Durable permission, conditional dependability.

I went into the Philippines expecting to write the easy one. After Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, here was the country everyone told me was the soft landing: English everywhere, a retirement visa that lasts forever, prices that make Ontario look insane, and a culture that treats older foreigners with something close to reverence. On paper it is the friendliest door in Asia. My job in this series is to try to walk through the friendly doors and find the wall on the other side, so I spent the research trying to break the case rather than sell it.