paperghost's posterous

And then there was the time I fed cats in Loreland

Well hey, I'm back in Manila so that must mean randomly turning up at company events and taking pictures of things. I tagged along for a teambuilding weekend held in Loreland.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

I can't really describe how to get there, except that it involved a people carrier with about fifty people in it and a bunch of hills and stuff.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

The main function hall had an amazing karaoke machine inside, which played videos with no relevance whatsoever to the song at hand. Highlights included a female diver who kept putting a crab - or something - into her mouth while the Rolling Stones belted out Paint it Black and some sort of folky lovesong warbling "Hold me once more, darling" while a T-Rex mauled two other dinos.

Unfortunately I didn't get a shot of that, but here's a picture of some fish.

Click to Enlarge

Of course the room wasn't ready when we got there, so everybody else vanished while GUESS WHO stood around for half an hour in front of the industrial sized fan. It was worth the wait though.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

The bed did come with one unexpected vistor, in the shape of this guy.

Click to Enlarge

Believe me when I say there's nothing more terrifying than the prospect of Steve the funny bug thing plopping in your mouth at 2AM, but there we go. It was time to walk around and take pictures of things like a flower and some bunches of...uh....more things?

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

In terms of structure, it reminds me of one of those old Japanese Samurai castles on top of the highest point of a hill, and everything else rolls down....and down some more.....until you end up at a big drop. What the pictures can't convey is the horribly intense heat coupled with the utterly brutal climb back up the endless oversized steps. That was not fun at all. And I'm pretty good at knowing when something isn't fun.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

If you fell off the edge here, you'd probably bounce quite a few times on the way down.

Click to Enlarge

Thankfully everything was made better by a collection of stray kittens that kept popping up for the duration of the stay.

Click to Enlarge

That, and a painful documentation of my complete inability to win a game of pool.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

I assure you, I'm crying on the inside.

Click to Enlarge

After that, it was time for the evening event. Some of the team put on a live band, others jumped around in a pool and the rest played various games while I continued taking pictures in a decidedly furtive fashion.

Click to Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

I also inexplicably sat around for two hours under a flimsy parasol talking about work in the middle of a thunderstorm while sharp parasol spikes came tumbling down from the balcony directly above. However, random homeless kitten came back and brought a couple of friends, so they enjoyed numerous pieces of swiped chicken and other bits of meat. I've probably also caused them to spend the rest of their days aggressively attacking people for food, so it's a win all round really.

Officer down, food everywhere

Oh hey, it's looking at pictures of food time. Read this blog entry when starving for maximum annoyance.

There's no real way to take a picture of this without making it look like "some stuff on some chicken", but the KFC Ala King Supreme bowl is amazing. A ton of rice, two decent slabs of chicken and THIS SAUCE, MAN.

Next up, I've been munching on this frozen yoghurt stuff from Red Mango. I don't get to eat this very often, so it's always fun to over indulge and rub it all over my face and limbs until I'm a big frozen yoghurt monster belching frogurt all over your kitchen or whatever.

Beware: this can cause brain freeze like nothing else I've eaten. And I lick frozen pipes in the winter.

I went to TGIF Fridays for takeout, but I was somewhat terrified by the staff breaking into dance routines both inside and outside the building - to the extent you couldn't even get out properly due to ten of them doing a weird Michael Jackson dance battle on the steps leading out. I managed to knock one of their hats to the floor, though that was entirely accidental.

To be honest, the wacky dancing and slightly forced WOO WE ARE HAVING FUN LOOK AT US DANCE WOO thing is off putting, but then maybe I'm just a grumpy old fart.

Next up: some Vietnamese dish, which may well be kung pao chicken and rice. With green bits.

What do we have here? A slightly generic looking "great googly moogly stop with all the rich food and give me something a little bland and crap looking" meal?

Yep.

The red splat was nice.

Kicking it up a gear - which wouldn't be hard, really - we have a place where they set your food on fire and you have to try and put it out before it burns your face off.

I totally dickballed myself in the face with a spoon hotter than the surface of the sun, too. The food itself was some meaty thing with rice and aargh arrgh argh oh god my mouth aaargh etc.

It's okay though, because they gave me this afterwards:

The sand was a nice touch. What? Oh right, cheesecake mix or something.

This is the part where I bring it on home, and show you my grotesque excesses with a stack of cream filled pancakes and the biggest dessert I've ever been handed.

No not the face, not the...oh go on then.

This is like one of those awful meme pics where they zoom in on the image until it becomes funny, except in this case I only have two images and they're both different so it probably won't be.

The only way I could bump up my fatty fat pants food intake here would be if I had a huge root beer float thing going on.

I am worse than Hitler.

This is not the departure date you're looking for

My latest trip to Manila (via Dubai) went horribly wrong within seconds of arrival. Here's a picture of the departure lounge at Dubai, for no good reason whatsoever.

Protip: if you arrive in Manila with a Visa, don't assume the guy on the booth knows what he's doing. I'd heard the usual horror stories of people sorting a visa out, arriving but not showing it to the immigration guy and being stamped with the standard 21 day waiver instead of the 59 day pass they'd paid for.

No problem, I'll wave the visa under his nose from the getgo and that'll be the end of it. Right?

Right?

Nope. At the immigration gates, they want to see your passport, your immigration form and your itinerary / proof of onward journey. I knew I was in for a fun time when he looked at my flight itinerary and said "What's this?" in a confused fashion and gave it back to me without bothering to read it.

Undeterred, I gave him the passport complete with visa and he looked at it, did his stamp thing then gave it back to me.

My spidey sense told me to look at the stamp immediately, and sure enough he'd stamped me for the standard 21 day entry (instead of the 59 that I'd paid for) without bothering to look at anything I'd given him. Considering the amount of messing around a traveler would have to correct this further down the line, this is pretty inexcusable - especially since I showed him my flight plans, waved the visa under his nose and stated repeatedly that I was due to depart around the end of February.

Didn't matter, stamp stamp stamp 21 days see you later. Thankfully they have a person on duty standing behind the booths, and if you have a problem you can go see them and they'll send you back.

Even then, the guy seemed more annoyed than anything else that I'd come back again - when you've been on the road for 18+ hours across two flights and a zillion timezones this is not what you need to be happening.

I've had a few other crappy things happen at entry / departure - back in August, some guy in a guard outfit (there's a whole bunch of them before you reach the booths) "offered" to help me with my customs form then asked for a souvenir (ie money) once done which is a less than fantastic way to enter a country for the first time. On the way out of the country, the immigration guys didn't seem to be aware you could extend your stay and two of them accused me of overstaying. That was....kind of alarming.

I also had a similar problem when trying to obtain the a visa at the embassy in England for this current trip, because - sure enough - the guy on the counter looked at my passport Vs length of stay then decided I'd overstayed while in Manila from August to October. Again. Someone else had to explain to him that yes, you can extend your stay while in the country but really, shouldn't this guy know basic things like this in advance?

They also told me that I couldn't get the year long, multi-entry visa I wanted and had to settle for the single entry. Why? Because according to them, you can only obtain the multi-entry if you've first been to the Philippines with one of their official visas in your passport. They claimed that turning up with a 21 day waiver, then extending while in country "isn't recommended" anyway and doesn't make you eligible for the multi-entry.

If extending the 21 day stay while in the Philippines isn't recommended, why on earth do they have immigration offices all over the country that do just that? Maybe I'm being stupid, but I don't get it.

There is no mention of having to first enter with a single entry visa to be able to obtain a multi-entry further down the line anywhere on their official paperwork, the forms you fill in, on any notices in the embassy or indeed on their website. Where this rule is written down, I have no idea but please tell me if you find it because I'd love to know. Why is a basic criteria of obtaining the multi-entry visa not listed anywhere? At the very least, it should be mentioned on the Schedule of Fees on the PDF document you print out and take with you but who knows.

Always, always check your passport when it's been stamped because the airport is quite a way off from anywhere, and I imagine you'll have a bit of a nightmare sorting out an incorrectly stamped passport should you look at it about five weeks into your stay then think "uh oh..."

My first earthquake drill

I got to take part in my first ever earthquake drill. It's basically a fire alarm drill with one entertaining addition but we'll get to that later. For now, all you need to know is some dude ushers you out of your room, then out through the fire escape door - slamming it shut behind you, with the sound of a lock catching. I'm not sure what would happen if I suddenly needed to go back the way I came, but whatever. The plan now is to dash down about a zillion sets of stairs:

 

Unfortunately, the ledge thing signifying a new floor pretty much took the top of my head off as it was way too low. That would be one of these things:

I was making good progress despite my smashed up skull, although I was a little bit startled (mostly confused) when some random hotel dude jumped out at me on floor eight, pointed and yelled "DAT BLING, SIR" then jumped back behind his door.

What I didn't know was the place was also scheduled for a fogging, which means people come in and...er....fog the place up with insect killing smoke stuff. So of course I was halfway down the endless staircase when this happened:

Yeah, that was super. Things improved significantly when I reached the lobby:

At least, I think it was the lobby. It could have been a sauna with a bunch of naked dudes in it for all I knew. Anyway, stumbling out into the daylight rewarded me with a trip to a nearby carpark as everybody lined up and stood around while names were taken (along with photographs. I guess those get put up in the lobby, assuming all the fog stuff eventually clears up). Strangely, we had a shotgun dude strolling around while they did their headcount. Somebody must have decided the ultimate repellent to an earthquake is a big ass dude with a shotgun.

Night Vision Goggles would have been better...

The Mall: now with all new and improved space zombies

I think someone played a little too much Dead Space...

 

Interesting store names at the SM Mall of Asia...

I doubt I caught every strange / odd / humorous / wtf name in this place, but let's see what I did end up with. First, a vendor that clearly based their name on the WWE wrestling song from the 90s, Slam Jam:

You can see what they did there (along with mashing up spam and jam in one terrifying mixture, hopefully).

Taking it to the next level (literally, because it was on the next floor up) is this brilliantly named store:

Now with 100% more cock, everybody.

I think the winner in this little competition, though, has to be this food place:

Way to go, guys. Way to go.

Crazy Crepes

While staggering around the SM Mall of Asia, a little food stall called Crazy Crepes popped up on the horizon and said "Eat some of our stuff".

I hate to let people down, especially when they're throwing food like this at me:

 

You can watch them make these glorious slices of nommage in front of you, and yes - the food you end up with actually does look like the items on display. In addition to the raspberry choco, I also had one of these:

Worth. Every. Penny.

My trip to the SM Mall of Asia

On the same day this dude hiked his way up the tallest peak in Indochina, I was wandering around one of the biggest malls in the World because that's just how I roll. A lot of these pictures are blurry to some degree, as a huge mall with anything up to 200,000 people marching through it in a day under poor lighting conditions isn't ideal (and my camera sucks - yes, I'm blaming the tools) but in a nutshell most of the four buildings glued together to make this mall look all shiny like this:

The place is stuffed with every kind of shop / resto / cinema / ice rink and dog show you could imagine. Wait, ice rink and dog show? Yep.

 

Apparently they also have firework displays here every night too. You know what? YOUR MALL WINS. Random snapshot time:

 

At the entrance, they have a pretty amazing LEGO map of the Philippines:

 

 

Elsewhere, bookshops and comic shops were common (although many stores with "comics" in the name carried no comics at all, only shirts, bags and statues). Have some Iron Man and an oddly proportioned Vader anyway.

 

Nobody seemed interested in the Thor model at all. Oh well, sucks to be him. We spent a few hours wandering around, I grabbed some cheap shoes (don't ask), bought some books and ate some food - as you might expect, the surface was barely scratched and repeat visits will be in order (especially as Captain America only seems to be playing here and nowhere else....huh?)

For now, have some blurry cake and the promise of a few more mall related writeups.

Movie Time in Plantilla

So hey, the seats in the cinema were the greatest cinema seats I've ever parked my behind in. The ones in the more expensive places are even better, aparently. The ones here were like big spongy things that tilted back and looked for all the World like they'd been ripped out of a jeep or something. The arm rests are amazingly hard and uncomfortable, though not enough to detract from the joy my behind felt while bouncing around on the seat.

Oh, right. Uh, the movie was Rise of the Planet of the Apes and it was awesome. But really: BEST CINEMA SEATS EVER.

Your escalator does what now?

I had a bit of a surprise when I wandered into a shopping mall, due to the escalators not having any steps.

As it turns out, this is so you can move between floors with a large shopping trolley. In case you were wondering, the trolleys lock magnetically to the escalator so you can't "accidentally" squish someone below you with ten gallons of coke or whatever.

They only get four stars out of five as a result. Still pretty neat though.