Back to the Philippines

For the last 3 days we have been busy meeting people. Last Saturday, we went to Glorietta to pickup our tickets for Cinderella. First, we had breakfast at Binalot in the nearby building. Binalot serves Filipino rice topping meals that are wrapped in banana leaves. The prices are inexpensive. A Tocino with rice, egg, tomatoes, and salted egg only costs around one Euro (68 pesos). After that, we took a Jeepney right at Ayala Avenue. I wanted MrC to try it for the first time. I was a bit excited and nervous at the same time. We prepared our money beforehand and MrC was in charge of counting the money and I was of course the “spokeswoman”. We got into a full jeep and the whole time we were sweating beads! As expected I made a mistake of stopping the Jeep on the wrong location and I heard some people that followed us out were also going to Glorietta only to find out that we were just at the corner of Makati Avenue and Ayala. We had to go down to extremely high stairs in order to cross and then to climb on the other side. I wasn’t prepared physically for this I thought I was going to faint, trying to catch my breath. It was good I had bottled water in my bag Glorietta is still the huge mall that I remembered it to be and this mall is adjacent to Landmark, Greenbelt and Park Square. MrC was looking for broadband wireless internet since day one but we have not been able to find a good one yet. I will make a separate article about this. Anyway, we also thought of going to the movie theater but we didn’t find anything we like to watch. Then we decided to go back to our apartment. I waved for a taxi at the Pasay road side of Park square. Anyways, the taxi driver admitted he doesn’t know the area and he needs help and I also noticed that the car was quite rundown and does not have airconditioning. The driver kept on apologizing and somehow feeling sorry for himself that he is very new to this. We noticed that he was also quite inexperienced in driving. I am so glad I still remembered Makati streets even though my memory is from 1996. Nevertheless we did not get lost and the fee was around 60 pesos. Later on that night, we took the taxi again and went to the Harborview Restaurant near Manila Bay. We weren’t sure where it was but everything went out well since the taxi driver was okay compared to the last one. One thing we learned by now is to always keep small bills for taxi. The restaurant was next to the Ocean Park and near the US Embassy. It’s our first time to meet the Dutch IT businessman who gave us a very interesting story of his life in the Philippines and the business. I was the one who found him in the Internet from a list of software companies. It is also worth mentioning that he is married to a Filipina and several topics about this are worthy of a series of blog posts. He generously offered free use of his office during the week because MrC needed to work! At this point, the only decent internet connection we can get is through Starbucks via Globe Wiz.
It’s funny to admit but up to now we have been blessed by people with free dinners, lunches and lodging. This is definitely great help for us as in the next few days, our funds would be mostly eaten by transportation. And yes, I have not even started with my shopping yet :P.

• My changing point of view
• Hello Philippines
• August 2008 Visit to the Philippines