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.