Am I losing you with these oh so serious million word entries? I’ll embark on this literary journey by telling you that today, I ate pig blood. I am lunching on tasty tofu, when I turn to my friend Shawn and ask ‘Why is this tofu so dark?’ ‘Oh because it’s cooked in pork blood, Olivia!’

So, I thought myself to be very well traveled before coming to Taiwan. I’ve climbed the Great Wall of China, swam in southern paradise, explored old and historic Europe, and so, so much more. I think that being exposed to traveling so young is what shaped me to be the type of individual to live abroad. My parents put more importance on seeing the world than the newest gadget on the shelf at the toy store. Thank you for this now, Mom and Dad, because I’m not sure how much I liked never owning a Barbie back then. I have little fear in anything, am fiercely independent (although some of you might be blinded to this right now, Liam), and find pleasure and stimulation in being submersed into a culture in which I cannot go about my daily routines speaking English. When people ask me why I came here, I tell them I was bored. Now, every night I go to sleep trying to tame this buzzing little brain of mine that is overloaded with everything I saw, learned, experienced…and ate…that day. I never sleep long hours and I am never tired. NOR DO I EVER GET ANXIETY. This is how my new brain works, and all this brain cost was a flight to Taiwan. Who woulda thunk it?

I met my friend Jeff (you know…Jeff Scott) in Manila last weekend. A little taste of home, finally. He had been on a boat in Dubai for three months and we’d been coordinating a rendez-vous somewhere in Asia. Fancy, right? The capital city of the Philippines is where we found ourselves. Manila occupies 38.3 square kilometers and has more than 1.6 million inhabitants. It is the second most populous city in South East Asia. The entire metropolitan area is home to over 14 million people. Picture all these people living in the most grimy and gritty city you ever seen. And this coming from someone who has seen what I have. Grimy, gritty, dirty, ghetto, poor, shady, polluted. But even in saying all of this, I LOVE MANILA!

Jeff and I arrived separately, not knowing where to go or what to see. It was just like ‘HEY, I’ll meet you in Manila on Friday.’ I landed in Manila late in the afternoon on Friday, the weather was something wild, like I so well illustrated to you with words and photos in my last entry. Sunshine and marshmallow clouds the whole way, but upon approaching Manila by air, the cities core was almost perfectly encircled by a single storm cloud slamming rain on the city below, but providing a magnificent picture to those above it. See photo in “Deported to Care-a-lot”. At the airport I got in a cab, actually two cabs before I found one that wouldn’t rip me off, a game I became good at by the weekends end. Manila’s first language is English, seriously, I didn’t know that. It having colonial Spanish influence, I got in the cab and said Hola! I’m retarded. So the cab driver chats me up, asks where I’m from (first question from every Asian local, where are you from?). I tell him from Canada and he tells me he has relatives in Toronto. I ask him if he’s ever been and he says ‘Only in my dreams’. I say strange that, since the Philippines, and all of Asia, has until now only been in my dreams. I’ll always carry this exchange with me through my travels. With no address and no direction, I find my hotel, and finally, my first friend from Canada. Jeff and I have dinner at the Hobbit House tonight, yes, totally Lord of the Rings. It is staffed entirely by…can you guess? Midgets. Apparently, here you are supposed to be able to toss a midget onto a velcro wall, there was none of that here, but my God this is something I must do in my life. I did, however, finally have a TACO. In mentioning tacos, I wrote to my friend Ricky on a postcard how Taiwan and Mexico need to unite. Too many English teachers, not enough tacos. What we need are dumplings stuffed with seasoned beef and guac to dip. Tacolings. YUM! Anyway, we were staying in Ermita and Friday we simply bar hopped the local bars between there and Malate. We were drunk by 10hPM. Ermita is Manila’s old red light district, so it was dirty and real. Beggars, prostitutes, kids with guns, mothers sleeping on the cement cuddling their bare infants, all of this in the bulls eye circle of the Malate night life. Woah.

Saturday morning we’re right hung over, obvs. After inhaling some breakfast slash really really late lunch, Jeff packs it in for a nap. Actually what he really did was tell me he was going to the gym, but he just napped. I get in a cab and tell the driver that I want to go to Intramuros. I’d read about the many beautiful churches and cathedrals that filled the streets of the especially historic walled city within Manila. In hindsight, strolling these streets was maybe not a venture to be had alone, but nobody slows me down. Some of my most wonderful photos from his trip were taken in Intramuros.
Old, grimy, gritty, REAL…like most of Manila, but this place was special. Men, women, children alike were SO EXCITED to watch me pass, they’d call out to the their family members for a look. Like they only saw a white girl once a year. I had children by the numbers following me around, waving, smiling, surrounding me with this warmth and happiness that I was so stunned to feel from people living in this environment. 80%, or something, of the population in the Philippines live in poverty, and they’re all smiling. I walked for 3 hours, seeing, hearing, feeling things I have never experienced before. My feet blistered but hangover beaten, I took a cab up Roxas Blvd to the boardwalk and took pictures of the sunset at Manila Bay. My elbows and knees resembled those of a 2 year old after a rough play in the park, they were dirty and bleeding from trying to capture a photo somehow more perfect than the one before. Walking back to my ‘hotel’, I say it like that because a room with 2 beds, 1 dead cockroach, and a rusty shoe box sized hot water heater is not exactly a hotel room to me. I’m just learning how to REALLY travel. So since I washed my hair with PALMOLIVE shampoo that morning (like Palmolive dish soap from home, in fact it probably was dish soap), a loud neon sign advertising a cut, shampoo, and blow dry for 40 pesos invited me in. And so you know, 40 pesos is $1CAD. You can pretty much do anything in this city on 40 pesos. I did this everyday I was there. Amazing. We had dinner Saturday at Tabu, some swanky supper club we found in a magazine. It also was the one electro club in Manila, and we found it, how random and perfect. Dinner turned into bottles of white wine and Tequila with our new Philippino friends, who accompanied us from one bar to the next. Not before a fight with this Cesar from Venezuela who I might have misled, we found ourselves in the Red Light District (100% my idea). It was only minutes here before I see my buddy, my dear friend Jeff, never watching out for me, DITCH ME and my little black dress and hop in a cab with… This time it took me three cabs before I got one that wouldn’t rip me off. Remember, ALWAYS RUN THE METER. One crooked cabby tried to charge me 500 pesos for what was in the end an 80 peso cab ride. Being white, we are walking dollar signs. The blonde stuff doesn’t help much. But really, the kicker here really is being left alone at 5am, in the red light district, in Manila, in a short black dress, with no phone, no address. I told the taxi McDonalds in Ermita, and filled up with hot cakes for the walking tour of Ermita at…6am? I WISH…I could keep telling this story but I have to bring us to Sunday morning.

We wake up, SO HUNGOVER, nothing that a bowl a Pho can’t fix. It always cures whatever type of cancer you might have developed the night before, mine this day was throat cancer. I hate wasting any time, so after I get my hair washed and blow dried (how will I ever wash my own hair again?), we head out to the Greenview mall, home to all of Manila’s knock offs. I didn’t buy anything because I was more interested in getting myself to Smokey Mountain, Manila’s slums. Smokey Mountain is essentially where all of Manila’s garbage goes, and also home to far too many Philippinos, scavenging for any morsel of something good we may have dropped in the garbage the night before. Google this, Smokey Mountain + Manila. Anyway, cabs here cost nothing, we sat in a cab driving around this immensely congested yet spectacularly scenic (in all it’s gritty glory) city for an hour and half, and it costed a whopping $2CAD. These cabs had no door handles, nor…window openers…guys I’m drawing a blank, what are those called? But they got us around. When I said to the cab driver ‘Smokey Mountain’, he looked at me as if to say ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS??? But he took us for the ride. Hanging my head out the taxi window, I bought a beer, a glass bottle of coke, and a pack of cigarettes for 40 pesos, Again, $1CAD. Upon arriving near Smokey Mountain, it was nearing dark and I was forbidden from leaving the cab, nor did we even really get as far as we wanted to, but I saw what I was there for. I saw children chasing each other around piles of burning garbage 2 stories high, I saw older kids playing in whatever abandoned car or piece of machinery was nearest to their house, their house being a shanty box made of 10 or so pieces of rusted tin and some cardboard, I saw, I smelled, I heard, I felt. This went on and on. And on. I grew up in Orleans, a suburb of Ottawa. We were the first people to live in our house, and my community had only begun developing. What I saw in the Philippines, I had never seen anything like it before. Guys I’ve never even seen this in the movies, and even if I have, the effect is nowhere near as mind blowing as the experience. Mind blowing, like I have no mind. I sat quietly and cried, fucking right I cried, in the front seat all the way home. This is a city of such contrast, of rich to poor, because driving out of the slums so close I could still smell the garbage, in the front seat, through my tears, I see just blocks ahead of me a skyline of rich, modern, towering structures that build up downtown Manila.

Know this, that it is not without reservations, guilt perhaps, that I continue writing about my escapades of this Sunday evening. But the days go on. Jeff’s friend Chris flew in tonight from Cyprus. Our Philippino friend Vince treated us all to a smashing Greek dinner in the Greenbelt, once again in this city of contrasts, Greenbelt being the fine dining and shopping district, where I was once again left with a bottle of white wine to nurse all on my own. Soon after my flaming mango dessert, I’m itching for midget wrestling in the red light district, again. What can I say? It’s a wild party over there. Someone in our group whose name I will omit stopped to buy Viagra from a friendly ripper offer on the street, and we found entertainment in feeding it to our gay friend and taking him to rippers if not to see if we could turn him straight. It didn’t work. The Viagra nor turning him straight. He left shortly before I took off all my clothes and wrestled Chris in boxing ring. Umm.

3:30am and I finally get to indulge on a honey massage. A one hour fully body massage for $10CAD. I could live here, you know. We all predicted I would sleep in for my flight, so to not disappoint, I woke up losing my shit at 9:30am – flight at 11:15. Last nights clothing, last nights make up, white wine seeping out of my skin, I get to the airport after my counter is already closed for my flight, the only flight to Taipei that day. Juggling coffee, my bags, and all of Jeff’s diving gear (a bag full of knives), airport staff thought I was cute (along with all of Manila, maybe I forgot to mention, SEXY SEXY YOU SO SEXY MA’AM) and not only checked me in but carried all my bags and escorted me to my plane. Ahh yess. Attention, finally. Also, ask me what was in my pouch. Ask me!

Why no one told me I wasn’t allowed to leave the country on a visitors visa, I don’t know, assholes, but immigration in Taipei sure told me when I reentered the country and they stamped my passport with a bright bold 30 DAY VISA EXEMPT LANDING VISA. On this visa exempt entry, it is illegal to work in Taiwan and also impossible to process any papers to attain a working visa. AFTER EVERYTHING, all those visa issues I had just overcome, I now am left with no option but within the next 30 days, leave the country (don’t forget, I’m on an island so I have to fly, $$$$$$$$$$$) and go to a country that has a Taiwanese consulate and reapply for another 60 day visitors visa ($$$$$$$$$$$), rush it (more $$$$$$$$$$$) before I can come back to Taiwan and process my working papers.

WHY

ME

But It all makes a good story, right?

My trip to the Philippines was a wild party, but I only allow myself that by balancing it well with those genuine reasons we travel. Seeing, experiencing, living, learning. Manila opened my eyes up nice and big to the way the other part of the world lives, a part of the world that with no running water, no electricity, and the entire population of the Philippines garbage as a floor in their home, visa runs and broken hearts are the least of their concerns, yet spirits are high, laughter is plenty, and life goes on. So it goes.

Amen.