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07/01/11
Friday night lights in Manila…
As part of my internship I was lucky enough to tag along with one of the Philippine Daily Inquirer sports reporters, Cedelf Tupas, to watch the PBA play-offs at the Araneta Coliseum.
The basketball was great to watch, even though my team- The Barangay Ginebra Kings lost to San Miquel 108-102. It was the second game in the seven series play offs, the series stands at 2-0. The crowd really got into it and I found myself cheering along.
On our way home Cedelf taught me how to ride the Manila light rail, a tricky feat when you have terrible sense of direction and are in a strange country, but he gave me a good trick to remember how to get to the train station. Apparently everything in Manila can be measured by how many malls it is away. For instance it takes four malls to get to the city light rail, that's right I cross through FOUR separate shopping complex' to get to the railway! Greenbelt, Landmark, Glorietta, SM and then railway-too easy.
Cedelf, his girlfriend, Rachele, and her work friends then took me to get a taste of Manila nightlife. We went out to a club called Encore, an RNB club, just like any you'd find in Sydney.
Entry fee was a 'steep' 500 pesos that got you entry and THREE vodka drinks, so I was fairly tipsy on just $13.50 Australian dollars-NOT BAD! We drank and danced all night to all the same music we have in Australia.
The downside though was that in the Philippines you are allowed to smoke inside clubs so my healthy lungs were dying and my eyes were getting sore-but like a trooper I soldiered through.
What we know as the late night Macca's run (Cannan is very familiar with this concept) in the Phils it's a more of a stop-in-and-take-a-seat-at-a-restaurant type set up. So at 3.30am in the morning we caught a taxi to North Pak (hopefully I remember the name correctly) and shared the best Chinese I have ever had. We got lemon honey chicken, sweet and sour pork, fried rice (Rachelle was very proud of me for eating rice lol) and some other dishes I am not too familiar with.
I crawled into bed at about 4.30am and was very content with my first Friday night in Manila.
From Manila lots of love,
Stace
xxx
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