Three days in Manila

A couple of weeks ago we spent three days in Manila, just to see what another big city in the Philippines was like. The first two nights we stayed in Intramuros, the "old town". As much as I don't like tourist places, I really expected it to be a lot more touristy than it was. As it was, there were a couple of hotels and a few restaurants, plus some old buildings, churches, and a couple of small museums, but apart from that it was hardly different from downtown Cebu - with homeless dogs, street kids, and street food vendors (we still haven't braved any). Very few tourists in sight, at least on foot, which is not surprising because there were hardly any footpaths, and the streets were quite dodgy.

One of the nicer buildings we found

We found some nice places while walking, like this courtyard connecting the exit from a historic house with a restaurant. If you look closely, you'll see the green jeep hiding in a corner.

The historic house was small, but worth visiting to get a glimpse of the life of rich Filipino families in the past.

A bedroom

They were VERY social people...

A really cool museum that we accidentally came across was Bahay-Tsinoy - "Museum of Chinese in Philippine life". We were the only visitors there for most our our time there. It outlined the history of the Chinese - Filipino relations from early contact, through the Spanish and American periods, till today. It was full of wax figures depicting different scenes from everyday life, and it reminded me a bit of Wellington's Museum of City and Sea (which I think is now called something else).

That same day we ventured outside Intramuros to the National Museum, which is a 7-10 minute walk from the Old Town. No one walked there apart from us, because it was just not meant for walking - hardly any footpaths, and massive streets to cross with 3-4 lane traffic going each way. It was mostly standing still, so we just walked between the cars. The museum was quite old fashioned and reminded me of some Polish museums (at least they didn't make us wear slippers!) :-) Lots of paintings, and lots of somewhat boring portraits, but there were a few quite moving pieces:

A Tragic Lesson (The Fall of Bataan) by Gene Cabrera, 1957

Bataan Death Marcher by Gene Cabrera (undated)

A Plea for Freedom from Fear by Fermin Gomez, 1949

In the afternoon we were booked on a walking tour of Intramuros with the famous Carlos Celdran, a crazy performance artist who many people recommended. His "walking tour" didn't involve a lot of walking, but was an excellent introduction to the Philippines history, helping us get more context for what we had seen in the museums that day. There were mainly Filipinos on the tour (which was in English nonetheless), and he made them sing the national anthem, and answer all kinds of questions about the meaning of place names, etc. He had presentations in several locations, and it was all quite interactive and fun. You could tell he really loves Manila, and he's trying to convince other Filipinos to become familiar with their capital and its history.

A jeepney made of Legos

One of the stops for a presentation (Carlos is the one in the big hat)

The next day we embarked on the life-threatening journey of crossing those big streets again and visited the Museum of the Filipino People, which is by the National Museum. It had heaps of interesting exhibitions and I wish we'd had more time there because we had to leave around 10.30 to check out of our hotel by 11. All the museums we went to had hardly any people in them. You'd expect school trips or tourists to visit them, but we had them to ourselves most of the time. I don't know why more people don't visit them - if not for the art or education, then for the free air-conditioning :-)

I don't even.

There were several cool sculptures in the park around the museums

After we checked out, we went to our next hotel, which was in Makati, the more modern business district of Manila. The 8km ride would have taken about an hour, so we decided to take our chances with the river ferry, which is part of the feeble public transport system. We didn't save any time doing it because we had to wait a couple of hours for the ferry, and then it was almost another hour delayed, but hey, it was an adventure! The ticketing office was something out of a bad comedy - there were maybe 8-10 people in the ferry company uniforms there, and they were all taking turns signing karaoke continuously throughout the 2-3 hours we spent there! They simply had nothing else to do - it looked like the ferry only came 3-4 times a day, and there seemed to be no other tasks they needed to be doing. Why there were so many of them, I have no idea.

The ferry ride was pretty uneventful. We took some photos along the way, and at one point the ferry people became quite agitated and told us to stop because apparently we were too close to the presidential palace and you're not allowed to take photos there. So we had to wait until we passed a certain bridge before we could start again.

Our little ferry, finally in sight

The captain had to lean out to the side of the boat to see what's in front of us

Mostly ugly sights along the way

And some not so ugly, at least from a distance

The hotel we stayed at in Intramuros was very nice, spacious and comfortable, but the one in Makati was out of this world. We decided to have another adventure after the ferry ride, and took a little motorcycle tuk tuk-like ride (like the bicycle one in Cordova, but with an engine) to the hotel. I kept my little backpack next to my feet, and Jon's suitcase got tied to the roof with some iffy-looking straps. The doormen at the hotel were not impressed when they saw us arrive in this chariot :-)