We arrived in Manilla at 2:30 am. There were still people on the street and shops and markets open. It reminded me a lot of Mumbai. It's a very active city and could be really fun to explore
Manilla is huge and there's lots of people and traffic, but unlike India it's very clean and people follow the road rules and allow people to merge into their lanes without cussing and honking so driving around didn't feel stressful
Next day on our way to the airport we realised that it's too much like Mumbai and we should have left an hour earlier for our flight because the traffic was at snails pace but we made it at 11:45 for a 12 noon flight and they still let us board with all smiles
Also I learnt that if you buy a bottle of water from outside and then try to open it on the plane then the cabin pressure can send the bottle cap flying around the aircraft like you've popped a champagne cork. Luckily mine only flew around a couple rows and landed on the head of an old Filipino lady who returned it to me with a huge smile
That's another thing which stood out to us, everyone is always smiling and cheerful, unlike Kuala Lumpur where it's a criminal offence to show anyone your teeth and everyone scowled at us. I'm not looking forward to transiting through there on the return leg of our journey
There is no concept of vegetarian here in the Philippines, almost every meal has meat in it. The airline served just beef bun, no other options. And our breakfast was pork.
I haven't seen a single stray dog yet. I'm afraid the locals ate them all and might also have served us some because some of the meat we've eaten was certainly not beef, chicken or pork
More updates to follow as we hit the beaches of Palawan over the next couple days