Back home from Manila now. My first time to fly Cebu Pacific and it was not bad. All you get for your plane ticket is a seat – no video, no movie, no food, not even a bottle of water – carry it on or buy it on the plane. And as long as it keeps the price of the ticket down, why not? For a short hop like that, I don’t need a lobster bib or cashmere socks.

The only downside to the trip is that when you’re there for a short time and don’t have time to go somewhere else and you’re not interested in sightseeing or shopping malls and not wanting to stray too far because of the traffic and not interested in the girlie bars, there’s fuck-all to do there. Maybe we should have gone to Boracay or I should have booked a fancier hotel with a pool.

Then I killed myself on Saturday night, first by having way too much dinner at the branch of Nanbantei at Greenbelt (my gf wasn’t too hungry and so I thought some place where you could order food stick by stick made sense) and that would have been okay except that, frankly, it wasn’t very good. I’ve been to Nanbantei in Tokyo at least a dozen times and while I know it’s not the best yakitori in Japan, they have an English menu and everything is okay. I’ve been to the Nanbantei in Hong Kong and it’s not too bad. (Oh, look, the web site says they now have a branch at “Couseway Bay.”)

But the one in the Philippines wasn’t very good at all. I sat there thinking that while being a yakitori chef doesn’t require the same skills as a sushi master, it’s still a very precise thing and I wondered how they managed to train local people to do that level of precision and that answer, I suppose, is that they don’t. Almost everything was overcooked, burnt, dried out. It was kind of sad looking at the shiitake mushrooms stuffed with chicken and knowing how they’re supposed to look and taste and then seeing what this local attempt was like. And for some reason, I ate it all.

Following that, we went over to the Max Brenner Chocolate Bar, chocolate served by the bald man or something like that. My gf may be a choco-holic but she ordered cheesecake and iced tea. I ordered chocolate cake and hot chocolate and seriously went into a chocolate coma, barely able to make it back to the hotel.

Saturday afternoon, in a taxi, the driver asked if I ever had more need for taxi services. Since I had to leave super early on Monday for the airport, I asked if he could pick me up that early and how much he’d charge. The amount was not unreasonable so I said okay. Sunday night he sent a text to my gf asking her to “ask sir if it is okay for him to give me some more money because I am in Alabang and have to meet him early in the morning.” The amount he requested was the amount I’d already decided to tip if he was on time, but c’mon, a deal’s a deal, isn’t it? Maybe not.

Flying home this morning, Cebu Pacific told me my bag was too heavy for carry-on so I had to check it. They offer a 200 peso discount if you fly with no check-in luggage, so I thought I would have to pay 200 pesos, which is about US$4 or so. But they told me I needed to pay 300 pesos. It was 6 in the morning, I was barely alive, I didn’t have the energy to make a fuss.

That new terminal 3 at Manila NAIA is nice to fly into but shite to fly out of. The smoking room is closed, the monitors displaying flight status aren’t working, there’s only one tiny shop there.

Two things I noted about the Philippines this trip …..

In job ads in the newspapers, they can still specify an age range and gender for open positions. Like junior accountant, female, age 24-28, include a 2X2 photo with your resume and photocopies of your school transcripts. Hello 1960!

Flipping around on the TV Sunday night, one channel was showing cockfights. Not some movie with fake stuff (like Monte Hellman’s 1974 film Cockfighter, starring Warren Oates and well worth your time if you can find it), this was the real deal. And on TV. Sunday Night Cockfight! or something like that. I watched for a few minutes, briefly fascinated but quickly nauseated. I’m probably not eating chicken for the next few days.