Californian Married to Filipina

These are some things to think about when making the decision to move to and live in the Manila Area from my experiences. First some background: My lovey wife moved to the USA from Manila, her lifetime home, in 1999. She brought with her a degree in business from a major Manila university. We met and married in 2002. I am a construction professional. She always held positions on the Board of Directors of Filipino-staffed corporations in the greater Los Angeles area. In one position she was a Real Estate Broker for a well known Philippine Land Developer. For ten years we traveled to the Metro Manila area and bought some property through this developer. 3 weeks visiting once of twice a year was nice; so in 2012 we decided to divest ourselves of our devalued US properties (we lost money) and move to stay in the Metro Manila area, near the place where we would build our dream home. The property here has appreciated (on paper).  So, that's the basic background.
We leased a new house in the neighborhood of the property we expected to build on. The electrical items we brought from the States needed to be plugged into power converters because the power here is 220V (US is 110V). Many of the wall plugs and lighting fixtures were not working; the plumbing fixtures leaked. No screens on the windows, air conditioning causes the electricity bill to skyrocket. Telecommunications are a joke - after three months we could barely complete a phone call with 3 different providers, extra fees required to call someone with a different provider. Then we learned our electric meter was connected to our next door neighbors house and vice-versa. (remember, these houses are built by a major land developer)  We had to wait at the house for hours, sometimes all day, for a 'technician' to show up to 'fix' things; some days they never kept their appointments at all.
We continued to make payments on our building lot nearby, I studied the means and methods of construction, made contact with architects and engineers and began to design our new home. I networked with others who built recently in the area. The advice is always the same - you gotta be there at all times to supervise or there will be shortcuts taken, inferior work and materials, and just plain no progress; a trustworthy builder with credentials will be pricey.
Construction debris is normally dumped on adjacent undeveloped lots and left there indefinitely.
I'll take a break now - if this sounds like a rant - it is. But it's only the start. We've lived here 14 months now and I want to talk about Visa Status for a US citizen married to a Filipina - later