Scenes from Manila

Here's some pictures of life in Manila.


Here in the Philippines each barangay, small neighborhood area, has a fiesta one weekend out of the year. So that barangay decorates the streets and spends the weekend partying. A couple weekends ago Uche and I noticed that there were a lot of fireworks going off and there was lots of loud parties happening. Uche even saw at one house there was a live band playing in the courtyard. We thought at first it was early Christmas celebration as Filipinos start celebrating Christmas as soon as the "ber" months hit beginning in September. A day or later we realized that it was fiesta time. Next year we'll have to join in.



The first picture shows the whole street decorated and here's what they used. Spaghetti noodle wrappers. So when you're looking down a street it looks really cool and decorative. Then you get closer and see what they used. I think it's such a creative way to make inexpensive cool decorations. Of course, someone ate a lot of spaghetti as the decorations go on for blocks.


Here's the Catholic church down the street decorated. This is probably my favorite decorations in this area. You can't tell really well in the picture how shiny the plastic streamers are.


I couldn't tell what exactly was used to make these decorations. They're silver plastic and very shiny. All I know is that it looks cool especially when there's a breeze.

Part of adjusting back to life in Manila is getting used to crowds again. As it's Christmas time, the malls are ridiculously crowded. Uche tried to get a picture that would do the crowds justice, and this is as close as we got. We'll be working on getting more because it's really quite amazing. As far as you can see it's a sea of people...

This is the mall two streets from our house. It's huge, of course, and they've been working on a new addition to it. It's going to be the 2nd biggest mall in the Philippines when they're done with it. It may be hard to see, but there's quite a few guys working on the blue section.

Here's a close up of two guys working. Notice the lack of any kind of safety anything. It kind of freaks me out to watch them because they're working really high up and if something bad happened they would be dead.