Never Check Your Bags
I don’t know how many miles I’ve flown, how many flights I’ve taken, how many times I’ve been asked, but never, ever, when checking in, do I check my bags.
Why, might you wonder, do I not? First off, you cannot make last minute changes to your trip, grabbing an earlier connection or getting bumped for a free flight coupon. Next, if you flight is late, and you sprint for you next connection, your checked bags will never make it. Late they will be, missing they could be.
Read MoreThe Mall of Asia? Yawn.
It’s a slow Thursday afternoon in Manila. You wanna do something exciting and cool. What may that be? How about you go local and do what everyone in Manila said they’d do – go to the mall.
The mall, like your typical suburban mall. Not the National Mall, or even the Mall of America, we’re talking the Mall of Asia.
Read MoreManila Night of Cockfight
The heat is oppressive. I start to sweat the moment I walk in. I don’t notice it yet, though, as I am deafened by the sounds.
Men screaming, yelling, flailing about with mad intensity. Words reduces to shouts, repetitious, guttural, filled with hope or despair. Hands always in motion, signaling, gesturing, figures up, out, curled, then wrists dipping in unison, a match made in sign, owners still yelling, but now to each other.
This a cockfight in Manila and I haven’t even seen the ring or the birds yet. This is just the stands, where action is overwhelming, then silent.
Read MoreNice shoes, Imelda!
There in the lobby of the Peninsula Hotel, the hero to all shoe-fetish women worldwide with her quote “I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty,” was none other than Ms. Imelda Romualdez Marcos.
Read MoreThe Peninsula Hotel, Manila
As strange as this may sound, when I travel, I rarely stay at fancy hotels. If I am paying for the trip myself, I stay at cheap local hotels, place where the nationals of that country would stay when traveling.
Clean, cheap and basic, they suit me just fine, for they offer a clean, dry place to sleep but not much more. When I travel for fun, I want to be out with the people, not sequestered in a fancy hotel.
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