Day Off in Manila

Woke up around 9 and just putzed around the room. Had about a hundred emails to wade through since I haven't been online for nearly 36 hours. Janet called around noon and asked if I wanted to go to lunch, so we hit the mall next door. It's a huge mall, hundreds of stores, and on the second level, dozens and dozens of restaurants. After some wandering, we chose a Vietnamese place. I had a big ol' bowl of Pho, the traditional Viet noodle/soup dish. JT had the same, but I gotta say, she's a helluva lot better than me when it comes to eating noodles with chopsticks.

We walked around window-shopping for about an hour, then headed back to the hotel. Nothing else on the agenda today, until dinnertime.

Oh, yeah, dinnertime. My friend Paige has been here before (and even stayed in our hotel), and she said I had to go to the Hobbit House. It's a restaurant/bar/nightclub owned, operated, and staffed by little people. DWARFS! I told a bunch other folks about it and 8 of us wound up going. We got cars and drivers from the hotel and headed over around 7:30. The cars were 2100 pesos each for 3 hours time. That's $47.73 each for 3 hours – a deal. The Hobbit House was a hoot. The little people love having their pictures taken and happily pose for photos with customers.

I had a Filipino dish called Sinigang and it was great. It was kinda like Vietnamese Pho, and was served in a clay pot. Lots of onions, tomatoes, daikon (Asian radish), beans, chili peppers, spinach, and lots of shrimp. And all kinds of interesting spices that I couldn't identify. Looked like this:

Here's a shot of Blaine with the bouncer, who was the smallest guy working there:

After we got back to the hotel, a bunch of us headed straight to the bar at Outback. I bailed out around 12:30 because it was a school night…