One Night in Manila

The next time I travel to another "emerging market," I'm going to make certain that my flight lands at a time when the sun is out. It's a little too depressing taking cabs into the major cities of developing countries at night, when you only see the rough outlines of construction cranes and the pathetically blinking neon signs attempting to foster a sense of nightlife. My cab driver was friendly enough--something that took me as a shock after years of brusque exchanges with New York cabbies--and I was more than slightly embarrassed when my mother asked over the phone what age he appeared to be and whether he looked like "a good guy." She undoubtedly assumed he didn't speak English (we had been chatting for about twenty minutes in English) and I had to try and muffle the sounds coming from my phone with deliberate and unnatural laughter.

Haha, so my dad recently learned to text and decided this would be our primary form of communication this summer so that he can be more tech-savvy. I texted him: "Hi Dad, arrived safely. Tired and going to bed now. Will skype you tomorrow." He replies "Cfrm rcpt. All ntd. We love you." Business shorthand + paternal affection = the epitome of my father, haha. Aw, Daddy!

I've always been a very last minute kind of person, a deadline writer who always, somehow, gets away with extreme procrastination. And so, it wasn't until my layover in Detroit that I figured out I was landing in Manila at 10:35 PM local time, making my 2.5 hour trek to Stairway unfeasible tonight. So I booked a 3-star hotel (yes, in the Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, about 16 hours before my scheduled landing...) and am now in the smallest hotel room I have ever stayed in in my entire life. But I'm content enough that it's clean, quiet, and equipped with high speed wireless internet!

I also waited until my layover to google the Filipino currency. The US dollar is the equivalent of about 46 pesos. Although initially excited to spend the next eight weeks dividing prices by 50 (a welcome change to multiplying everything by 2 last summer in England...), I can't help but feel that it's a little bit ludicrous to be tipping someone in the triple digits for bringing my luggage upstairs. I guess that's not as strange as paying 500 JPY for a Toblerone bar in Japan... Judging by the shocked expression, I'm guessing not everyone in the Philippines approximates what they would pay in the US and then multiplies by 50. Will have to adjust to thinking in terms of lower costs of living so as to not paint an image of myself as a lone, small, Asian girl, traveling alone, clueless about the ways of life, and traveling with an abundance of cash. That sounds like a sure way to be kidnapped and/or trafficked into illegitimate human slavery. Nobody show my parents The Taken any time soon, thanks.

I've kept myself awake and necessarily wired on caffeine since I left Durham over 24 hours ago so now I'm exhausted but I've successfully preempted jetlag! I'm going to go to bed now and am going to try to wake up and see some sights in Manila before checking out and trekking to Stairway... more on the complexity and insanity (motorized tricycles....) of my impending trip tomorrow after I get to Puerto Galera.