Saturday

[indigo_rose99]

I got a nice 10 hours sleep after the volcano adventure and still woke up gritty-eyed. The dust, I suspect. Gym visit and brunch in the hotel, and Bong picks us up at 11am to take us to Chinatown.

Things went downhill from there. Manila traffic always seems insanely bad to me, enough to make a Zen American go into full blown road rage and start taking a tire iron to the next car that cuts her off. But today seemed to be a special level of road insanity.

After an hour and fifteen minutes, Bong admitted that a fun run had closed all of the roads between here and there and it would take another 2 hours to POSSIBLY get to Chinatown. He suggested a nearby mall, the Mall of Asia. We agreed and left our Tilleys in the car. No need to draw that much attention to ourselves indoors.

The mall was huge, as all Filipino malls seem to be. Indoor-outdoor, it took us four hours to walk it. We headed back to the entrance we came in, prepared to cross the street and meet Bong.

The entrance was shut down for a private event. The walkway over the road we had planned to use covered in fancy tables, obviously ready for a party. There are guards and ticket booths.

Having learned from the last time we ran into this problem, I approached a guard and asked how we could get across the road to meet our driver.

Ok, imagine this HUGE mall with three entrances in the front, two entrances along each side.

The guard told us to go back into the center of the Mall and take a side exit (left, left, left) and go around the barricade. We did, though it took us a while. We discovered that the entire road was barricaded off, and most especially the stairway by the road which marked the spot we were going to meet Bong. I texted Bong the situation. He said he was by the ferris wheel. T found the ferris wheel in the distance, on the other side of the barricade. Ugh. I texted Bong that we would be coming to him. We started walking.

Back the way we came, around the mall to the side entrance. ALL of the front entrances are closed. All three. We try the side entrance nearest the ferris wheel. Closed. I ask for directions. Go out the farthest side entrance and try to cut around.

Bong, bless him, found us as we hit the sidewalk.

According to my fitbit, it was about 1.25 miles of walking from the point where we discovered the first entrance blocked.

Comments

[reedrover]

Eeek. And wow. I hope you know you are not "selling" the Philippines as a tourist destination for me.

[indigo-rose99.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I can see that. And probably my post on the experience of using a public women's bathroom is not helping any.

On the good side... the pearls are really nice... *Trying to find nice things to say* And the customer service is really really fantastic. Wherever I go, people are more than happy to give directions and help. Not at all like China (where they lied in an effort to get rid of me) or Slovakia ("Why do you want that?").