After my first day of being a little sour on Manilla, I'm beginning to dig it more.

First off, Taglish is weird. It sounds a little like Taiwanese, but that doesn't make it any more distinguishable to me. It's the odd English words or phrases thrown in that stand out, along with the Spanish sounding ones. I heard today "Bakadali yo kye `wheres the map` kyet bing?" Of course I'm substituting nonsense, and probably even being offensive - but its a very odd language to hear for me. And the food... wow. I've only heard negative things about Philippine cuisine. Everyone who said these negative things are wrong. The only downside I can see is that it is incredibly unhealthy. Of course, that also mean it tastes godamn amazing. In the battle of "Healthy - Delicious - Cheap", they have chosen delicious and cheap. I got a BBQ Chicken and Mushroom pizza slice for 20 pesos. That's like 50 cents. Ya know what one large pizza (slightly bigger than a small in the States) costs in Taipei? 300-400 NT ($10-$13). It's a ripoff for just bread, cheese, and tomatoes. The Philippines are doing food right, minus the heart conditions.

Anyway, rant over. Today I set out to Quezon City to meet with Jesse's coworker, as weird as that sounds. Che met me at an Applebees of Filipino food kind of place. I had something called Sisig, which is diced meat, peppers, and mayo over rice. It's pretty ballin. She answered a lot of stupid foreigner questions I had, and mentioned something she was doing on Saturday. I asked if I could join, which felt kind of rude but honestly I've got nothing to do while I'm here.

We parted ways and I set out to explore Quezon. Per Che`s suggestion I checked out a place called Expo, but it was dead on a Wednesday afternoon. I looked on my map, and saw a big circle road and a park. I decided I'm going there. It took about an hour to walk, but was actually pretty cool. Its the burial place of Mr. Quezon, along with his summer home. A very nice lady gave me a private tour, and loaded me up with maps of things to do in Metro Manila. Which actually, sidebar, people are super polite here, even more than in Taiwan or Japan. They call everyone "sir", say "excuse me" like it's going out of style, are always outgoing, and eager to please. Maybe because I'm the token white guy, but I don't care. The police specifically, have been ridiculously helpful in helping me navigate around. And it just so happened the part of town I was in had something I had wanted for a while. It was the only thing I saw on the internet before coming. The one, the only...





Taco Bell.

You laugh, but i haven't had a good taco since last Christmas. It was actually pretty expensive (200 pesos for my meal - $5 US?). But compared to 5 peso chicken and 20 peso pizza, it felt expensive. Don't care, had tacos. Also, when they called my name for the order they called for a "Bike". Is Mike really that weird?

Back at the hostel now, I have again, no idea what to do tomorrow. I'm feeling more optimistic about my time here though. After all the walking I did today, I need a beer. Fortunately San Miguel is so cheap, they might as well be giving it away.