Philippines Day 1

I’m finally in the Philippines. It wasn’t a smooth travel day and had a few glitches, but I made it in one piece with everything I planned to bring with me, so it’s all good. I arrived in Manila just before midnight on Thursday night, but didn’t arrive to my destination until after 2 AM. Getting through customs was crazy (4 flights came in at the same time, and it was a free for all – no neat orderly lines like we’re use to) Thankfully my cousin was picking me up, but we ended up waiting for each other at different places. It was probably an hour and a half before I realized that there was another waiting area.

I spent my first full day in Manila visiting with my cousins and their families, wandering around a bit, eating a lot and spending a lot of time in traffic. I haven’t seen these cousins for 15 years, so it was great to meet their families and reconnect.

I stayed at my cousin Beauty’s house and around mid-morning we headed to my cousin Abdul’s house on the other side of the city. I was treated like a guest of honour and we arrived to Abdul cooking up a storm.

After lunch, there was a discussion about what to eat for supper (apparently that’s a Filipino thing – hey Nes, that’s where you get it from!) So, we headed to the market and a mall in order to run a few errands and pick up food for supper. From there, we hit the road again to go back to Beauty’s house, where Abdul once again took to the kitchen and made up a supper feast. My cousins live about 7 km apart, but we spent about 4 hours on the road (roundtrip).

Today it’s off to Palawan and the city of Puerto Princesa.

PS. I’ll be posting descriptions and pictures in separate posts. It doesn’t seem to be working smoothly writing these posts on the iPad and frankly it is driving me a bit crazy. I’ll see if doing things separately works any better.

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