Everything is bigger in Manila

Alright, first some housekeeping. In my previous blog I gave a hard time about the name Rylen. I thought I would post my sisters email to me from yesterday.....

We KNEW we'd get some smart remark from you about Parker's middle name. Turns out it IS a real name, even though we thought we invented it. There are lots of people on google with Rylen for a first name! Anyway, the story. We combined the middle names of Parker's two uncles. RY(an) for Matthew and (Al)LEN for you!

Now I'm the older uncle so the names should be reversed. It could be AL(len) and (ry)AN. For a middle name of Alan.....and that's the bad spelling so they could have just gone with Allen....Parker Allen has a nice ring. It would still be both our names and my middle name.....win/win.....anyway.

Mike asked me if I'm getting to watch football and threw in a little rabbit punch about how bad JaMarcus Russel looks....thanks Mike. Actually, football is not that big here in the Philippines. Basketball and Baseball are big. Oddly enough, they are big Jazz fans out here....so that kinda sucks. ESPN has been grabbing the feeds of all the MLB playoff games so I've seen a lot of those and they usually play the Sunday night football game Monday night and the Monday night game Tuesday night and a random game here and there from the weekend, but not on ESPN. Then, just as I came back to my room from breakfast I started flipping channels to see what is on while I write this post and I found the Monday night game live.....I had no idea. I literally jumped up and down a little. Oddly though, in the US the game is on ESPN and here it's on a channel called Balls. Seriously, the channel is called Balls. I don't know.

So what I am really writing about today is where we went yesterday. When I say everything is bigger here, 3 of the 10 biggest malls in the world are here and we actually went to the 3rd largest, the Mall of Asia.....it was very impressive and of course, I said I'm not much of a picture taker and I forgot my camera altogether. I plan on going back because of that reason. I think it's a little unfair because if anybody has been to the Mall of America in Minnesota, which used to be the #2, it is one big 5 story building and the Mall of Asia actually crosses a couple streets with different theme parts of the mall in different buildings. So it's kind of like different malls but it's all one.

The Mall of Asia was the first mall to have an Olympic sized ice rink.....it's not in a private part that you have to go into, it's in the center of the mall and has a some sunken stands around it. They play hockey games there and have ice skating competitions, it was pretty neat. We went to the IMAX while there and saw Dinasours 3D and it's one of the biggest IMAX screens in the world. I only bring up the IMAX because of something interesting that happened. Before the movie started somebody came in and said something then everybody stood up. They played this video before the movie and it was the Philippine National Anthem. We felt like we were at a sporting event....it was kind of neat though.

There was a bowling alley in the mall so of course we went and bowled a game...it was totally posh for a bowling alley, not like any in the US with all the molded plastic seats and crappy lighting and such. Each set of lanes had 3 wicker couches surrounding the lane with nice cushions and had really nice Asian type lighting. Again Mike, this would have been your one chance to beat me as I had to use a house ball. I still shot a 137 which is on the outside of your range....but you would have had a chance.

Right across from the bowling alley was a big bingo hall so we went in there and played some bingo. Bingo here is like it is in the rest of the country outside SLC where you play for money. When I was 18 I used to meet my Aunt Dorthy to play bingo all the time so I was giving Adam and Cheyenne the lowdown on what to expect. They play bingo in 3 game sets where you buy 3 games for 80 pesos.....so about $1.80 and one of those games paid 20,000 pesos which is about $2K. They also play special games in between for 50 pesos so we did that too. One of the things I schooled them on was calling bingo when you don't have it and to not do that. The first game we played was a special game which was blackout and the caller started speaking in Tagalog and we were like WTF? and I missed an important part of the rules. The first batch of numbers, let's say he calls 14, then every number ending in 4 could be marked. After that they stopped for a minute and we thought it was to let everyone catch up but it was also because it was no longer every ending number. They started calling individual numbers.....yeah, I didn't catch that. So I called out Bingo and everybody started yelling at me and I apologized. We were the only white people in the room and a little later the caller was speaking tagalog again and people started looking over at us.....I think they were making fun of us.....maybe. We had a really good time though.

In about 3 hours we are going to go Jeepney hoping and see how lost we can get. I plan to remember my camera this time. Jeepney rides are 8 pesos....so like $.10. It should be fun. Hopefully I'll find time to write about that tomorrow. Hey Lindsay.....Aries says hi. I told him, "Lindsay says hi" and he said, "oh, Miss Lindsay Hunt?"......so he still remembers you.

Take care everyone.