The Philippines: 2008-2009
In August of 2008, I learned that Alma and her parents were going to the Philippines around New Year's, and that I was invited. Because of the cost associated with making the trip (my plane ticket cost $1,780), we had to go for around three weeks. I warned my office of this well in advance and got the green light, and so, after months of waiting, it came to pass that on December 22, 2008, I found myself at O'Hare waiting to board a Japan Airlines flight to Narita Airport outside of Tokyo, from where we would connect to Manila.
It had been a long time since I left the country. In my youth I was quite the globetrotter, banging out trips to four continents in less than a decade - Venezuela in 1991, the British Isles in 1993, 1994 and 1996, South Africa in 1997, and Australia and New Zealand in 2000. Asia remained my lone untouched continent. In 1998 I had the chance to go to China, but it would have been my third straight summer as a student ambassador and I, perhaps foolishly, opted to stay home. I'm sure I did plenty of exciting things instead, like play NCAA Gamebreaker '96 on the Playstation for two solid months or something. At any rate, a trip to Asia had fallen back into my lap, and it was a chance to visit the ancestral homeland (I realize that sounds a bit over the top) of my future wife. All told, I jumped at the chance. And, in fact, I had a pretty great time.
What follows is similar to the 2000 Australia/New Zealand journal, which longtime readers may remember (it hasn't graced the pages of the site since early 2004, when it was deleted for space considerations, although you can still find all the entries and some of the photos via the Internet Wayback Machine). In fact, I believe this is the same FrontPage theme. The difference? Well, I'm 26, not 17, so a lot of the stupider stuff I said isn't likely to be repeated. Other than that it's pretty similar. There is one big difference, though. Just before the trip I purchased a new 10 megapixel digital camera. The salesman pointed out to me that it didn't really matter how many megapixels I had, so long as it was more than three, if I was showing them all at 600 wide on the internet. So for many of the pictures, you will be able to click on them to get a much larger version (2000 pixels wide or high for normal shots, 3000 or 4000 wide for panoramic views).
With that out of the way, let's get this party started: December 22-23, 2008
Want to skip ahead like a big cheater? Here you go. I'll even give you a very rough cheater's guide in case you want to try to jump right to a certain location:
December 24, 2008
(Manila)
December 25, 2008
(Manila)
December 26, 2008
(Manila)
December 27, 2008
(Subic)
December 28, 2008
(Baguio)
December 29, 2008
(Baguio)
December 30, 2008
(Baguio)
December 31, 2008
(Tagaytay)
January 1, 2009
(Tagaytay)
January 2, 2009
(Romblon)
January 3, 2009
(Romblon)
January 4, 2009
(Romblon)
January 5, 2009
(Romblon)
January 6, 2009
(Manila)
January 7, 2009
(Japan)
January 8, 2009
(Chicago)
Want to see some trip videos that aren't really all that interesting? Sure you do.