Thrilla Manila!

I know it's been a while since I've last posted on this blog and I intend to remedy that as soon as possible, starting now. A lot has happened since my last post - namely, we found out while on the cruise that my dog was gravely ill and had to be admitted to the animal hospital. We cut our trip to London out and rushed back home - she had an emergency surgery and she was stable for a day but passed away the next day. It's still painful to talk about so I won't dwell on it - but the memories of those days sort of tainted those of the cruise and I stopped thinking about this blog altogether.

I have visited some wonderful places in the meanwhile, however - Helsinki, St. Petersburg, New Orleans and Houston, to name a few. I took loads of pictures and I hope to write about my experiences in all these places soon.

At the moment though I'm in the Philippines, Manila to be exact, or thrilla Manila as my friend Raya calls it - fittingly, as I've already come to see. When I went to Portland last year I met these two wonderful girls from Manila and they told me all about this region in the Philippines called Palawan - a little known province of the country that has incredible diving opportunities. I checked it out on Lonely Planet, which says that it has the best beaches in all of Asia. So of course, I had to come check it out for myself. The other thing I'm doing while I'm here is research for a story I'm writing on Manila's burgeoning fashion scene - all thanks to Alyanna and Raya, once again. They made the Philippines sound like this hip, beautiful, frenetic, buzzing place - I've only been here one day and I think I know exactly what they mean.

Omer's here with me, which is wonderful. He loves to travel as much as I do and he's just the perfect travel companion. We got off the extremely long flight super tired and bleary eyed, so you can imagine how pleased we were when we found two representatives from the tourism board waiting for us at the airport. We skipped the immigration lines completely and once our passports were stamped and baggage claimed, we were whisked away to meet the head of tourism, who has been helping me organise this trip over the last few months, a lovely man called Francisco, or Kiko. He took us to the wet market at the Manila bay, which is a place where you can pick ingredients for your meal out from the market, tell the restaurant next door how you'd like them cooked and hang out at the waterfront with a beer while you wait for it to arrive.

Which is a pretty good way to start any holiday, I think. So I picked my vegetables for chop suey - Francisco seemed hugely surprised that I knew what that was - and then we proceeded, as he said, to "Where all the fun is." Behind the veggie stall was this massive tunnel with every kind of seafood you could think of - most of them still alive. Lobsters, clams, mussels, oysters, crabs, they were all jammed into these little buckets filled with water. The poor crabs had their pincers tied together -

- which made me really sad. I'm not one of those fanatical vegetarians and I do try to live and let live but I still felt really bad for those poor little guys. This is probably the crustaceans' version of a concentration camp.

There were huge lobsters too:

This one was asleep, according to the guy who owned him. He tried singing to it to wake it up, but to no avail. It was all a bit morbid, but it was sort of overshadowed by how friendly everyone was. Besides, when it finally arrived at the table, it looked like this.

I haven't always been a vegetarian. I did once appreciate the joys of good seafood and honestly, if there was ever a time when I was tempted to cross back over to the dark side, this was it. My pictures today have been awful, just as out of focus as I've been feeling - but honestly, that looked all kinds of amazing and it smelt even better. I didn't give in though, for which I am rather proud.

The wet market

We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about Manila, Palawan and the Philippines in general. I couldn't contribute as much as I would have liked because I hadn't had a proper night's sleep in three days, so as soon as we were back at the hotel, I tried to get some rest but my mind was racing and I was thinking about a million different things, so I decided to get online and post this! I'm not even sure if my sentences are coherent anymore and my eyelids are fighting a losing battle against gravity, so it's adios for now. We're heading to Palawan tomorrow and I know it is going to be beyond special - I just hope it has Internet.