Manila - Quiapo

Nao e a palavra filipina por "quiabo" como eu imaginava, mas talvez voce pode comprar arroz doce aqui, pois vendem de tudo nesta feira.

  
Quiapo is one of Manila's many street market areas. Cheap clothes, pirated DVDs, black market pharmaceuticals, watches, handtools, knives, toys, fruit, handmade baskets, anything you can think of.

  
Fresh mango may be the most popular fruit here.

  
Bob took a couple of these shots with my camera.

  
This guy is selling wire hotpot holders.

  
The keyring guys were taking a little break.

  

Crispy Chicken Ass

  

"Bunda crocante de galinha"
Mehmet had to order it, just so we could see it.

  

It's the part of the chicken where the long tail feathers grow. I nibbled just a little and yes!-- tastes like chicken! But we just couldn't get over the unappetizing quality of the word "ass," so it was a waste in the end.

  

Grilled tilapia for only about a dollar. 美味しいよね！

Boracay Part 2

Here are a few more photos from Boracay. I don't think they require any special explanation.

  
Me lembra das praias nordestinas no Brasil.

  

  

Manila - Malate

Malate is a poor neighborhood near the bay. It is perhaps the closest thing Manila has to Bangkok's Khao San Road, a quasi-backpacker's haven with a range of hotels, restaurants, and discos, but without so many tourists. Malate is a slice of real life. Small children selling peanuts or roses or just begging for money. Waiters working 7 days a week for $200 a month. The guy with the stack of cheap guitars on his shoulder. The rich cruising down the street in big black cheuffeured SUVs. Groups of young Filipinos out for dancing. Japanese or Korean guys with their young Filipina escorts. Trash. Pedicabs and motorcycles. Guys hawking Viagara or cheap old coins. There is a Starbucks in the middle of it all where you can pay 10 times more for a cup of coffee than at the Filipino coffeehouses down the street. There is an enormous clean Western-style shopping mall a couple of blocks away with all the western chains. Across the street it is all run-down storefronts of money-changers and lotto booths. Down on Remedios and Atlantico streets there are nice restaurants with great live bands inside, while outside there are cheap plastic tables and chairs with very cheap food and drinks.  
I don't know who the statue is, but it sits in a park at the entrance to Malate. We saw a show of a famous Filipino ska band in this park one evening.
  
There is an improbable number of these stainless steel bus things. They are a form of privately-owned public transport.
  
Pedicabs abound as well, if you don't have far to go.
  

  
The church in Malate. 80% of the population in the Philippines is Catholic.

  
Late afternoon at a fruit stand on a sidestreet in Malate.

  
Need a new hairstyle?

Boracay

Started off my first Philippines experience with 3 days on the island of Boracay. The Philippines has 7,101 islands, and Boracay is one of the smaller ones, with no airport of its own. From Manila we took an hour flight to a neighboring island, a 2 hour van ride to the other side of the island, and then a half hour boat ride to reach Boracay. These are the only two good pictures that are accessible at the moment, but I may add more later.

Comecei minha primeira experiencia nas Filipinas com 3 dias na ilha de Boracay, uma pequena das 7.101 ilhas das Filipinas.
  
Boracay is perhaps the Philippines' most famous touristy resort island, with one whole side of the island lined with hotels, restaurants, and discos. There are tons of foreigners there, lots of people hawking diving excursions, surfing and parasailing and jet-ski rentals, and there are loads of Muslim vendors selling fake watches and sunglasses.
  
It's a beautiful place with fine sand and very clear water, but a bit overpriced by Pinoy standards and it was a bit too tourist-heavy for my tastes. I had a good time there but was glad to get back to Manila.

Random pictures

A little froggee pointed out that I was overlooking the obvious, normal way of posting pictures here. Silly me. Thanks Moiji!

Here are a few random pictures from the rest of my Thailand-Cambodia trip. Click to enlarge them.


Amok, the national dish of Cambodia, is a mildly spicy coconut milk curry dish, usually with chicken, fish, or shrimp. Very tasty!


Images of the king and queen of Thailand can be found everywhere in Bangkok and throughout the country. King Bhumibol (poom-i-pon) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is Thailand's most famous jazz composer and performer. He has played with many famous musicians, including Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, Lionel Hampton and Jack Teagarden. He also holds an honorary jazz degree from my university, UNT, among others. He's actually like 78 or 80 years old now, but all the images you see of him are of his younger years, like this one.


I don't know if it's a sacrilege to post the king's picture right next to that of a toilet, but there is no doubt that he has often used a toilet much like this one. Even less convenient to foreigners than the Japanese squat toilet, the Thai toilet is sometimes raised off the ground, with little wings to balance on, and it has no flush mechanism-- Usually you find a bucket of water nearby with a bowl floating in it, and you do the flushing manually.


A snack cart in Bangkok. Deep fried crickets, grasshoppers, scorpions, and grubs. I heard of one place in Cambodia where the specialty is big deep-fried spiders. But no-- I did not, would not, could not, and will not try any of them.


The road between the Thai-Cambodian border town of Poipet and the Angkor Wat anchor city of Siem Reap is, though only about 100 kilometers, a very dusty 3-hour rollercoaster ride on a heavily potholed red dirt road with a moderate traffic of jerry-rigged tractors, pickups piled improbably high with people or goods or both, motorcycles carrying anything from a trio of dead pigs to a stack of bicycles to a quartet of tiny Cambodian grannies, and also a number of other difficult-to-describe improvised vehicles. To either side of the road, the rice farms you see are heavily land-mined, so you occasionally see a de-mining team at work, as there are estimated to be as many as 2 million unexploded land mines left in Cambodia, planted as recently as 1998. (People who are missing a limb are a common sight throughout Cambodia.) The easiest way across this stretch is to find a couple of fellow travelers and negotiate a price with a share taxi, i.e. some random guy with a dirty mid-90s model Toyota Camry. The picture above could have been taken in front of any number of stilted shacks along that road, and when your driver gets low on gasoline, he'll probably stop at one of these.

Wat Arun

Walking to the west from Wat Pho down what appears to be a dead-end street lined with hawkers and food stands over a tiny footbridge and through a small open-air market building, one comes to the edge of the Mae Nam Chao Phraya, the big river that runs through Bangkok. Across the river is another small but famous wat, Wat Arun, named after the Indian god of dawn, Aruna. A small rickety ferry will take you across for 3 baht, about a dime.

 
Wat Arun, taken from a ferry like the one in the foreground. From here the structure looks like granite, but when you get close to it you see that it is covered in intricate mosaic tiles.

 
Lonely Planet says "The 82m prang (Khmer-style tower) was constructed during the first half of the 19th century by Rama II and Rama III. The unique design elongates the typical Khmer prang into a distinctly Thai shape. Its brick core has a plaster covering embedded with a mosaic of broken, multihued Chinese porcelain, a common temple ornamentation in the early Ratanokosin period, when Chinese ships calling at Bangkok used tonnes of old porcelain as ballast."

 
The stairs are very steep. The upper parts are closed to the public.

 
Back down on the river, the waters are crowded with small boats, mostly private tourist boats like this one, that are chartered by tourists for more lengthy exploration of Bangkok's extensive river and canal system.

 
As we floated by this one, I notice that it was not a charter boat but rather a floating pub.

Wat Pho

 
Across the street to the south of the Grand Palace complex is another very famous maze of chedi, shrines, and statues. This wat is known as Wat Pho.

 
The most famous monument here is this enormous golden Reclining Buddha.

 
This is the back of him, his head resting on two gold cushions. Check out his corkscrew perm!
 
All along the backside of this Buddha is a row of pots, I'd guess about 200 of them. The faithful walk along the row and drop a coin in each one. You can hear the plink-pli-plink-p-pli-plink-plink well before you come around this corner.

 
Some more 20-foot-high guard figures. Nice top hats, guys!

 
There are hundreds of Buddha figures all around Wat Pho, both inside and outside. This is the largest indoor shrine.

 
The number of colorful chedi here was striking.

Wat Phra Kaew

 
Situated next to the Grand Palace about 15 minutes' walk to the southwest from Khao San Road, Wat Phra Kaew is the most famous temples in Thailand. The weather was cloudy and hazy today, so these pictures are even more insufficient that they normally would be to convey the enormity of this place and the brilliant designs and colors this place has to offer.

 
The grounds are really a maze of statues, chedi (stupas), small shrines, and five larger structures, all surrounded by an ornate outer wall. The Upper Terrace holds four of the large structures, as the brochure says "a reliquary in the shape of a golden chedi; the Mondop, a repository for Buddhist sacred scriptures inscribed on palm leaves, contained within a beautiful mother-of-pearl inlaid cabinet; a miniature Angkor Wat crafted by the order of King Mongkut (Rama IV); and the Royal Pantheon in which statues of past sovereigns of the ruling Chakri dynasty are enshrined."

 
Offerings for sale. For a nominal fee, you can dip one of these lotus blossoms in some water and bonk yourself on the head.

 
There are a lot of these huge guards, of varying color, two at each gate. I come up to about mid-calf on this guy, I guess.

 
The two larger structures are the Phra Mondop (left) and the Royal Pantheon.

 
The Royal Pantheon is surrounded by all kinds of statues of mythological beings.

 
These guys are holding up a golded chedi. Lots of tourists were taking pictures of each others in front of this doing the same pose as the statues.

 
The entire inside surface of the outer wall of the complex is covered in one big mural telling the Thai version of the life of Buddha.

 
These vulture-like statues surround the fifth and most important structure on the site, the Royal Monastery of the Emerald Buddha. You are not allowed to take pictures inside, but I snapped the following photo through the crowded doorway.

 

The brochure says of this site, "North of the royal residence and linked by a connecting gateway lies the Royal Monastery of the Emerald Buddha, one of the most venerated sites in Thailand where people convene to pay respect to the Lord Buddha and His Teachings. The Emerald Buddha is enshrined on a golden traditional Thai-style throne made of gilded-carved wood, known as a Busabok, in the ordination hall of the royal monastery. The sacred image is clad with one of the three seasonal costumes (summer, rainy season, and winter). The costumes are changed three times a year in a ceremony presided over by His Majesty the King.

The Emerald Buddha is in fact carved from a block of green jade and was first discovered in 1434 in a stupa in Chiang Rai (far north Thailand). At that time the image was covered with plaster and was thought to be an ordinary Buddha image. Later, however, the abbot who had found the image noticed that the plaster on the nose had flaked off, revealing the green stone. The abbot initially thought that the stone was emerald and thus the legend of the Emerald Buddha image began.

The image was later taken to Lampang where it remained until King Tilok of Lannathai moved it to Chiang Mai, his capital, where it was fittingly enshrined. In 1552 an interruption occurred in the Lannathai line of succession. King Chaichettha of Luang Prabang, who was the son of a Chiang Mai princess and a Laotian king was invited to fill the gap. However, after a relatively short reign he returned to Laos to succeed his father's throne, taking with him the Emerald Buddha. The image remained in Laos for 226 years until 1779 when a Thai army under the command of Chao Phraya Chakri, who later became King Rama I, captured Vientiane, the Laotian capital, and the image was brought back to Thailand. When King Rama I had built the city of Bangkok, the Emerald Buddha was housed within the Royal Monastery with due pomp and ceremony.

 

Outside the front of the monastery there were a lot of offerings for sale, candles and incense being burned, and people praying.

Wat Phra Kaew is on the same grounds as the Grand Palace, which also has a great deal of interesting Thai architecture, but as most of it was under roof restoration, I didn't get any outstanding pictures there.

Thanon Khao San

 
Street vendors setting up their carts for the morning.

 
A row of tuk-tuks lining up to hassle tourist for the day. They taxi people around town at rip-off prices, unless you speak Thai, of course. They are also quite apt to change your destination midway because they would rather drop you off at a jeweler's shop or a tailor who will pay them a commision for delivering tourists there.

 
A noodle vendor. Her spring rolls were delicious.