A Sunday in Manila

October 9, 2012 (from Sunday, October 7)

 Happy Birthday, Dad/Michael! 

     As we’ve mentioned before, we are fortunate to have our apartment sandwiched between two green spaces: Ateneo’s campus to the west and Loyola Memorial Cemetery to the east.  We’ve been meaning to explore the cemetery for weeks and finally got around to it Sunday morning. Many families were bringing flowers and having picnics on the gravesites.  We were surprised by the dozens of workers manicuring the lawns by hand, raking up fallen leaves, and repainting the traffic lines within the cemetery.  The common workweek here is Monday through Friday with a half day on Saturday.  Sunday is a day off for most people.  

flowers in cemetery (also on Ateneo campus)

Chapel in cemetery

One of the many ornate tombs

view of our building (to the right of the blue building)

Fritz’s grandfather in Texas worked closely with a Filipino partner who has a niece in Manila. The niece and her family took us down to Manila Bay on Sunday for a giant buffet at a fairly new restaurant called Vikings. Sunday buffets are a big deal here and our new friends had carefully chosen one of the best and biggest in Manila and Metro Manila area. We arrived a few minutes before they opened at 11:00 and used the time to walk out along the promenade by the bay.  Much of the area along the bay, including all of Mall of Asia, affectionately referred to here by everyone as MoA, is built upon reclaimed land.  We had mainly heard negative remarks about the odor and haze that hovers above Manila’s polluted bay, but we were pleasantly surprised by the bluish water and impressed by the large ocean liners, which reminded both of us of ships that travel through the St. Lawrence Seaway.    

looking towards center of Manila along bay

after lunch...

After a few mandatory Manila Bay photo ops, we headed inside to find the most ENORMOUS buffet we’ve ever seen.  Hundreds of different food options included whole sections dedicated to Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, Indonesian cuisine, grilling stations for both seafood and red meat where customers selected the raw filet or steak to be grilled individually. The sushi display featured raw tuna still in in the meter-long fish halved open for display.  Dessert was equally impressive.  After two hours we were stuffed and very satisfied.  We walked a few hundred feet over to MoA to begin our exploration through the multiple levels of indoor and outdoor shopping options. Some perspective: we've heard that MoA is the biggest mall in Asia (although this may not actually be true now). Including MoA, there are at least three malls in metro-Manila bigger than the Mall of America.  On our way home we drove by Old Manila and Intramuros, the walled fortress within Manila. This was our first time in Manila proper and we were excited to get a chance to see many of the landmarks of the city as we drove by.

Barbie fashion show in MoA

Ice-skating rink in MoA

Looking towards MoA's ferris wheel

We had a lovely time and were once again so impressed by the generosity and hospitality with which we were treated.  We’ve already made plans to check out two markets with them again this Saturday.  We have a busy week planned with a trip to UP tomorrow, tickets to the Spanish film festival on Thursday (a yoga classmate and professor of Spanish at UP gave them to me yesterday and is driving us both ways), the Lopez museum library on Friday, two markets (Mercato Centrale and Salcedo) on Saturday. We have a new neighbor downstairs from Ireland who is another Visiting Research Associate at Ateneo writing about popular music and have had fun showing her around. We received a surprise email this morning announcing an overnight retreat with IPC to La Puerta del Sol in Bolinao near the 100 Islands on Monday and Tuesday...hopefully some interesting future blog material. Hope everyone is doing well.