Time in country: 40 days
Money spent: approximately $1450 USD each
Currency: Peso
Conversion Rate: 40 Pesos to 1 USD
Food:
Typical food was pork or chicken with rice. Rice was served with most dishes since it's cheap and abundant. Sometimes they'd throw in some cucumbers and tomatoes for the side dish.
Chicken/ Pork adobo, with rice, is one of the popular dishes and it was delicious. The sauce was made up of soy sauce, vinegar, and black peppercorns.
Another Filipino dish was Pancit Bihon, which was a combination of a few veggies like cabbage, green bean bits, carrots and a little meat mixed with thin glass noodles. This dish could be found almost anywhere for pretty cheap ($1- $2 USD).
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| image from google |
With all the tropical fruit, naturally, comes smoothies. The smoothies are usually made with condensed milk, and although not nutritious, they're delicious.
Overall, the food in the Philippines is fairly bland and nothing to write home about.
There are only two kinds of Filipino beer- San Miguel (Pilsen and Light) and Red Horse (similar taste as San Miguel just a higher percentage alcohol). The beer isn't that great, but it's usually cheap.
Places Visited (in order): Sabang (Puerto Galera), Boracay, Sugar Beach (Sipalay), Dumaguete, Apo Island, Siquijor, Puerto Princesa, Port Barton, El Nido
Random Thoughts:
The Philippines is comprised of over 7,000 islands, roughly 2,000 of them are inhabited, and we barely skimmed 15 - 20 of them.
We read from a government agency that there are over 90 million people living in the Philippines (over half of the population lives on the island of Luzon) and over 50% of them live in poverty. The majority of the population is poor and has a very basic means of living.
Filipinos are some of the nicest people we've encountered so far on our journey. They were excited to see foreigners and would say "Hello, how are you, today?" as much as they could. We'd walk down a street and everyone, especially the kids, would say hello to us and smile big. The adults were very welcoming and helpful as well. I think we got more curious looks than most due to Matt being a much larger guy than the typical Filipino. It made it almost impossible trying to find shoes or shorts that fit him.
Filipinas really love their westerner foreign men. A few times, girls/ women even told us that they wish and hope to find themselves a westerner one day and move away. Lots of western men live in the Philippines and have restaurants, hotels, businesses, etc with their Filipina wives. The women told us that generally the Filipino men are no good. It was interesting to hear these sentiments.
Unlike most Asian countries, the dominant religion in the Philippines is Catholicism due to hundreds of years of Spanish rule.
As mentioned in previous posts, transportation in the Philippines was always interesting. From the questionable boat trips and rough waters to the packed non-a/c buses on unpaved roads. As the marketing tourism slogan says, "It's more fun in the Philippines" and that includes the transportation as well :-).
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| www.tourism.gov.ph |
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