Philippines

Alrighty, I think I've finally settled on a template, for the time being, so I'm finally putting up trip pics! For those I haven't told, I went on a relatively last minute trip to the Philippines for my grandmother's 83rd birthday. It was something I had been thinking of doing for a while now, but the final decision (and flight booking) didn't happen until about mid-October, which for me is last minute considering the distance and scale of the trip.

Around Metro Manila

My family, my hometown

Fun times with the cousins

We left Calgary Nov 7 and arrived in Manila Nov 8. It was a crazy flight, both Air Canada flights (to Vancouver and then to Hongkong) were late, which meant that I got bumped off my Hongkong to Manila Cathay Pacific flight and put on a later flight. Which also meant having to run around the Hongkong airport to find my dad (who was taking a later Philippine Airlines flight from Hongkong) so he can call my uncle who was supposed to pick us up! Whew! But somehow after several tries, he managed to get through and so everything turned out fine after that.

Our stay in the Philippines was fairly low key, since our main purpose was to see our family in the province and attend my grandma's bday on the 15th. We went to the city (which was really only about 20km away) a few times to run errands for the grandparents and to have dinner/drinks with my cousins - I stayed over at my cousins for a couple of nights in Quezon City - and one time for a trip to see the new Ocean Park and also the new-ish Mall of Asia, but for the most part we stayed in our town, catching up with our many relatives and generally hanging out. For some reason we were waking up early in the mornings (around 6 or 7am, which is early if you're on vacation!), so we'd sometimes go jogging around 7am at the cemetery (which is pretty much the only quiet, no-traffic zone in our town these days). The bday party itself was pretty fun, there was a mass in the afternoon followed by an early supper. Afterwards, the kids (that's me and my 1st and 2nd cousins) went to Tagaytay City at my cousins' place there to do some drinking and hanging out. The adults (that would be my dad and his brothers and cousins) stayed in town and had their own drinking party.

The only other event worthy of note was my laptop issue...which is turned out to be a non-issue at all! When we first got there, my laptop wouldn't turn on at all! I asked my cousins' advice since they were in the IT industry, and followed their suggestions to no avail. So we finally took it to the HP Service Centre in the city, where the girl (woman?) did exactly what my cousins suggested, and, lo and behold, it worked! Weird...and a waste of an hour waiting my turn, but hey, at least my laptop is working!

We were basically just there for 2 weeks. Both my dad and I left on the 24th, my dad back to Calgary and me to Tokyo for a week before heading back home!