The Philippines - Day 1

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We left for the airport at 8:00 pm on Friday because our flight left so early in the morning. We got caught in a blizzard on the way, which was our first big snow of the year. On our bus on the way to the airport, Joel called me and said that he had booked his flight for 24 hours after he thought he had. Whoops! Hilarious, though. So he had to make sure he was on our flight from Manila to Puerto Princesa, because that’s the scarier one to do by yourself. Luckily he got to have the extra day by himself in Seoul instead of Manila, since he’s very comfortable in Seoul.



Unfortunately, I couldn’t sleep at the airport so I just explored until the gate opened at 5:00 am. It was disgusting. And then it was a rough flight. To be fair to the people in front of me, I always hate the people who sit in front of me on planes. But these particular people pushed their seats all the way back and kept slamming back into them in an attempt to push them farther back. How rude.



Once we got to Manila, we got a metered taxi (the metered part is important) to get to our hostel. Unfortunately, the hostel had moved locations and nobody seemed to know where it had moved to. Or rather, everybody seemed to have an opinion as to where it had moved to, but nobody really knew. So we drove (and stopped) around some sketchier parts of Manila. I got a bit nervous a couple of places when our driver would get out of the cab to ask someone a question and say “Stay in the cab and make sure your doors are locked.”



We heard a lot of stories about the dangers of being a foreigner in Manila, so that was a bit scary. One of the friends that was with us is half-Filipina and one of her uncles said “I hope you’re travelling with white people because they’ll get robbed first.” We read things like “the Philippines are experiencing some inclement weather. Be sure to watch out for mugging, theft, kidnapping…..” Nothing about the flooding, really. And a couple of times in cabs the driver would get really nervous and yell at us to check that our doors were locked. We got stared at a lot, which at first didn’t seem any different than Korea because we get started at there all the time. But this staring put us a bit more on edge. It was a bit more interested than the stares in Korea.



So, we thought the driver was doing his best he could to find the hostel with the sketchy information he was getting, but when we gave up on the hostel and decided to stay in the closest hotel we could find (Best Western!) the security at the Best Western building actually showed us the way to the hostel. Our driver had talked to the elevator guy of the building and told us it wasn’t the right building!



The hostel was really pretty nice and we got a room upgrade since we had to go through so much trouble to find it. They gave us a map, showed us how to get to Intramuros (the old Spanish fortress, and basically the only thing we were interested in seeing in Manila) and recommended some places for us to eat. They also invited us to the Christmas party they were having that evening. It was easy to forget it was Christmas Eve when we were exploring Manila in shorts.



We ate Wendy’s for lunch. As we were eating it, I realized that people might think we were bad travelers for eating Wendy’s when in an exciting, new country. But, A) I love Wendy’s, and B) I hadn’t seen a Wendy’s in a year. WE were all ridiculously excited for the French fries and Frosties.



When we got to Intramuros, we did a little exploring of the National Cathedral and then were offered a horse ride through Intramuros. As Americans, we’re taught to be very cautious around people offering good deals on tours, but I’ve found for most things that the tour is a good idea. In this case, it was a FANTASTIC idea! Our driver was so informative about the area, which was MUCH bigger than I had anticipated. He got us to the highlights of the neighborhood, told us a lot of information about each part and building, let us get out to take pictures, and was hilarious. (“First we take a picture. Souvenir for the horse.”)



Part of the tour was a park area dedicated to the Filipino national hero, Jose Rizal. Apparently he was “falsely accused” of trying to start a revolution, but according to the information I was given at his museum, it sounds like he was actually trying to start a revolution. Which sounds to me that it wasn’t a false accusation, so much as it was a failed revolution. So, I was confused. But the museum was really cool and there were many translations of the final poem he wrote in prison “Mi Ultimo Adios” (My Final Goodbye). I would have liked to read the whole thing, but we didn’t have the time since we were still on our tour time. They also had the bone from his body that still has the bullet in it that killed him. Which I thought was morbid, but is apparently pretty Catholic.



After a shower and a nap we went to find Christmas Eve dinner and found a Middle Eastern restaurant that was delicious and WAY too fancy for us. Sam and I introduced Brittney to the glories that are hummus and falafel and I got to eat lamb kebab, which is one of my favorite meals. When we got back to our hotel, we realized that the Christmas party they’d told us about actually included dinner. Whoops. We were all extremely full, but I tried to eat a bit because it all looked delicious and was traditional Filipino food. We had stopped in a 7Eleven before we came back to pick up something for the breakfast the next morning and I had looked in the ice cream freezer there. Of the ice cream flavors, there were four fruits that I didn’t recognize and one was ‘buco’. At the Christmas party, we were offered buco pie. So I asked what it was and the older man sitting next to me (English teacher, public school, three years, Iksan, South Korea) told me it was coconut. I learned over the week that it’s actually baby coconut. That pie was delicious! They also had milkfish (traditional Filipino fish and adobo (Filipino national dish).



We sang karaoke (or danced to it, in our case) and talked to our fellow travelers. The other English teacher and a Japanese woman were in the Philippines for dental work (apparently it’s so cheap, it’s worth the flight). There was a French man who didn’t talk much, but took a lot of pictures. This creepy American guy (who kept talking to me as I wrote the first part of this post) and a Canadian guy sat in the corner and didn’t talk to anyone else. And there was an older couple (man was British, woman was Filipina, live somewhere in Eastern Europe) just backpacking around the country. We even got small presents! I got a little bottle of organic hand-sanitizer. It comes in very handy when out on the road. We all went to bed early because, at this point, I had had one hour of sleep in the past 37 hours.

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