suffocated

Van Manila-Cebu-Bohol-March2009

Well, a lot of things happened during the past days! We met so many friends, that we haven't seen for such a long time, it was lovely to meet them again: Roderick, Jimmy & Nils, Manfred & Rhem, Jerremy, Clarence, ... and fortunately not everybody could come and visit us (for several reasons: out of town, or very busy with work), otherwise we would have had a fulltime job in just chatting with all our visitors!

Whenever he could, Jimmy would come (he has a car + driver) and bring us whereever we wanted to go. So nice of him, he's such a charming guy. One night, we drove through very dark parts of Manila, and the view was incredible: busses dumping huge thick clouds of burned oil in the air, suffocating every single person in the area, too bad it was too dark to take pictures, it really looked like hell! Of course the traffic was the only negative experience, it is plain horrible, overcrowded everywhere, and impossible to be somewherein time. Jimmy wanted to bring us to Intramuros, but that part we have seen extensively already, and it was quite far away (traffic!) so we opted for a stroll in Quezon and a stroll in Makati (HL's must-be-HardRock!), and a nightwalk in Malate, that part was supposed to be the gay area once altough nothing seemed to be left of it.

I invited them for a dinner in an excellent restaurant in Makati (Sentro, near the open-air-church, first floor of the restaurant-walk), lovely food and excellent service, absolutely worth going there, but be in time because later in the evening it was packed.

We did our walks, as usual, e.g. to the MegaMall, only a stroll away from the hotel, quite a nice mall, with a fascinating huge shop "Kultura Philippina", all local products from the Philippines, it's like a museum of modern commercial handicrafts :-) And in one of the small shops, I got a baseballcap embroided with my favorite 2QT2BSTR8 hahaha!

I can imagine that 12 million people find it necessary to live packed together in greater Manila, but I'm not one of them. The city does not attract me. I'm very thrilled to find out if the more rural areas (like Bohol, our next destination after Cebu) will please me more!

Now we are in the airport of Manila, ready to board the plane to Cebu!

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

The flight to Cebu went smoothly, and the airport transfer was perfect; on our way I spotted a guy in a jeepney who was counting his money, holding it in a most intriguing way between his fingers! I couldn't resist taking a picture :-).

I had quite good memories of the Mariott hotel in Cebu, but now that we're here, I'm a bit disappointed. We booked a business suite, but it's all rather crampy, and so is the hospitality of the hotel: we asked for ashtrays in the room, and we only got one; we asked for a DVD-player, and we got the message that we have to pay 1.000 pesos per day to use one. I don't think we'll return often to this hotel. Instead we headed to the nearby shopping mall and bought a brandnew LG dvd-player for 2.000 pesos (30 euro), and that one will serve us both in Cebu and in Bohol.

While we were shopping for the DVD-player, we admired a boy who was testing a karaoke machine, by singing his lungs out in the middle of the mall! The other customers passing by were either laughing at his emotions, or very compassionate with him! See the pix :-)

I tried to pay the DVD-player with my mastercard, but the card got refused. In a former shop, they tried over & over again to get a payment through, and maybe that disturbed the MC-system, and now MC might think that the card got stolen or something. I'll have to check on internet tomorrow what happened with that card! We need it to be fully functional :-$

We have found some coffee-shops that offer free internet for their customers, and that's where we'll park tomorrow! While I check the office and post this updated blog, HL will search the mall for a genuine internetcafé - if that still exists in these times!

huggies,

PB

.