1. Spending is such an odd word. Try saying it thrice and it loses meaning.
   
2. Bus conductors have excellent memory and superhuman balance in moving vehicles. I can't, for the life of me, imagine working as a long distance bus driver or conductor... Traveling the same route back and forth for n times a day. I'd be bored out of my mind! Although I must say driving a double decker is extremely enticing. I wonder if I'd be more confident driving a bus than I do a sedan or an SUV.
   
3. Chowking, from multiple taste tests, has the most scrumptious Danggit and the best Tofu.
   
4. "So this is how the world looks like at 6 in the morning... meh"
5. I've been to Divisoria twice before and the whole layout of the place still doesn't make sense to me, even after I looked it up on Wikimapia. Baguio's swerving streets are fairly easy to navigate, and most of Manila is planned with a gridiron pattern. Divisoria's streets however are a concrete and asphalt chop suey. The road signs (when available) aren't clearly visible, although my poor navigation skills would find no real use for them if they were. It isn't much different from Rome if you think about it. Replace the Tiber with the Pasig River, replace the Pantheon with the Tutuban mall, the Trevi fountain with leaking hydrants, gelato with dirty ice cream, "Quanto?"s with "Magkano?"s and you've got Divisoria. (oh, and add the smell of "cockroaches" ala Claire Danes... olfactory prude b*tch)
   
6. Divisoria is so chaotic... I love it to pieces. Aside from the streets (or lack thereof) the place is teeming with people. People walking, people running, people getting conked on the head by the massive sidemirrors of delivery trucks with drivers who have a compulsion to honk every three minutes. Honk and conk. Honk and conk.
   
7. Calamares tastes excellent with adobo if you're really really exhausted.
   
8. Here, 6 pieces is considered wholesale.
   
9. "Wait! this costs thrice in (insert overpricing mall here)!!!
10. Piracy has a class system according to apparent resemblance with the original. It takes a CSI to determine genuine Fendi bags or Hugo perfumes in these parts.
11. Small retractable trolleys cost 300 pesos (6 dollars)... believe me you'll need one (or two) Do you have any idea how much 140 pieces of box board weigh??? Let's just say, I was this close (making an action with my thumb and forefinger) making a collect call to Phil Pfister.
12. Even the most comfortable Chuck Taylors (mine) and Hushpuppies (ate Pam's) fail you if you walk all day. Masseuse!
13. When going to Divisoria for bulk shopping... go in droves. Ate Pam and I were contemplating how we could have possibly done the whole trip without my Dad and her brother. Elbow grease! That and my Dad is a supernatural navigator.
    
14. I have newfound respect for rickshaw drivers pedallers. Two carried all of us and all the boxes and bags and bales we bought to the terminal. There were no other accessible forms of transportation. Ate Pam and I must've looked terribly ridiculous when we see-sawed back and forth trying vainly to add some momentum to the struggling pedicab. We didn't notice because we were laughing our asses off.
    
15. A sore butt from a five to six hour bus ride makes everyone cranky.
16. I am stymied by people who watch Steven Seagal movies. There are people who actually like him? Gawd... degradation of the species. His name conjures images of birds in my mind. Especially those who say "mine, mine, mine" on the Sydney Harbor in Finding Nemo... stoic, and not the fashion forward super model stoicism nor the helpless botox induced stoicism. It's the "I don't have talent and/or thoughts in my brain and/or nerve endings on my face" type of visage. One was shown on the bus back to Baguio, it was the perfect sedative.
    
17. "It's a small world..." It's interesting... I usually ride Victory Liner buses, but on this rare occasion, me and ate Pam rode on a Genesis one because the station is closer to our destination. And it just so happens a highschool buddy of mine was on the same bus going home. He saw me smoking in one of the stop-overs. I forgot to mention that also during the Sagada trip, in the heart of the Sumaging Cave, I met a friend of mine from primary school as well. Is the world shrinking?
    
18. Divisoria should be on a tourist's itinerary. It's one of those gems only a few foreign tourists get to see. Don't ask me why it's called "the dividing line"... The answer was probably explained during one of my history classes while I was reading Scott Summers and Jean Grey's third attempt at a wedding... (Silver Surfer will be in the next Fantastic 4 movie! Can't wait! I wonder if Galactus tries to make the world a kebab)

Labels: boo-freakin-hoo, filipinowledge, travels