What else did we do?

We were late coming back to work after the trip. The flights are in the smallest airports, seating is limited, and often in just those plastic chairs that people use on their yard patios.  Blind men in bands playing ukeleles are the airport entertainment, for money--it's quite hard for them to find a job. (Is it easy for anyone to find a job in Philippines?)

So the time in the Philippines after Boracay was a bit tense, work-wise. The time in the hotel was very boring.

All I can do is fast-forward through it--> so let's zoom ahead to Intramuros.

It's the oldest intact section of Manila. Originally a fort, the Spanish took over. They killed the national hero, Rizal, there--by just gunning him down one morning while he was imprisoned for the radical idea that being under Spanish colonial rule wasn't the best thing in the world.

We had the opportunity to ride a horse drawn carriage here, but it was too horrifying. The horses looked malnourished, again.  It was hot, this day, and we used umbrellas to shield ourselves from the sun.

There were deep stone trenches dug as prisons and when the prisons were overcrowded, the "bad guys" (so many different people were in charge here) would either deliberately flood them (drawing a portcullis over the top), burn the prisoners alive, or normally, just let the elements of extreme sunlight kill the inmates.

All of Manila & the Philippines were destroyed in WWII. It's pretty horrible to just imagine rebuilding an entire country. Certainly it has happened there, but it's also hard to find locale with historical context. Intramuros is one of them, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have seen it, though even now, the memory of the trip is charged for me. I shouldn't have gone somewhere during the day, it took too much of our sleeping opportunity away and destroyed the  circadian (adjusted) rhythm I tried hard to maintain.