Category: manila

Manila Scenes

A selection of thoughts and pictures from my trip.

Luxe breakfast buffet included danggit, tiny dried, salted, fried fish. You can see their little faces, so it takes a bit of getting used to. And I see that this picture has captured the reading glasses which are my near-constant companion of late. Sigh.

This pavlova, at a Thai / fusion restaurant, was fantastic.

Malls make up a big chunk of life in Manila, and they’re stuffed with Americana. I was sorely tempted to try out the Shakey’s Pizza or this Texas Roadhouse where the claim to fame is the St. Louis style ribs. I know… St. Louis isn’t actually in Texas. I’m just the messenger on that one.

That’s the view from the AWS offices where we held the training. All that sandy soil is landfill… they’re building a whole new city out there in Manila Bay. We saw a big ship spewing a load of sand… construction on a scale that would be difficult to envision in today’s New Zealand.

People waiting in line for a bus after work.

People camped out two whole days to be among the first to get the iPhone 16 (even though it had been out in other countries for a couple of weeks).

Plenty of semi-feral cats in the area. There were food bowls scattered around, so I suppose the cats are kept around as pest control.

In the old days, I could have run home faster. Manila traffic is legendary, but this trip we didn’t encounter anything really horrific.

What I was actually doing over there. It was a fun trip… I’m looking forward to going back a couple of times next year.

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The (touristy) red light district

My Australian colleagues have been to Manila a few times recently. They’ve developed a ritual to eat at the Filling Station each trip. It’s an over-the-top shrine to a sort of 1950s America that probably never existed.

My verdict? Atmosphere 14 out of 10… more kitsch than should be possible in one place. Food meh… I like diner food and this was ok, but that’s as far as I’d go to recommend it. But dinner out with your workmates is always fun no matter what, and we had sampled plenty of Filipino cuisine at other meals, so there was something to be said for comfort food.

The restaurant is just at the edge of the Makati bubble. Inside the bubble is lots of foreigners and lots of money. An American can walk down the street in relative security. Outside the bubble, it gets grittier.

It turns out that the restaurant is on P Burgos Street, a well-known red light district… so our group of five were enthusiastically offered massages and other unspecified services by an array of girls and boys. The restaurant is in the same building as a hotel, and the rates were helpfully displayed in the men’s room. 30 minutes and up…

I’m sure there’s a lot of poverty and diseases and debts and addictions and exploitation behind that whole scene. But being inside the bubble, and out on the street (definitely not legal like in Amsterdam), all the problems are scrubbed and hidden, so it was almost carnival-like to walk through.

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Winning the Raffle(s) Prize

A couple of weeks ago I spent the week in Manila, working with my new Aussie colleagues on a project to increase local capacity for standards-based electronic medical records. I spent two days teaching about FHIR, and then we had a 2-day Connectathon. It was especially nice to see some people I first met 10 years ago when Apelon was working over there. We had the right idea back then, but we weren’t sufficiently deep-pocketed or clever enough at pulling money out of government coffers.

For mysterious reasons, I was upgraded from a really nice room to to a freakin’ palatial one at the Raffles hotel. I stepped out the dimensions (something I’ve gotten to practice on the pétanque field) and it was a good 800-900 square feet.

That was my view.

And there’s the rooftop pool… more than 25 metres, and never crowded.

Bliss.

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The port of Manila

When I was here last year, The city fathers had to adjust traffic flow to relieve congestion at the port. The new regulations were disastrous, and traffic got worse. Containers full of stuff rotted on the docks.

This time, the city fathers have adjusted traffic rules to accommodate delegates to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). The new regulations are, so far, disastrous…

Note to the learned and powerful economic planners at APEC: however beneficent your ideas may prove in the long run, in the short term you’ve lowered productivity by an appreciable margin.

Aside: The gray building on the water left foreground is the U.S. Embassy.

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This billboard was one of the first things I noticed on arriving in Manila. It’s late, you’ve been flying all day, and so you have to really ask yourself if you just saw an ad for Prettylooks™ with the slogan you thought you saw. Hooray for photographic evidence.

Do real men care that much about their eyebrows? I’m reminded of the line that for me cemented Daniel Craig as a worthy Bond…

“Vodka martini.”
“Yes sir, shaken or stirred?”
“Do I look like I give a damn?”

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Last time I stayed in this hotel, I worried about a typhoon veering into me. This time, Manila is safe while Japan gets pounded. We did get a spectacular thunderstorm, however, and on the 30th floor you really feel like you’re right in the middle of it.

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The sumptuously decorated lobby of the Sofitel Manila, where we went for after work drinks last evening to celebrate the end of our training session.

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There are many moving memorials to war and sacrifice in Manila, as there are in any big city.This monumental sculpture, however, honors a class of citizens perhaps less commonly venerated… The brave and far-sighted land developers who made the neighborhood into what it is today. May they rest in luxurious peace.

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Manila skyline from 33 floors up. That ominous haze is the outer edges of Typhoon Ruby Hagupit.

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Guess what I’ll be thinking about this weekend from the relative safety of my high-rise hotel in Manila? I say safe because it’s a modern high-rise away from the water, and even safer because it’s several hundred miles away from the likely path of the storm. Still…

The places that are in harm’s way got hit hard last year by Hayan and their people must feel a Sisyphean despair as Ruby barrels in.

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