February 18th 2015 iloilo- Day 1

My first thoughts of iloilo was that I really liked it as I walked around.

As I walked farther I noticed the neighborhoods changing with less motor vehicles and more peddle bikes for cabs.

Thinking I was heading to the ocean I kept heading in the same direction and came to small alley ways and went in and kept walking and realized I was in a really poor neighborhood. Every alley way I walked down people would immediately look at me as I am sure they don't see too many big white guys with blond hair and blue eyes and they would say "Hello" or "Good morning" and the most common was "Where are you going?". It was going down all theses alley ways where I eventually got lost.

The Philippines isn't a great place to be a pet. This kitten doesn't exactly look healthy but neither does any animal I see including dogs here.

One thing I like to do is watch the construction going on. In Philippine construction they normally build vertical columns of support with cement and rebar as you can see here and once all the support columns are in they fill in the walls with cinder block (hollow blocks).

I notice all their meters are high up on poles where they need a truck to get them up their to take the meter readings for each residence. It seemed an odd and inaccessible place to put them but maybe it keeps people from tampering with them or wrecking them?

After being lost for a couple hours I finally found my hotel again and still had a couple hours to kill so went over to a place called COFFEE BREAK and got a coffee (50 pesos) and blue berry cheese cake (110 pesos). The cheese cake was very good! As I sat there a vendor with his goods came up to me and I nodded my head "no" that I wasn't interested but he came up anyhow and I checked out his stuff. I ended up buying some sunglasses off of him for 550 pesos ($15 cdn) as he demonstrated that they were unbreakable by twisting them up into a ball where I was impressed and the pair of cheap sunglasses ($3 cdn) I bought 5 days ago in Bacolod broke within a day so flexible sunglasses were what I needed!