Embracing the Adventure

I'm learning that bazaars are a big thing around here. There is a different bazaar I could go to every day of this week, held by various organizations and with various themes. One monthly bazaar that is very popular with the expats in Manila is put on by the American Women's Club of the Philippines (AWCP). A friend took me to that bazaar today, and I can see why it's so popular! It is held in a huge convention center, and there was so much there! It looked very much like a Peddler's Mall, with booths set up by various vendors, but it was all new stuff. Mostly clothing and accessories, crafts, and home goods. Being November, and since Christmas starts EARLY here , there were also a lot of Christmas booths as well. There was also a whole food section serving both hot meals and take-home foods. I got several different dishes to take home and try... Didn't even have to cook dinner! Score! Some of my favorite purchases from today: mother of pearl coasters, ...

In the book The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, the land of Narnia is under the control of the White Witch, who has it in a permanent state of winter. The book says that Narnia is a miserable place because it is "always winter, but never Christmas." An American friend here in Manila pointed out that the Philippines is exactly the opposite of Narnia, because here it is always Christmas, but never winter... That is such a completely true statement!!! The Philippines begins celebrating Christmas in SEPTEMBER, and it lasts all the way through December. So decorations were already in full swing when we arrived here at the beginning of November. The malls and restaurants are all already playing Christmas music, and EVERYPLACE is decorated. Below are just some of the decorative sights we see around our neighborhood! Our neighborhood is called Bonifacio Global City, so everyone calls it BGC. This tree is in a little square right outside our building. We randomly ran into som...

Our new neighborhood is amazing. We live in Bonifacio Global City (called BGC), a section of Manila that many of the other Americans around here call "the bubble," because it is so Western it feels like you could be in any large American city. Going to a different part of Manila feels like your bubble is being burst. :) BGC just got this new greenway that people love to walk and jog on. I can take this path to get to the grocery store in about 7 minutes! Our building is in the background.  Our building also has the most amazing pool I have ever seen. We are living the life!! Every Sunday, the little park that is directly outside our building hosts a dog playtime. They have two separate sections for big dogs and little dogs! Elias loves seeing all the dogs come to play! There is an outrageous variety of restaurants in our neighborhood. At a place called Wildflour, I got this Carmelized Onion, Brie, and Date Tarte. (What??!!) At a place called The Tipsy Pig, some...

Read Part 1 here. In the Tokyo hotel, we slept as well as you can with a 14-hour time change. Our bodies had no idea where we were and what we were doing! But we woke up ready to continue our journey the next day. Our flight to Manila didn't leave until 5:30pm, so we had all day to relax and try to get our heads on straight. The airport is quite far out from Tokyo, so we didn't want to venture into the city. We just explored the area around the hotel. There was a pretty rock garden:  And a bamboo forest! Just around the corner was a Japanese shrine to a local dance art form, and so Justin went to check that out. That's our hotel in the back right of the picture, so it was quite close. Although our flight didn't leave until 5:30pm, we still had to check out of our hotel at noon. We had heard there was plenty to do at the Tokyo airport, though, so we just shuttled over there and checked it out. At the Delta check-in counter. Elias said he's looking over...

We got all 6 suitcases packed up, and all three carry-ons stuffed full, and we headed to the airport bright an early on the morning of November 3. The trip from Virginia to Manila was a LOOONG one! Our flight path took us from Washington DC to Atlanta, then from Atlanta to Tokyo. The flight from Atlanta to Tokyo was 14.5 hours, so it was pretty brutal. That's a big airplane! We discovered on this flight that it seems Elias gets airsick. That was not pretty. We were only about halfway through that long flight when he started throwing up. However, we had with us everything we needed for him to change clothes and brush his teeth, and Justin and I both stood up so that he could lay across all three of our seats, and he managed to get about 2.5 hours of sleep. Justin and I, however, didn't sleep at all. It was long, but we survived. And we knew that we just had to survive this leg, because we had booked a hotel room in Tokyo and were planning on taking an overnight rest s...