacific Islander cultures.
Olivia Rodrigo (AP Photo_Chris Pizzello)
Everybody gets more Filipino now
There’s an apartment in Monaco that’s probably blasting Rodrigo’s newest album as we speak. That flat is probably owned by Anya Granados, the only Filipina journalist who’s accredited to cover Formula 1, Formula 2, and Formula E.
Like the newly crowned pop princess, Granados is also a mixed Filipina working to put the Philippines on the map in industries that have traditionally leaned Western. From mainstream pop music to motorsport, it’s initially been rare to see Asian voices at the forefront, but recent years are turning the tide there.
“Olivia has reached a point where her Filipino identity doesn’t have to be introduced to a Western audience as a novelty or an educational footnote,” Granados shares. “It simply exists within the global cultural picture she occupies. She is Filipina American, but she is also one of the biggest young artists in the world.”
“When she brings Filipino elements into that world, millions of people encounter them without being told, ‘here is a Filipino person you should know.’ They are simply encountering her,” she adds.
The world has been consuming Filipino culture for years
This distinction is of particular importance: for Granados, the world has been consuming Filipino culture for years. It just wasn’t paying attention to what was Filipino. In the early 2000s, we already had stars like Enrique Iglesias, Shay Mitchell, Nicole Scherzinger, and Vanessa Hudgens who had Filipino heritage, one way or another.
“There was a real pressure to assimilate, sometimes even to distance yourself from being Filipino,” as per Granados.
That pressure is a natural side effect of centuries’ worth of colonial mentality, despite an overwhelming Filipino presence scattered across the globe through our diaspora, and the “unusual amount of raw material” we have in music, fashion, beauty, food, film, literature, design, and sport. Raw materials like capiz shells and ylang-ylang, for example, are often associated with luxury and opulence first (see Ibiza-style dresses and Chanel No. 5), and their Filipino-ness second.
Anchored in their Filipina identity
What makes Rodrigo and Eala’s ascents to superstardom extra admirable is the visceral shift from that urge to distance oneself. Rodrigo and Eala are consistently anchoring their Filipina identity when they’re making their press rounds.
(Unless one lives under a rock, they’re bound to know about the aforementioned stars’ Filipino roots because they make where they hail from crystal clear.)
By doing so, they and their successes become instrumental in developing a more positive and nuanced view of Filipino people, which is important when the Western world still tends to associate Filipinos with the stereotypical roles of caregivers, nurses, and service workers.
Crab islands
What do Liza Soberano and Eala have in common, aside from being Filipinas making waves across the globe? They both prove how the Philippines is a country that loves to celebrate winners but cannot get itself to celebrate the process that makes them winners.
“Once there is a medal, a championship, a ranking, a record, suddenly everyone wants to claim them. But the years of development that came before the victory: the money, coaching, travel, sacrifices, and uncertainty, are much less glamorous and therefore much harder to get people excited about,” shares Granados.
Sports like tennis, gymnastics, and weightlifting only started to become palatable to a Filipino audience when Eala, Carlos Yulo, and Hidilyn Diaz started winning internationally. Prior to that (and honestly, even after that), we as a society only cared about basketball.
Similarly, before “Forgotten Island” became the highest-rated DreamWorks film at debut, people were too busy calling Liza Soberano an ungrateful woman for burning bridges in the Philippines.
These are just a few examples of the crab mentality that pervades the Filipino people. Generations raised on “hiya” and “utang na loob” make up a volatile Molotov cocktail that teaches us to look down on people trying to make a better life for themselves.
That’s why it’s easy to call people social climbers, ingrates, and other insulting terms: Filipino crab mentality tells us that if we can’t have something, other people can’t and shouldn’t either.
Filipinos will only continue to make waves across different industries globally from here on out. For Granados, she fears that as we develop stronger cultural exports, the culture takes off before the people do.
“Something so specifically Filipino has traveled far enough to become commercially desirable in a place where Filipinos themselves are barely present,” she says as she recounts that irony.
While a development of soft power is mostly ideal and desirable, we have to exercise caution because we might end up exporting our problems alongside our culture.
A timeless example of this would be the distinctly Filipino value of resilience. Yes, there’s something beautiful about it, but there’s also something disconcerting about the concept of celebrating an ability to survive unsurvivable conditions.
Celebrating global success versus seeking validation from the West
Granados also thinks that we ought to strike a balance between celebrating global Filipino success and treating Western recognition as a final stamp of legitimacy on our culture.
“I hope we learn to support every kind of Filipino—not just the well-spoken, half-white person who wins a beauty pageant crown, the middle- and upper-class athlete who makes it into an elite sporting system, or the actor whose Filipino heritage we discover only after they’ve become famous abroad,” she says.
“Because if we only support something once it is aspirational, we never give ordinary people the opportunity to become extraordinary,” she adds.
That said, the true power lies in learning how to celebrate and build bridges for the wins of our people while simultaneously unlearning the urge to tear people down for exercising some form of upward mobility.
“I’d rather the Filipino value we export be: your success doesn’t diminish mine, and my success doesn’t have to come at your expense,” she ends.
Philippine stocks extended their decline on Thursday as lower economic growth forecasts and rising US Treasury yields kept investors on the sidelines.
The benchmark Philippine Stock Exchange Index (PSEi) fell 1.12 percent, or 65.12 points, to close at 5,730.02, its fifth straight session in negative territory.
This was the lowest finish of the index since Nov. 14, 2025, when it ended at 5,584.35, according to Philstocks Financial Inc.
Philstocks said investors turned cautious after S&P Global Ratings and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) had downgraded their 2026 growth forecasts for the Philippines.
S&P Global Ratings cut its projection to 2.9 percent from 4.1 percent. The ADB, meanwhile, lowered its forecast to 3.3 percent from 3.8 percent.
Luis Limlingan, head of sales at Regina Capital Development Corp., said the revisions — rooted from the weaker-than-expected first half and persistent economic headwinds — added to concerns over the pace of the local market recovery.
Negative spillovers from Wall Street also weighed on the local market as rising US Treasury yields weakened risk appetite.
Trading remained lethargic, with net value turnover reaching only P4.63 billion.
Foreign investors continued to pull funds out of the market, recording net outflows of P749.31 million.
Most sectoral indices closed lower. Conglomerates were the sole gainers after rising by 0.43 percent.
Our future as a nation literally hangs on the education of our children and the education system that molds them, and the way things stand, we’re facing a rather murky future indeed. I wrote last week how the 2025 Program for International Student Assessment no longer puts us at the bottom in education outcomes. But we remain among the bottom one-fifth in the world, and up to three out of four Filipino students remain below minimum proficiency levels. On top of that, the already wide learning gap between rich and poor widened even more. Our education crisis persists.
It became evident early on to the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2) that fixing our flawed education governance is paramount. The heaviest drags on the sector have to do with (1) too centralized, top-down governance; (2) policy directions that change with every new secretary of education (who changes even more frequently than the President); (3) insufficient budget worsened by inefficient and ineffective budget execution; and (4) inadequate appreciation and support for optimizing the role of the private education sector in the overall education system.
I’ve written of the “memocracy” that prevails in the Department of Education (DepEd). Edcom 2 learned that school principals will not (and believe they cannot) decide and take any action, especially on creative, locally adapted learning approaches, methods, and content, unless a memo from above explicitly instructs or permits it. Local government officials with a genuine desire and capacity to improve the learning environment in their schools cannot effect beneficial changes when principals and district supervisors feel constrained by perceived restrictions from above. And yet the Governance of Basic Education Act of 2001 (Republic Act No. 9155) promulgated “shared governance” and “school-based management,” explicitly empowering principals to, among others, “introduce new and innovative modes of instruction to achieve higher learning outcomes.” To his credit, DepEd Secretary Sonny Angara has enabled wider latitude for school heads and their immediate superiors, so they do not feel straightjacketed by imagined restrictions from above. He is also enabling moves toward decentralization and devolution of education governance functions best left at lower levels. This contrasts directly with the atmosphere that appears to have prevailed under his predecessor, known for whimsical directives that trumped time-tested education practice, apart from the suspicious use of unprecedented confidential funds. Still, “memocracy” is an ingrained culture that will not vanish overnight and will take years of sustained and consistent empowering leadership to overcome.
If you ask me to pack my entire life in a duffel bag, I could probably do it in less than 10 minutes—a survival instinct, or, as some would say, a life skill learned by someone who grew up with separated parents.
In the Philippines, where divorce remains illegal and annulment deemed inaccessible, children like me have to take the brunt by living double lives that came with two sets of everything: Two toothbrushes. Two bath towels. Two groceries. Two laundry baskets. Two birthdays. Two Christmases.
While other kids associate packing a duffel bag with going on a holiday, I had associated it with short weekends that left me with only little to no time to relax.
At 7 years old, my life had become an endless series of packing and unpacking toward an unknown destination held by two completely different people who were entrapped by a marriage contract.
For more than a decade, this has been the living conditions of my two brothers and me: ready to leap and always on the go.
It wasn’t until my parents had a huge argument one night that led us to stay at my grandparents’ house for a “short vacation.” What initially began as a two-day stay was extended into a weekly routine that became a routine not by choice, but out of sheer necessity.
I became one of three Filipino youth who grew up without both parents. I was at the most formative stages of my life when I had to grapple with the confusion of why I had to pack my bags every so often to settle in a new household.
In retrospect, it was never really a spoken agreement between my parents on who got who on what days; it was more of a sporadic arrangement of when and where the three children would be spending the weekend.
Still, it was a disorienting experience. Going back and forth between two cities and transferring to three different high schools for my basic education was a lot to take in such a short time.
It was only in 2018 when my parents decidedly separated that a set-up for us siblings to spend the weekends at my dad’s and weekdays at my mom’s was established.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which only made our schedule more unpredictable due to restrictions brought by the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ). The set-up was reversed. My siblings and I would stay at my dad’s place during weekdays and at my mom’s place during weekends.
This also came with the discomfort of having to answer the simplest of questions with difficulty. “Where do you live?” friends and teachers would ask me. I could either tell a long sob story of my life or cut to the chase by saying how my parents are separated. I eventually learned how to answer the question truthfully without batting an eye.
But I no longer wanted to just be the girl who was known for growing up with unfortunate circumstances. I wanted to be someone who people remembered for her fortitude despite the cards she was dealt.
I became a meticulous person who planned out every single detail of my life. I built a feasible routine that worked for my parents but, at the same time, was still convenient enough to get me the results that I wanted.
I would stay at my dad’s place during weekdays for school and at my mom’s place to rest during weekends if I was not busy doing schoolwork.
For the first time in my life, I had a clear vision of where I wanted to go: I was to take the UPCAT, graduate senior high school at the top of my class, study journalism, and permanently stay with my mom for college.
I was adamant about getting what I wanted, and I was not about to let anyone tell me otherwise, or at least that was what I thought.
The day of the UPCAT 2024 results came, and a green congratulations glowed from my laptop screen. I had passed in a UP campus that was kilometers away from my home and that I was waitlisted for my first degree program of choice—all of which were not in my plans.
I was at the crossroads on whether I was to stay in the comfort of my hometown or take a leap of faith by uprooting myself for the nth time to study in an entirely foreign city.
Thankfully, I had a breakthrough: perhaps this was what the long days of packing and unpacking my life in and out of a duffel bag were preparing me for.
Tus, a month later, I did what I did best by once again packing up my entire life and said my goodbyes to everyone I knew. All the routines I built and the comfort I grew accustomed to were soon forgotten and replaced with new ones.
Now I’ve unpacked in my dorm in Baguio City, settled into my priority college program, and am finally living on my own terms with the liberty to decide when and where I get to go home next.
In this third city where I made a new home, I no longer carry the weight of my duffel bag as if it were a burden trying to drag me down. I now understand that it was only training me to be strong and independent enough to live even 255 kilometers away from home.
The artificial intelligence (AI) boom has not yet caused a decline in the Philippines’ service-export revenues or employment, ING Bank N.V. said, arguing that AI is so far changing what gets outsourced rather than reducing demand for outsourced work.
In a report, Deepali Bhargava, head of Asia-Pacific research at ING, said there was evidence that AI was reshaping the composition of service exports and employment in both the Philippines and India, another global outsourcing powerhouse.
Telecom and computer services have continued to expand alongside business services exports, lifting their combined share of the Philippine economy to 7.1 percent by mid-2026 from 6.3 percent before the pandemic, Bhargava said.
