The streets of Manila
After a tiresome day that was short of sleep, we both had a late lie in today. We had a flight to Cebu tomorrow morning, so we were only staying 1 night in Manila. That meant we had to check out today and we’d decided to explore Manila a bit. It was a bit of a bummer that we had to pay to keep the bags at the hostel, most do it for free. We’d decided to go to a shopping centre quite far away. This would allow us to see the streets of Manila and hopefully have aircon when we got there. That was a gift in and of itself.
The streets we walked were blisteringly hot, even in the morning, and you could feel the air pollution. We had breakfast in the form of sweet potato wedges covered in liquid sugar. Healthy as it gets. What was annoying, however, was that when the sugar solidified, it rendered the toothpicks we had useless. We walked through many neighbourhoods, and in all honesty, they all seemed like slums, really poor. The poverty and homelessness seemed more rampant than other countries we’d been to. After a couple of hours of walking, we finally made it to our shopping centre. The Shangri-La Plaza was our choice, and it didn’t disappoint. We even felt out of place a bit, but it had aircon, so I didn’t care what I looked like.
Time wasting
As per usual in big cities and plenty of time to kill, we decided to watch a movie at the cinema here. We decided to watch Parasite, the Korean movie about different social classes and how they live in different worlds. I confess, I thought it was somewhat of a zombie movie before I went in, due to the name. We really enjoyed it, and I’m not surprised it won at the Oscars. Afterwards, we had food in the food court, I went for orange chicken with rice, it was delicious. To get back to our bags at the hostel, we took a jeepney, similar to tuk tuks in the rest of Asia, only longer. It was so bloody cheap though, I couldn’t believe it, and we had no troubles getting it because everyone speaks English here.
Speaking of tuk tuks, check out this experience in Laos where we travelled with a few others who had bought their own!
Back at the hostel in central Manila, we picked up our bags and get out of there. We used Grab to take a taxi to the airport, though we were in for a long wait. Mat and I arrived at the airport around 9pm, and our flight was at 5am, the joys. There was no way to check-in so early, so we had to wait around for ages until we could go through. In the meantime, I loaded up my videos and manga which kept me company throughout the night. After a long and hot day walking through Manila, I’d seen enough and was ready to get out.
