We started, not surprisingly, with a traffic jam. We landed at the worst time, and the ride from the airport to Quezon City (19 kms) took 2.25 hours...

But, to look on the bright side, we got to see a cross-section of Manila. The shanty areas, the river, the adverts for "bangus belly" (bangus is milkfish), the young men selling sweetcorn to the queues of traffic, the "rich quarter", as our loquacious taxi-driver described it (ie, the bit behind big walls), the open-front shops selling different grades of rice or different kinds of eggs (the red ones are salted eggs), the jolly, nice-and-ordinary, bursting-with-street-food places...

And once we'd arrived, a quick tour of our now dark suburb revealed lots of eating places, a laundry, and a source of San Miguel. So we went to bed reassured that our basic needs would be supplied.

All the streets in this area start with "Scout". We're on Scout Castor. But there's Scout Delgado, Scout Gandia, and lots of others. On our exploratory walk this morning we ran across a memorial honouring the 24 Filipino scouts who were killed in a plane crash in 1963 while on their way to the World Jamboree in Greece. The area's streets were renamed in their memory, and the scouts share the monument with Tomas Morato, Quezon City's first mayor.





It's a pleasant enough area. There are trees, chickens, jeepneys, and Korean grocery stores. We miss China's broad, flat pavements, but hey...



We had lunch at the Romulo Cafe, which is run by descendants of renowned diplomat Carlos P. Romulo, and is really close to our hotel. The environs are elegant, and the food is awesome.

We started with tinapa rolls (the rolls are lumpia wrappers; and the filling is tinapa, or smoked fish, which is shredded and mixed with tomatoes and the salted red eggs we'd seen on that interminable journey yesterday). Our mains were beef kaldereta (beef in a rich sauce with vegetables) and pan-fried bangus belly served with sisig sauce (a tangy kind of mayo). We rounded off with leche flan and black coffees. All flawlessly executed -- Filipino food at its best.







We were driven out again in the evening by the need to look for internet. The hotel's is adequate. But for some reason, the Malaysian Digi local linkup (which had worked just fine in Japan and China) didn't work with its Philippines partner Smart. And we have definitely come to the point where mobile internet is hard to do without.

Enter the Fisher Mall, which -- in addition to lots of CNY decorations and a very respectable Pancake House -- has Globe, a purveyor of portable wifi devices.





It's a little over five years since we were in the Philippines, and we were on holiday then, whereas we're working now. So we're (re)learning a lot. But it's good.