My name is Gina. I´m a staying at home mom with 3 kids, 6 cows, 25 chicken, one big ass dog and a turkey. But it hasn’t always been that way..

I was born in the squatters area, by the banks of the Pasig River in Manila, Philippines. Not a very glamorous start of life for any little girl. As you might figure my parents were very poor and I guess my future didnt look all that bright at that moment. Most of the kids born there dont get any chances of a better life, but I was quite lucky! When I was just a couple of months old, two lovely elderly sisters chose to adopt me, and they brought me to a small barrio (a simple village in the mountains) called San Juan East, Aringay in the northern part of the Philippines. This was the place where I grew up, and spend the first 20 years of my life

How music changed my life..

During my upbringing, music was always a very big part of my life. I cant remember when I started to sing, but I guess it was at the age of just three or four, when I discovered the true joy of singing. By the age of eight I entered my first talent compitition (we had a lot of those back in the Philippines) and if I remember it right, the song I sang was “You needed me” from Anne Murray. Later on I entered a lot more of these contests, and I´m proud to say.. I won almost every time, and I got my self a lot of champion titles. I guess that was the time when the music really started to trigger me.

Traveling and working abroad as a singer

By the time I was 20, I was already a single mom. I´ll tell you a lot more about this later.. To make a long story short, I needed to find a way to finance the upbringing of my newborn son, and the only solution I could think of, was to sing my way out of the troubles. This led to 15 hectic years, traveling around the world, singing in hotels, bars and joints in a lot of different places, reaching from the North pole and back to the South pacific. During those years I visited and lived in countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Bali, Malaysia, Maldives, Denmark, Norway and even as far away as Greenland. On this blog I´ll try to make a new post every day, sharing my experiences from my travels, writing about work, music and my thoughts about life in general.