Messages from abroad, not massages from a broad

So I am just about to wrap up my first full day in the Philippines and despite what some people (Chris Yuen) may have said about this place, it’s not that bad.  Sure, it’s not as beautiful, cool, modern and clean as Vancouver, and the girls may not be my cup o’ tea, and the traffic may suck huge monkey balls, but the food is cheap and umm.. the shopping is good, and umm.., and that’s about it so far.

I feel very lucky to be staying at Lisa’s aunt and uncle’s place.  It’s new, it’s nice, it’s clean and modern.  That’s been great.  The air conditioning is my best friend and it works really really well here.  It rained today, so that helped a lot too.  The temperature is hovering around a muggy craptacular 30 degrees.  I freakin hate it!  It makes me want to shower every 30 min.  We haven’t needed to rough it out here since we’ve had driver’s at our disposal.

Let’s start off by saying that I’m just not used to having rice and stuff for breakfast.  It felt like I was eating lunch, so I treated it like lunch and ate until I was full.  Bad mistake ’cause no one told me that there was gonna be a HUGE lunch 2 hours later.  Not that I’m complaining, but lunch was friggin good at Gloria Maris, and I wish I had saved some room for the banquet style lunch that we had.  Kudos for Auntie and Uncle for the great dining and food selection!

Speaking of Auntie and Uncle, they have a spectacular place.  One of the best parts of their place has to be their Master Bedroom bathroom.  It’s awesome.  It’s really amazing.  The water closet aka the toilet stall/room had a beautiful curved glass door attached to it.  I was thinking, wow, it’s so nice, it must be a really expensive door, and no less than 3 min later, Wes was a little aggressive opening the door and he kinda broke it.  With his He-Man strength and Herculean phyisique, he destroyed the plastic door stopper and chipped the bottom of the glass door in one swift tug.  There were tiny shards of glass everywhere.  Let’s just say that it wasn’t meant to open that wide, but Wes managed to get it open fairly wide.  I don’t know why Darren and I thought it was so funny, but we weren’t giving Wes much support at the time.  It was just too damn funny.  Oh well, Wes has a nice picture of the cool toilet to commemorate his awesome power.

Chinese people are cheap.  And I’m talking about us in the Philippines.  We hit up Greenhill mall.  The fakest of the fake reside here and the place was massive.  Stall upon stall of the same t-shirts, shoes, and whiney women trying to induce a sale ‘Ma’am’ or ‘Hello sir’.  It sounded like a broken record walking through that place and we stayed there for no less than 4 hours, circling the place over and over again in case we missed a deal or a decent selection of goods.  Anyway, hours after we started our adventure at the mall, we realized that we didn’t buy much yet, so we were on a mission to get some shoes.  On average, the shoes usually started around 550-600 pesos.  This is the equivalent to about 11-12 Canadian.  We would talk the vendors down and they would try to sell their crappy shoes for 480 pesos.  We generally thought this was too expensive, but had they gone down to 450 pesos, then we would have had a deal.  We are talkin about a difference of 30 pesos.  Do the math.. it works out to something like 80 cents canadian.  We were pretty stubborn on this too.  Hahhaa.  We are friggin cheap and some might also call us stupid

One other thing we found at this mall was Balut Sa Puti; 17 day old duck eggs with partially formed ducks inside.  We bought enough for each of us to try and it’s quite a horrifying experience at first.  When you crack the egg open, the first thing you notice is that it’s really dark.  Mainly from the veins covering the inside of the egg shell and the color of the ’soup’ and the partially formed bird.  The soup is not really soup.  It’s more like hazy and nasty looking egg fluid.  The experience is defintiely a mental challenge.  The inside breaks down to about 3 parts.  The egg white part is really hard and nasty.  It’s edible, but apparently, a lot of people will throw it out cause it’s friggin hard and difficult to eat.  Then there’s the egg yolk.  It’s basically the same as any other egg yolk.  The other part of it is the partially formed bird.  It’s darkish grey and it sure is hard to look at.  If you had the unfortunate luck to take a bite out of the egg and leave the bird left, then it was 2 times more difficult to pick up the slimey/soft bird and eat it separately.  Gag.  We all did it, and the people in the mall thought we were a bunch of crazy nutbars.  I didn’t think it was that bad and for me, I thought it just tasted like regular egg with a different texture to it.

For dinner, we met went to Sentro.  Nice place with good food.  Actually, the place that we went to was pretty neat.  It was some building with a floor dedicated to cool looking restuarants.  We met up with one of Darren’s old buddy’s for dinner, his brother (who happened to be friends with Lisa, and an old classmate of mine), and Christian Newman and his wife Sheryl.   It was good seeing those guys here.The name of the mall eludes me and am I’m dead tired.

With that said, I’m going to cut this entry short and hit the sack.  I’ll update again soon.  Tomorrow, we’re off to Boracay.  Woo hoo.  $5 massages, here we come.

-Anthony