Sunday morning after almost 24 hours total of traveling and about 8 hours sleep. I woke up feeling almost hung-over although I hadn't had a drop of alcohol since the bottle of wine I had with the first dinner on the plane out of Detroit. It was almost 16 hours since that time before I went to bed so not the alcohol. Jet lag actually is what it is I realize. I am now 13 hours ahead of the east coast of the U.S. I went downstairs to explore the hotel and the surroundings and found that they have a lovely breakfast buffet just off the lobby in a very well appointed restaurant.
Breakfast in the hotel in Manila is wonderful. Freshly squeezed orange juice, mango juice, papaya juice, and watermelon juice were in large serve yourself containers. There were at least a dozen different kinds of fresh fruit, bacon that was quite good although not quite what someone that lives not far from Virginia is used to. There is a cooking area where a chef will make you a perfectly cooked omelet with any combination of about a dozen filling ingredients. Several types of breakfast meats were around. Some were breakfast meats that I did not recognize but I tried them and they were all awesome. I can honestly say that I still not 100% sure exactly what kind of meat some of it was but it was good so I don't care. The coffee was extraordinary and if you take cream with your coffee they steam it so it won't cool off the coffee too much.
I could dwell on the restaurants at the hotel because they were all very good but please do not be afraid to try food from street vendors. You may hear Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmern extol the virtues of street food on their TV shows and I can tell you from personal experience in the Philippines that they are correct and the food is fabulous. There was one I remember quite fondly. At about 4:30 every morning an old man perhaps in his 70s would come walking up behind the building where I was working overnight shift training. He had a long stick across his shoulders and he was carrying 2 large steaming stainless steel pots. For the equivalent of about 18 cents U.S. you could get a cup with about 8 ounces of hot, soft bean curd into which he would scoop about 2-3 ounces of the most marvelous brown sugar syrup I have ever had and sir it around and hand you the cup of Taho. You could spoon it out if you like but it was soft enough that most of the time you could just drink it. He was there about an hour before the actual food stalls opened. What you got was not really breakfast but it coats your stomach and gives you a bit of a sugar rush to help you finish off the day so you could actually go eat a full breakfast.
This will be all you will hear of my working because this is not about working but about travel so we will move on with the next post.
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