Manila 3: Intracurricular

Day three in Manila, and we were already feeling a little burned out.  Perhaps we would follow everyone’s advice and move up our plans to leave the city after all.  First, however, we had spent few of our tourism dollars doing touristy things, so we felt we had some obligation to see the city’s proper sights.  Today we would wake up early and go right for the most obvious tourist district, Intramuros.  Wikitravel and Lonely Planet had a wealth of information about the walled-off old city, all of it tantalizingly historical.  Perhaps we would find a quiet place around the Plaza del Roma to draw pictures of one of the famous Baroque churches?  Alex had asked us to meet us at his lab in Cubao at 6:00 for some dinner, so we had the whole day to spend planning our next move and exploring the corners of Intramuros.  Also, today we would eschew taxis and finally take local transportation like local people, pinkie-swear.

When we left Alex’s home in Marikina, we began to hear hoots and catcalls from passing tricycles and Jeepneys.  We were drawing a lot more stares than usual from the locals as well.  By the time we had made it to the main road to catch a trike to the train station, we deduced that it was due to Jenn’s new tank top.  And thus was the sacred bond of the pinkie-swear broken: we hailed a cab, uneasy about exploring an infamously shady public transit system while drawing extra attention.

Intramuros was immediately historical, hectic, and hot, even at this, the supposedly coolest time of the year.  Private schools were crowded next to fast food restaurants, street vendors, churches, convenience stores, and surprisingly little in the way of parks.  Every three or four minutes we found ourselves fending away pedicabs or tricycle drivers who wanted to give us guided tours.  By the time we had found San Agustin (the oldest church in the Philippines) to be surrounded by touts and depressingly few places to sit and draw, we discovered that we were too hungry to continue tourist-ing anyway.

Source: http://www.wheninmanila.com/

Here we encountered another of the great traveling dilemmas, one with which we grapple every day of our awesome, awesome existence: where do we eat?  The most obviously appealing choice as fearless world travelers is to dine at any of a dozen local canteens, dirty-looking, crowded places, and eat shoulder to shoulder with the residents of Intramuros.  What more authentic way to get to know a place than by eating with the locals?  Plus, local places tend to be cheaper (as in “less than $2 for two people to get full” cheaper) and more delicious than chain restaurants or tourist traps.  The only problem with this option is that we would be abandoning the advice given to us by our perpetual guardian angel, Kate: “Don’t eat the food that’s been sitting out all day unless there’s a fire going under it.  Otherwise, you’ll get hella diarrhea.”  (Note: I may be taking some liberties with Kate’s sparkling personality.)

So, if we are too chickenshit to eat at one of the turo-turo restaurants (meaning “point-point,” an establishment thoughtfully named for the only way we know how to order any of the dishes (also it’s so nice they named it twice)), then how are we to fill our bellies?  There were a few extremely upscale tourist restaurants in Intramuros, ones categorized under “Splurge” in Wikitravel; we attempted to peer into the door of someplace called “Illustrados,” and got so far as looking at the menu before we politely asked ourselves to leave, as we were getting poor person germs on the fine rug.  Also, I ain’t payin’ no $10 for no pasta con funghi.

We finally settled this dilemma as we do all dilemmas: waver back and forth for awhile, carefully consider how each choice relates to our overall travel philosophy, then just pick randomly when we’re too hungry to argue anymore.  The result: moderately tasty and entirely non-poisonous chicken adobo from a tiny local canteen!  It was cold, but we still avoided getting diarrhea (this time, anyway).

Then, of course, we instantly squandered our Traveler’s Karma Points by spending an hour in a coffee shop using their overpriced WiFi (and really, isn’t any WiFi that isn’t free overpriced?).  But hey, our escape from Manila into the greater Philippines wasn’t going to plan itself.

By 4:00, we realized that this may be our last chance to redeem ourselves for the morning’s cab ride.  It was time to brave Manila’s Jeepneys all on our lonesome.  We scrambled across a few busy roads and hopped the first Jeepney heading to Cubao that didn’t have people hanging from the back door.  We made fast friends with the other passengers by studiously speaking in low voices and avoiding eye contact with anyone else (this is friendly by Japanese public transit standards, anyway).

Source: http://www.bubblews.com/

Navigating in Jeepneys is a bit of a puzzle, as due to the vehicle’s low, narrow windows, we could only see a narrow band of our surroundings at about nipple-height.  I pretended I could tell where we were by looking at the destinations written on other Jeepneys, but really all this accomplished was getting myself attached to a few particular Jeepneys (where are you now, Dragonball Jeepney?).

When the rest of the passengers hopped out at a traffic jam that was presumably somewhere in Cubao, we followed suit, then painstakingly made our way to Alex’s lab by asking a series of increasingly irritable security guards.  Success!  After only two and a half hours and about 40¢, we had made it across town!  We cheered, then coughed up lungfuls of smog for ten minutes.