Manila Philippines...rough little stint...

Arrived in the Philippines from Japan which was a nice little 4 hour or so long flight. Slept most of the way, which was great! When we got off the plane, we collected all our bags and all our gear (about 50 pieces in total) and this little midget of a van pulled up. It was funny to see this van completely lowered to the ground from the weight of everything inside. The next day morning we came in early to the venue to check everything out. We played at the World Trade Center building in Manila which was just a huge square room, kind of like Walmart but with nothing in it!! Haha Had some serious power issues going on there. Their power is 240v and our gear runs at 120v. Problem being that the step down transformer that converts 240v to 120v was not functioning properly. We were getting extreme voltage through the ground leg of their power which would have blown up our gear at 70v through ground. Had to help them sort this out because after 4 hours of waiting for any type of power before I could plug anything it...enough was enough. Found the issue on the 240v distro box...i had them move the step down transformer connection to a different source and it dropped the volts on ground to 20v. Better, but not acceptable for our gear! They called in an electrician to re-wire their cables at the generator and this brought the volts on ground to under 1v which was good enough to do the show! Once I finally got power for everything, all my gear was working perfectly fine, except for the rental 4x12 Marshall cabinets. We had ordered 9 4x12 cabs and only 2 of them worked. I had to re-wire 2 cabinets just to have a rig that worked. Not sure how rental companies always get away with sending out crap that doesn't work, but it happens all the time! There was one more major problem as well before we could start sound check... Every single XLR (microphone) cable for every cabinet, D.I. Box and mic had some sort of issue with them. Some crackled, some popped, some just didn't even work at all!! We went through over 20 different XLR cables before we got everything working...just for Stef's guitar rig. After all of this, I was so frustrated and grumpy about all I had to fix just to do the show, but that is just part of my job sometimes!! The show ended up being great, so all the hard work definitely paid off in the end!