Bangladesh / Vietnam Pictures

These were not my pictures, but they are great and tell the story well (including all the food). Unfortunately, I will have to add the story and context another time.

https://picasaweb.google.com/114299329752342205782/BangladeshVietnam?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCPaGq4is_MyF7gE&feat=directlink

Taste of Manilla

During our trip back from Coco Beach, we stayed in Manilla for a night. Our hotel was called "the Copa Cabana" an it was next door to a casino and across the street from two more casinos. Enough said.

We had two delightful experiences to chat about: fast food and fireworks.

The fast food in Manilla includes the obvious (McDonalds, KFC, etc...), the local (Chowking, Jolibee's, Mang Nasala etc...) and the questionable (Kenny Rogers Roast House). Jolibee's and Mang Nasala were both highly recommended for their grilled chicken and unlimited rice. We really enjoyed the Chowking for their awesome spicy rice and iced teas. However, our real experience was the Kenny Rogers fast food place complete with space for kids' birthday parties, silver records (for selling 500k albums like the Kenny Rogers Christmas album) on the wall and plenty of soul food! What a great experience! The food sucked, but who goes to a restaurant for that?

On our way back, we noticed that the Mall of Asia, the largest mall in Asia, was holding a fireworks battle between The Netherlands and China. We were extremely impressed by the sweet fireworks display, but we were far more impressed by the sheer length of the competition (~2hrs). The fact that the battle happens once a week only makes it that much more of an impressive expenditure.

Cheers!

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"What a Burn" in Coco Beach

After Banaue, our travels took us to an island south of Luzon in the Philippines. On this island, we stayed at Coco Beach Resort. To summarize these events, the first thought to our mind is: "What a Burn!"

The most obvious way is the sun. Jessica turned red and Jason turned black (guess who is writing this one). So, I say to her, "what a burn!"

That brings up a separate tale, competition. We found a game that can only be defined as horizontal skee-ball. You roll a lopsided, wooden ball (no two balls are alike) up a ramp and it falls left whenever it feels it might be appropriate, where it runs across a set of holes, hopefully going in the one worth the highest points. When we first arrived, Jessica had found her calling. Jason didn't have a chance. Jessica told me, "what a burn!" by the middle of the trip, we were both raised to the level of "island expert". Sometimes, it is amazing what will entertain us... For hours.

We didn't just sun bathe and roll wood, vacationing with us is hard work. We traveled into "the town" where we expected a nice dining experience, and maybe some shopping, etc... "What a burn!" We told the boat driver that we wanted ~3 hours to explore, but in 30 min we had seen the whole town, including some interesting grade school singing, amazing views from public viewpoints, and more new types of food than we could track! Luckily, the boat driver had not finished his in-town purchases yet, so he was still around to drive us back to our horizontal skee-ball championship.

We went kayaking throughout the lagoon to check out beaches, homes, etc... When we got back, we figured out that Jason dropped the key at one of our beach adventures. Oops! The only free way to get it back was to take the kayak back out and get it, so that is what Jason did after a whole day of kayaking before that. What a burn!

Finally, we were certainly burned at finding out two instances that make even us nauseous: 1) fine dining on a revolving platform that constantly jerked due to aged gears (the picture) 2) hitting the very high seas in a tiny boat on our way back.

Partially because of these minor burns, we had an amazing experience seeing the island culture of the small town, checking out the sweet homes while kayaking throughout the small bay, sun bathing on our own, private beach (at least while we were there), learning about new, cool drinks at happy hour, fine dining around the resort, etc... Our only regret was not having enough documentation on the iPhone such that we could put a sweet picture on this blog. What a burn!!