Manila - Day 1

A project came up for work, and my boss sent me to the Philippines for 2 weeks. I was staying in Makati, which is like the financial district, just outside of Manila. I was pretty excited because I'd never been to the Philippines before, but 2 weeks away from Calvin was also pretty rough (for the both of us).

When I arrived the first thing I noticed is that eveyone is extremely polite. I don't think I've been called m'am that many times in my entire life. By the time I reached the hotel it was 1 in the morning on Monday, but I still managed to get a few pictures of the room.

I only got a few hours of sleep, but the next day I was off to the office with one of my coworkers to start on our project. The area of the city that we were in was surrounded by malls, that were all connected on the inside. So you could walk from one end of the city to the other almost without ever stepping outside.


This is the office where I spent my 2 weeks. It turns out it was the only office building in that area. We had to go to the other side of the ring of malls to get to any other office buildings. The location definitely made it easy to find places to eat for lunch though.


The first place we went to eat for lunch was a place called Max's. Their specialty is chicken, but somehow we ended up not ordering a single chicken dish...The food was really good though. This dish was a stir-fry veggie type of dish.

This dish was like the Chinese pork belly, but Filipino style. Pork belly pretty much just means pork fat...

The other dish we ordered was called Kare Kare, which is oxtail with various vegetables in some kind of peanut-based sauce and shrimp paste. It was actually really good. I think Phil would have liked the oxtail.

After work I headed out with my coworker to explore one of the many malls near the hotel. While we were in the mall we passed a Jollibee, which is a local fast food chain, similar to a McDonald's. Their mascot is the Jolly Bee. They are actually a customer of my company, so I had to take a picture with the Jolly Bee.


For dinner we ended up eating at an Italian restaurant. I think it was called Italiani, or something like that.

We ordered a chicken mango salad. It was a lot bigger than I was expecting...I could have eaten it as my entire meal!

I ordered their thin crust pizza special, which basically had 3 different pizza types/toppings. The pizza was extremely thin. It was less like pizza and more like some kind of thin crisp cracker, especially since there was no tomato sauce, but I liked it. It was just way too much food.

On top of the fact that my coworker, Daichi, ordered his own pasta too. We definitely ordered too much food...That huge smile on Daichi's face is the "I can't believe we ordered this much food/There's no way we're finishing this" laugh of hysteria. ^__^