For our last full day in Manila, we were pretty tired from the previous day and stayed relatively close to the hotel, just a bit of shopping malls and shopping.

In Landmark, I almost fell for a tiny scam.  My gf is busy trying on shoes, I’m off in another section and this guy comes up to me.  He tells me he’s the security guard from my hotel and has held the door open for me which is why he recognized me.   At this point I probably should have said, “I don’t recognize you, what hotel are you referring to?”  Because it’s not a big stretch of the imagination to see a white guy standing there and guess that he’s a tourist.  The guy goes on to tell me that he’s there with his family to celebrate his daughter’s birthday.  I didn’t see any sign of him being with anyone else but Filipinos are open and friendly and always striking up conversations with each other and I figured this was more the same.  So I pretended to be interested and asked a question or two.  And then he said, “Oh, by the way sir, can I have some tips from you to buy my daughter ice cream for her birthday?”   At that point I started to reach for my pocket.  I thought I’d give the guy 10 or 20 pesos to get rid of him.  But before my hand made it to my pocket, he added, “Chocolate cake costs just 374 pesos, sir.”  I didn’t say “fuck off” at this point but I told him to get lost.

Dinner time, I suggested that we walk over to Greenbelt 5 “Phase 2″ and check out the new restaurants, especially the ones with outdoor seating.  We passed this amazing looking bread shop.

I thought about trying a restaurant called Lorenzo’s Way.  Their menu gathers favorite dishes from other LJC restaurants, but since we’d eaten at Abe the night before, I thought this would be overkill.

Eventually we settled on a place called Tapella – nice looking spot with comfortable seats.

I have no idea who “Gaudi” is.   I ordered four different dishes and two glasses of wine.  I was very pleased that our waitress was able to explain the menu to us and seemed to know her way around the wine list.  We were relatively happy with the wine we chose.  After that, things went slowly down hill.

The Spanish cold cuts plate was okay.

Everything tasted nice enough, but I kept thinking back to a similar plate at Uno Mas.  Uno Mas drizzles a bit of olive oil over the meat, puts some olives on the plate and gives you enough toasted bread for 3 platters.  Here the plate was relatively plain with just those four tiny pieces of bread (though it was nice bread).

We were told that their absolute best seller was melted Camembert cheese with caramelized onions so I figured we should try that.

Again, the bread was really nice.  The onions almost completely over-powered the cheese, not that there was much cheese there to begin with.  And honestly, isn’t that the saddest looking plate you’ve ever seen?  That one teeny bit of parsley?

The salad with tuna and “assorted vegetables.”

A thimble-full of bland dressing.  And a smidge of diced beet and cucumber – I’m guessing less than a slice of each.

Finally, Moroccan chicken skewers.

Almost completely lacking in any sort of spice.  Once again, a sad bit of parsley and nothing resembling any sort of sauce or dip.

I certainly wasn’t expecting an authentic tapas experience here but was expecting tastier food, especially at that price and in this kind of setting.  (The meal came out to around 1200 pesos.)   Maybe their paellas are better but I don’t expect I’ll be going back there to find out.

We paid the bill and walked over to Greenbelt 2.  The weather was quite pleasant and we were in the mood to sit outside for awhile longer and have another drink or two.  We chose Spicy Fingers, the busiest place on the stretch, since we know a couple of the owners and one of them was there to greet us.  Inside the bar, this band was playing an energetic set.

I quickly found the limitations of a SanDisk III CF card.  Shooting on continuous, the camera kept pausing noticeably each time the buffer filled, writing the images to the card.  I could have saved some time by switching from RAW+JPEG to just JPEG but, well, I prefer RAW.  Obviously this week I’ll be investing in a faster CF card (or two).

After midnight, we went over to Greenbelt 3 and Cafe Havana, packed as always.

Here’s a couple of bonus “spy cam” shots.  My gf liked this girl’s shoes:

And a different angle on one of the singers from the band at Spicy.

For our last day, time for a bit more walking around and lunch before heading to the airport.  I spotted this limited edition Victorinox Manny Pacquiao watch.

Limited edition, just 1000 pieces (or so we were told) selling for around US$500.  It also came with a boxing glove with his “autograph.”  This is the second edition and I just didn’t like the watch enough to blow that kind of money on it.  Home now, I can see what the first edition looks like – I would have been a lot more tempted on this one (which I see is going for US$550-750 on eBay).