See ya, Manila, Hello Malaysia

This country is not made for people over 5-foot-6. We're on our bus to Clark airport and I just went used the restroom on the bus and was too tall to stand up properly. On street posters for available jobs, it's common to see requirements of "MUST BE 5-FOOT-4 OR TALLER."

I can count on one hand the Filipinos I've been shorter than, not bad being taller than 99-percent of people you see. The only taller person than me is Logan (he's like 6'2, which is like 8'2 for Filipino standards) so I guess I'll just have to kill him.

Anyways, we got into Manila yesterday at about 11am. It's 24 hours later, we're on our bus to Angeles two hours north (Clark is in the former US military hub where our Air Asia flight leaves from) and the escape out of Manila couldn't come soon enough.

Definitely not willing to write the city off as a whole, especially considering how many pieces to the city's puzzle there are (something like 18 million in the greater metro area). Everyone I talked to who was pro-Manila said you needed weeks not days (and definitely not hours) to get to know it. So for now, I'll just write off the area we stayed (Malate), since it was on the whole dirty and touristy and funky. Not headed back there anytime soon.

We did get to see one nice section of the city yesterday for lunch, a totally overblown, ritzy mall complex called Greenbelt (like karate that is essentially The Bridge on crack. It's way bigger and way more confusing. But there were swanky, well-dressed people from all over (the most diversity I've seen in the Philippines), so it was a change.

Before lunch, we hit up this tourist spot called Fort Santiago, where the Spanish held down a military base for a quick second (400 years or so). It was also the spot where a Filipino intellectual/revolutionary turned martyr named Rizal was jailed and executed in 1896 before independence. Pretty touristy, minus the tourists (definitely off-season) it had a lot of cool writings from Rizal before he was to be executed, including his "Adios Ultimo" that he smuggled through a lamp to his family the day before he died.

Though there is a driving range literally right next door to his former cell that kinda kills the moment.

Other highlights included the other two western tourists we saw (a French and Lebanese flight attendants from Emirate Airlines, two friendly gay guys I talked with for a bit who took a lot of very dramatically posed pictures around the Fort, and who waved to us when we saw them at the airport later that day. The Lebanese guy was wearing an awesome cowboy hat, too).

Also, we took a bunch of pictures with Filson, me and Logan's new travel buddy. We met him last week at the supermarket. Well, technically we bought him at the supermarket, since he is just a 10 liter jug of water that we named, drew a face into and have been carrying around ever since (Filson is the name that Chris and Logan came up with for him, think Wilson from "Castaway" only Filipino).

He's been everywhere with us the last five days (he's even survived being left at a tiny village in Danao and the Bus Station about 30 minutes ago, got through Dumaguete Airport security with 4 liters of water and has endured frequent torture from Logan). Logan hates him at this point. I love him more every day (there will be plenty more of his story soon enough).

Anyways, yesterday was pretty low-key, we hung out at the Fort and the Greenbelt mall area until 3pm, when we had to go to the airport to drop off Dean, Chris and Patrick for their flight to Hawaii. After that, we got a ride to our hostel, checked in and took in all Malate had to offer (again, not much).

At night we settled in at the Sharwma Snack Shop because it was super big and clean with aircon and free wifi. Good place to get away from the grind of grimy, musty Malate. I stayed there for five hours until 3am, since it was far and away the nicest place we went in Malate.

Then we woke up early to watch the first half of the Lakers-Celtics final (dreadful), jumped in a taxi and shipped over to the bus station for our 1130am bus.

Now we're on to the next one (that Jay-Z song is locked in my head right now) 2 hours from airport before a 4pm flight from Clark to Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia (everyone just calls it KK). We just met a girl from the UK (don't remember her name, super hard to pronounce) that's on our flight, whose been traveling for like a year. She's also staying in the same Step-In Lodge as us in KK (and stayed at the same place I did in Boracay, as well). Young people traveling know most of the same, good spots. Good things.

Anyways, my four hours of sleep is catching up with me (Logan's head is already bobbing asleep next to me) so I'll check back in a little while and hopefully throw down some words on Dumaguete and Boracay.