Manila, Philippines - September 19, 2001
Just finished a few days in Baguio among the rain for several days. Very nice little town, there is some live music, fairly interesting overall. I didn't get a chance to see much though as it rained the entire time. Now I find myself back in Manila once again.
Observation of Baguio! Seems like a college town. I spent several nights listening to live music. I was hoping I'd meet other travelers up here, but I'm pretty much the only one I see. I guess the terrorists attacks in New York, and past kidnappings in the past in Philippines, has drastically dropped off the number of visitors. It seems safe here though of course. I did have one young guy follow me when I got off my bus. It was raining really hard, so I was waiting with cover, and he kept looking at me the entire time. Finally, I just sprinted out into the dark night while getting wet. I was going at an extremely fast pace for about 50 years, when suddenly, I noticed a restaurant, and quickly glanced behind me (out of habit in some of these countries), and there was the guy again! He was keeping right at my same pace running down the street without me knowing. When our eyes met, he said 'there is a hotel this way!' and I shook my head, and ducked into a small restaurant. I don't know what he wanted, but it kind of surprised me. After my meal, I looked for him before going to look for hotels, but he wasn't anywhere around. Maybe he was just curious about me, not so sure? But kind of strange behavoir to be following me around like that.. he kind of struck me as a thief though. Anyhow, its my one interesting Baguio experience. The rest of the time, i caught up on websites and emails and just wasted time waiting for the rain to stop. Eventually I quit and went back down to Manila.
So now I'm staying in Makati in Manila. I found a cheap little place near lots of live venue places. I met a couple other travelers in my hostel, and we went for some live music and such. Lots of good places around here in Manila. But actually, you really have to watch out everytime you go out on the streets. There are so many guys just hanging around wanting something from someone. I must have been approached dozens of times. Usually they just want to exchange money with you at unfavorable rates. But occasionally you get your occassional pimp or drug pusher as well. Lots of street kids who will follow you for blocks with hands out. All kinds are here, and they all seem to want something. If I'm with friends its not as bad, they still do it, but its not AS bad. But when I'm by myself, they are more persistant and more annoying in their approaches. Also, throughout the streets there are quite a few drug and aids clinics, so it kind of gives you a sense of the place. Its really unfortunate too, because once you get into a bar or restaurant, they are really quite nice and enjoyable.
I've been extremely amazed at the ability of Filipinos to play some incredible live music too! I've been amazed about that throughout my time here in Manila and Baguio. Seems like they can and do play just about anything. The other great thing about the Philippines is that they speak nearly fluent English!! Its really nice to have normal conversations with people without any kind of language barrier or language difficulties. It seems as if Tagalog and English are pretty much equally used, as the newspapers and most of the signs are purely in English. But when you watch tv or the radio, you'll hear the Tagalog once again. People seem to switch back and forth quite a bit as well, and sometimes when you are hearing Tagalog, they will throw out fluent English sentences in the middle of what they are saying. Also, whenever they use numbers, they say it in English, rather than Tagalog. Supposedly this comes from years of school where everything is spoken in English, so I am guessing that maybe from math classes and such, they just get use to speaking number in English. Although a few times I hear them use numbers in Tagalog, which is actually in Spanish! It gets confusing! A small portion of Tagalog words actually are Spanish including numbers, months, days of the week, country names like "Estados Unidos" - spanish for United States. Overall pretty interesting usage of languages in the Philippines.
So far so good in the Philippines. I just bought a ticket to go south to Puerto Galera, so next journal entry will be from there!
Continued journal entries in the Philippines:
September 22, 2001
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