long overdue post: MANILA!

It's about time we update our blog I suppose.  We were doing so well for a while there, but got a bit caught up in the moment.  Though, I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing. We spent just under four days in Manila (in the Philippines) and had a great time.  Our hotel was awesome - we had an aquarium as one of our walls and the hotel was right on Manila Bay. We arrived in Manila at about 5:30 am and were actually able to check into our hotel immediately upon arrival.  Most hotels don't allow you to check in until after 2pm so this was a very pleasant surprise, as we were able to fall asleep for another couple of hours.

We arrived on Tuesday and, after taking a morning nap, we had an itinerary we were hoping to accomplish, but it didn't end up happening the way we had planned.  We first went out in the morning and were blinded by the light of the sun so went back inside to get sunglasses.  After exploring the lovely Rizal Park for about 20 minutes the sun suddenly disappeared and it started raining BUCKETS! We found it slightly ironic that it had only been a mere 20 minutes since we had gone back in for our sunglasses. By the time we ran back to our hotel we were basically drenched.  Still feeling a bit tired from our red eye flight from Jakarta, we took another shower and put some comfy clothes on and decided to take advantage of the free wifi and cozy hotel room. We ended up just relaxing for most of the day and had dinner at the White Moon Lounge that overlooks Manila Bay.

We left prepared on Wednesday morning with both sunglasses and umbrellas, as we realized that the weather in South East Asia can change on a dime during the rainy season.  Our first stop on Wednesday was Intramuros, which is the historical Spanish part of Manila.  It's kind of a dainty little village within the city and is surrounded by walls that have been there for years.  Interestingly enough, one of the top things to do in Manila is visit one of their many malls.  So after Intramuros, we headed to a local mall and it was definitely something an interesting place and crowded with plenty of locals.  We had lunch there and enjoyed walking around a bit and doing a little people watching.  It started to rain again so we took a taxi back to our hotel before we got caught again.  We had been craving some American food so we ended up eating dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe.

Thursday was, by far, my favorite day in the Philippines.  We took an early morning boat over to Corregidor Island, which is an amazing little island situated in the middle of the entrance to Manila Bay.  If you like history, like I do, then you would love visiting this place.  It has an amazing story and has been used by the Spanish, the Filipinos, the Americans, and the Japanese.  It has a strategic location, as it blocks the entrance to Manila Bay and can control what goes in (or doesn't go in) to Manila.  During WWII, the Americans controlled it most of the time and there were countless barracks, as well as several large guns/cannons that could shoot as far as 17 miles.  However, most of the buildings, etc. have been bombed out.  We took a tour around the island and had an extremely informative guide.  Overall, it was a very interesting day and we both learned a lot of things that we didn't know before.  One little fun fact was that Babe Ruth was actually stationed on the island before he became a famous baseball player.  We didn't get back to Manila until about 4:30 pm and were quite spent after being in the sun since 7am.  We had a laid back evening and got Chinese food for dinner and just ate it in our hotel room.

Our flight was in the early afternoon on Friday so we just did a little more exploring and walking around before heading to the airport.  We had a great time in Hong Kong and will do another post about that ASAP!  

We're currently in Macau and in a little bit of a bind, as we're not sure how we're going to get to our next destination (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam). We were supposed to fly out at 7:05 this morning but, upon looking up our flight information online at 4am, we couldn't find our flight and ended up finding out that our airline is no longer in existence!  This was the only airline to fly to Ho Chi Minh from here so we're not exactly sure what we're going to do.  We tried booking other tickets online, but because the window is less than 24 hours, they won't allow us to book them via the internet.  We found some flight possibilities online that have us stopping in Bangkok, so we're just going to head to the Macau airport and hope for the best.  Please say a little prayer for us...we're trying to stay in good spirits :)