David Mashael

Just read on BBC that Philipinnes is ranked 5th in Worlds Most Friendliest Countries. Despite the many day to day gripes, do we agree in general that this is a fair assessment?
BBC - Travel - Living in… the world’s most welcoming countries

Gazza-d

Can't see it here in the UK as it's an international site and is not supported via the license payers.

mrken30

A lot depends on locality. In the UK there are some very friendly places and some quite inhospitable places. Cities tend to be less friendly, but not always so.

Stokkevn

I think it depends on where you live. Manila and Cebu ( neither have I lived in for long periods ) are not what I would consider friendly places, unless of course you are handing over money for one reason or another and that includes family members.

But having said that they make up for it in in spades in the provinces, where considering the greater disparity between my income and theirs in most part I do not feel now like an expected cash cow. I play with the kids and dogs, wind the adults up as they do me when they get a chance . It helps that I do not pull rank, when I first came here a lot of the locals were frightened to talk to me because I was a company director from the UK. Now they realise that I am just like them, a person but with a weird sense of humor and who has annoyed the local mayor who thinks I have undermined his authority over the village.

My conclusion is that the people are very friendly but the ones who belong to the "Don't you know who I am" brigade are not as they feel threatened by overseas experience/knowledge.

quiltman

Gazza, go get the Chrome/firefox extension HOXX which is a proxy VPN. It only works from within the browser so is no good for downloading torrents etc in UK - for that you need a "proper" VPN. It works well and I can watch iplayer quite happily here , plus get BBC.co.uk rather than BBC.com . If you check this post you should see that I am supposedly in the Netherlands, not where I really am!

Allan R

When you move to a new area in the Philippines, they really do seem very friendly. However this comes to an end when they have exhausted their English skills with questions like where are you from?, how old are you?, my aunt is married to an English guy his name is Smith do you know him?
They then become as bored as we do with these conversations and you just get a nod if they see you in the street.