Manila Vanilla Sunday, with a generous side of mango...

Ah, feels good to be back in my sweet home Singapore. So last weekend was the extremely rushed adventure to Manila, with no leftover time to visit the rest of the Philippines. I think I got the gist though, in essence it's a bunch of American-accented, very tanned, and devoutly Catholic Asians living over a large group of islands with lots of jungle, beaches, and volcanoes, riding around on jeepneys and eating lots of almost Mexican-like seafood and fruit. Haha OK so I'm really oversimplifying the Philippines here, but what else can I do in just 2 days?

I was afraid at first that there would not be enough to do in Manila to entertain me for the weekend, but that turned out to be wrong. First of all, it takes a while to get anywhere in the Philippines, I've realized. After a 3.5 hour trip over from Singapore, it takes another 2 hours to actually get into Manila from the far-flung Clark airport (an airport which apparently was once a US airforce base). And that day I had just been up all night the night before celebrating at a friend's birthday party (it was a mostly Indian crowd, and Indians, I've learned, know how to party... as well as being notorious for showing up late to anything, including their own birthday party, which I was advised to come at least an hour late for myself haha) and packing at the last minute for the trip. So by the time I got to the hotel in Manila, I crashed. Getting up again in the evening, we walked around the Makati City area, where we saw fancy new malls (wow, just like Singapore...) and the red-light district. Also tried Filipino food, which tastes a lot like Mexican food, with more seafood. Some notable examples are stuffed squid, fried pig's trotter, milkfish, fried baby crabs, etc. Next day, Sunday, was extensive touring, which consisted mostly of many churches, so hopefully Jesus will forgive me for missing Easter Mass last week by making up for it now by visiting Manila Cathedral and others all at once. We also went to Imelda Marcos' infamous Coconut Palace, a palace made entirely from local resources, notably coconut wood/shells/bark that was constructed to host the Pope when he came to visit, who actually refused to even visit the Coconut Palace in protest of Marcos' lavish, ill-placed spending that could have been put to much better use in this poor country. I didn't get to have any coconuts myself, though, like I did at practically every meal in Thailand, but I did have mango at pretty much every meal this time. Know those bags of dried mango from Costco that you always get that say they're from the Philippines? Well, now I know why they all come from here.

Ok now I'm trying to Skype and blog at the same time, when I really should be studying... the whole reason why I came back so early from my vacation. Let me just upload some pictures of Manila, and you can ogle all you want.

One of those colorful jeepneys, basically a homemade elongated jeep vehicle meant to carry about 20 people... a local form of public transport


Inside a church


Statues of Moses and a Chinese stone lion together... what are the odds?


St. Augustin chapel


Manila Cathedral


The national park and grandstand, where we saw some political rally with a crowd of red-shirted people, which reminded me of the pictures I saw of Bangkok with the red-shirt protests going on there now... thankfully it was not that kind. They were some pro-Imelda Marcos group I think, which I thought was pretty strange.


Viva Filipinos! I was actually mistaken for being Filipino myself a few times... That stretch of road behind me is actually where we had to sprint a long block to catch our city-tour van, which passed its regular stop without stopping for us, at least I caught up to the damn thing when it stopped at a light


Another old church...


The coconut palace tour-guide was off-duty, so we were given a tour of the Coconut Palace by the cleaning maid (who apparently also had a degree in finance?!), and she was actually really good, but she did cut me out of this picture with the coconut chandelier...


Leon and I sitting on our coconut thrones... notice the architectural obsession with hexagons, that's apparently the shape a coconut tree trunk is...


Coconut lamp


Coconut palm frond-shaped lights


Outside Coconut Palace


Mangoes everywhere...