manila

i have been back in singapore for two days now and still need to unpack...(what do you mean i'm lazy?) it's raining like hell today, so i thought i'd finally blog today and clean up and unpack and stuff. i've kinda been avoiding posting about the philippines, because i know it will take forever since there is so much stuff to tell you guys....but i'll just start at the beginning:

every international flight going to the philippines arrives at the capitol, manila. the philippines was taken over by the spanish during the 16th century and later on, manila was known as 'the pearl of the orient', the jewel of spain's empire in the pacific. the name used to be 'maynilad', presumed to be from may meaning 'there is' and nilad, a mangrove plant that grew in the pasig river. from the late 19th century onwards, manila was a great trading centre with its multicultural mix providing a good entry point for china and other emerging countries. in 1905 a master plan of the city was made and it was booming with business and entertainment and the streets were lined with grand buildings. during WWII the town was destroyed by the japanese and americans and 150.000 locals were killed. rebuilding was hard and the city never reclaimed its regional importance. manila is now a conglomeration of 17 cities and municipalities.

we arrived in the afternoon somewhere and in the cab to the hotel i was staring out of the window with total amazement. in comparison to singapore, manila seems complete chaos and a lot of buildings and streets look neglected and dirty (except for churches of course, since they steel everyone's money and houses owned by rich foreigners)(and ok, it's not like there's garbage everywhere, but you can see that opposed to singapore, people don't really care what it looks like, as long as it works and fair enough i guess) the electrical chords just hang there above the sidewalks, there are holes in the roads and some buildings have steel pins sticking out of them at the top or side, because there was no money to finish it and they just left it like that. the hardest thing is little kids in dirty clothes walking up to you asking for money, because for me everything there is f*cking cheap and for them, it's really not...





but this picture right here shows the heart of the philippines: the people. even in a big city like manila (there are around 11 million people living there) people are very polite, friendly, nice and happy. being a tourist can be very annoying, because people want to sell you stuff all the time and therefore approach you all the time and sometimes they can get very rude and irritate the shit out of you (don't know if you've ever been to paris...?) if you politely decline they just walk away with a smile and say ok. i also went to find some girlbars with a kelkian forummer, but with it being a mondaynight, they were all closed and we ended up in a gaybar. the staff was really friendly and i had a great time. a little bit too much tequila though, but my hangover the next morning was vanished after some pancakes with maple syrup and some magic tricks our driver (mike manila, there's also a mike puerto) showed us. he has seriously his jeans stuffed with packs of cards, all containing a different magic trick, very funny guy.
we drove to the airport again and took a domestic flight to puerto princesa (by filipinos known as puerto) the capitol of the gorgeous island palawan.

more about that next time...