Welcome to Manila and the Mall!

So we arrived around 4 AM in Manila and were only able to check in early to our hotel by paying for an extra night, which was disappointing, but TOTALLY worth it to sleep and take a shower! Turns out that our hotel is directly connected to Robinson’s Galleria, which is a gigantic mall. Not the biggest by Manila’s standards, as there are 31 mega-malls here. So in a sense I feel that I am actually experiencing a great deal of the “real” Manila even if that means a lot of Mall. I’ll write more about my thoughts on where we’re actually going to be living (which is in Marikina City, a part of Metro-Manila). For now, a quick list of the things we’ve accomplished in the past 24 hours:

1.Getting our bags (which are somewhat heavy, although we only have six in total, is this a lot for four months?) through security, customs, and to the hotel. There’s a lot of valuable books and archival material in there, I’m really relieved to have it with us.

2.Finding a place to live! We owe Tita a lot for putting us in touch with her cousin who has a condo (a small apartment really, but condo is the parlance here) in a secure, clean, and really nice residence where there’s a pool! And, which is only a quarter of mile from the local athletic complex where I can go for runs on their track. Woot! Now we’ll wait and see what folks think about my Vibram Five Fingers…

3.Getting local cell phones and internet. We were able to purchase two cell phones that we can use for unlimited texting and 20 minutes talk time a day along with a modem that can be plugged into our computers for internet in the condo.

4.The Condo is furnished but we needed an extra hot plate, electric kettle, and dvd player, and we got all three for a great price. I’m starting to see why these malls are so popular.

5. We’re going to see our first movie in the Philippines. Cinema is really big here, all the malls have theaters (including the small mall that is close to where we’ll be living) so it looks like we’re going to see Avatar later today. Should be interesting to see this particular movie in this context.
So this is it for now from Manila. Looking forward to figuring out how to get the internet working in our new place so that I am more g-chat and skype connected, so look out for that too!  Kiara