Salcedo Market and other Saturday adventures

14 October 2012

            Yesterday our family friends took us for another full-day adventure. They picked us up in their big white van (which RJ can somehow maneuver quite easily through all the traffic and tight spaces) at 8:30 to go check out the Mercato Centrale in Makati. When we arrived, though, the tents were empty and nobody was around. After asking the guards nearby we learned that, despite all the signs saying that the market started at 7:00am on Saturdays, they no longer did the morning markets.

            Fortunately we had ambitiously planned to go to two markets so we went on to Salcedo Market, also in Makati. RJ and Chrish had friends whose building was across the street from the market and they had extra parking, a fairly amazing stroke of luck since there was absolutely no parking anywhere near the market.

The market is on a parking lot in Salcedo park

Kind of crowded at first but it was quite manageable after the first 30 minutes or so

Lots of foreign foods, some pretty fancy (escargot here...)

There was a stand with the biggest macaroons we'd ever seen. Drinking fresh dalandan juice 

fewer people on the other side of the market

Lechon

We've mentioned macapuno several times so thought we should include a photo

Japanese pancakes: we had chocolate and hazelnut ones. Tasted like American pancakes...

giant sombreros

lots of orchids

mangosteens: delicious! (you eat the white center part)

big box of rambutan. The season is almost ending here.

giant pineapple. They're grown here in Tagaytay.

We found a huge loaf of challah that we shared with Chrish, RJ, and one of their friends 

Lots of beautiful things made out of acacia, mango, and other wood

more Filipino food

eating lunch

            After the market we were all exhausted and full but there was more to see. We somehow started talking about cemeteries in Manila because we had heard that there were some gorgeous ones in the city that offered a great escape from the hustle of Manila. RJ happened to know that there was an amazing cemetery on the way back from the Market so we stopped in. The Manila American Cemetery and Memorial is located on a plateau in the middle of a very busy area and is very near the airport but it feels like you’re on another planet. It is also gorgeous, much like Arlington cemetery in the U.S. We mostly walked through the memorial to the 36,000+ Americans and Filipinos whose bodies were never found since the majority of them probably ended up lost to the Pacific.

chapel exterior

big mosaic in chapel

looking out towards Taguig

big mosaics showing various aspects of WWII

Lists of the 36,000+ missing soldiers

memorial for missing soldiers 

state seals on the floor

            We stopped by EastwoodCity/Mall on the way back to Marikina to see another market that was located inside a mall. RJ and Chrish used to live in Eastwood so they also wanted to show us their old neighborhood.

Making hot chocolate the old Spanish way: by hand and with a wallop of cayenne

A common sight: Halloween (jack o'lantern tree with scary owl on right) and Christmas (big tree in back) at the same time

            When we returned around 4:00 we both immediately had to take a nap before trying the bag of mangosteens that they had given us. The fruit has a very hard, thick skin with small, white, slimy flesh on the inside (similar to rambutan, longgan, lanzones, and lychee, basically a whole class of fruits that we don’t have in the U.S.). They taste great, kind of like an artificially intense Tutti-frutti flavor found in juice drinks or gum, except that this was from a real fruit. We haven’t seem them around in stores but we’ll be on the look-out now.

            Tomorrow we head off at 5:15am for a two-day trip to the 100 Islands. We’ll have more on that later this week.