We had planed to go to the Taal Volcano today but we were in need of laundry services and money. By the time we got all of these things taken care of it was already 11:00am. We canceled our volcano plans and decided to take a shopping tour of Manila instead.
The interesting thing we learned about Manila's shopping districts is that they are segregated into different geographical areas of town based on items sold. Gold dealers can be found in one area, sporting goods and electronics stores in another. Clothing shops were all on the same street, hardware stores on yet another. All food and perishables were grouped together in markets.
The first stop was China Town. A P6 each jeepney ride got us there. I was expecting Manila's china town to look like San Francisco, California’s China Town but it did not. Manila's China Town is the gold center for the area. Every other store was a jewelry store with the others in between being small restaurants or general stores. There were no shops that carried souvenir type items like one would see in San Fransisco. Outside of the gold retailers, all the shops seemed to be catering to the local population only. Tourists like ourselves were apparently somewhat of an oddity. I was looking for a kimono for one of the women at work and figured that this close to Japan would be a good place to get one. I was wrong. Not only were they not available, the word kimono did not even seem to be in the standard shopkeeper's vocabulary. We started asking for bath robes and eventually came up with a Japanese- looking thing which I bought for P120.
There were several pick-your-own-meal seafood restaurants that were quite interesting. These establishments had extensive collections of live fish, shrimp, crabs, lobsters, eels, and who knows what else swimming, floating, and crawling around in tanks. You go up to a tank, point at something and the cook will fry it up and serve it to you on rice. We were thinking about eating frog legs at one of the restaurants but decided against it for some reason.
We walked several blocks from China Town to the Quiapo 'Ilalim' market. Here we found all types of hand made crafts and traditional souvenir items. I purchased a Filipino sleeping mat, some paper plate holders, and a bunch of little mother-of-pearl baskets for the people at work. I tried out the phrase "volume discount", on one of the shopkeepers and saved P2 each on fifteen of the baskets.
On the way back, we went through a section of town that was all sporting goods and electronics stores. By the way, when I say electronics stores I mean ELECTRONICS STORES. They are noting like the Radio Shack stores you see on every other corner in the United States. Many of these stores carried repair parts and specialty component items that only a technician could fully appreciate. I am not much of an expert in electronics and my home town of Oklahoma City is not the size of Manila, but I know we only have one store in town that could even come close to the type of items offered in these Manila stores, and there was an entire block of them.
After spending the last week and a half touring remote areas of the Philippines, I had created an image of the average Philippine person as being rather simple and uneducated. Just walking through an area catering to the needs of technologically-based citizens changed my opinions on this rather quickly.
Our last stop was an outdoor market selling mostly local hand crafted items for tourists. It was here we noticed a vendor selling coconuts. These coconuts are green when ripe unlike the brown coconuts we see in the United States. With four or five quick moves of his machete, the vendor sliced away the outer husk of the coconut. With a final skilled blow he
removed the top exposing the bare inner core often without totally penetrating the meat and exposing
the precious milk. With a small curved knife and surgical skill he separated the meat from the husk in
a quick motion and pored the inner prize into a plastic bag. Some people had him skip the meat
removal step and simply put a straw in the coconut to drink the milk.
Note: We were warned against eating anything in the local markets like this that had been cut in public and not cooked.
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