Disclaimer: The times and/or places of this 24 hour period have been changed for reasons of convenience. Reference to persons living or dead is completely deliberate and should not be excused no matter what flowery language is displayed before it.

So I started my morning off with a healthy round of badminton. Of course I didn’t, this was yesterday night sometime, you may notice that the 2nd of January disappeared entirely. But that’s not important right now. The difference was that this time I went to an actual club and if you’ve never been beaten by a 50 year old woman in badminton then I’m sorry but you’ve never known true humiliation. The news isn’t all bad though, I won 2 out of my 3 games in a most ridiculous manner. No one else there took to diving on the floor to rescue a shot or spun like a dervish to resist using my backhand, that’s the thing with me and badminton, I’m not overly skilled…. At all. The trick is I’m just not very heavy, which means that generally I float around doing whatever I like and be relatively successful

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After that the inevitable had arrived. My trip is drawing to an end and in order to guarantee I have some friends to return to I must visit a mall to buy for all a pasalubong (a souvenir). The concept of souvenirs genuinely puzzle me, yes it’s a nice gesture to show y were thinking about someone when you should have been thinking about your very expensive holiday but on the other hand if I received a souvenir from Italy how embarrassing would it be to have someone comment on it?

Nice person who comments on a souvenir: “Wow, that’s an amazing looking matador cloak, what did you think of Spain and its culture? Were you entranced by the deeply conflicting issues of the various demographic minorities there?”

Me: “Umm… Well. I’ve never actually been to Spain. This guy I knew bought it for me. So yeah….”

See what I mean? Still, it benefits the local economy and I enjoyed the rare experience of haggling. It’s all a game in the end, with much hmm-ing and sighs. I even walked off from one stall and they called me back with the discount I had offered earlier. I probably still got ripped off overall but it could have been a lot worse.

Before returning home we were sucked into the black hole of the Krispy Kreme drive thru. I’ve never witnessed two people pouring coffee from one cup into another while driving but it’s like open heart surgery on a highway.

Finally in the evening I went for a destination-less walk. Just me, my flip flops, phone and some tricycle money in case I got lost. I saw some interesting things while I went for my evening stroll. I spotted a cafe which was housed multiple jeepney skeletons inside it, you could clamber into one and they’d obviously erected a table inside it to create a vibrant dining room… What a cool concept, to be honest the entire establishment was an absolute explosion of colour in the dusk atmosphere.

Update: I felt after writing that description it still didn’t do it justice so I went out again with my camera. That’s how striking it was.:

I came across 4 stray cats, all of whom were black. I can’t quite recall if that’s good luck or bad luck. I guess after 4 of them it’ll be pretty clear in the morning.

You know overall I felt relatively safe while walking alone the Filipino streets by night. Of course I was alert, and definitely overly paranoid but it didn’t have a massively menacing feel. Now if I was a woman and alone I think I’d feel more uncomfortable, as it was, every now and then something would cause my heart to jump but it was never anything more than my imagination. And that, is what we fear the most. All the terrors we can conjure up, sometimes we even feed it with horror movies or searching up things like “why are the streets of Manila dangerous” on Google.

Interesting.

Well, I’ll leave you with that and I’ll go to sleep now without too many nightmares I hope.