"M" is for Manila

NOTE: This blog has almost no pictures because it is just taking WAAAAY too long to load them. Hopefully, there will be some cool ones in the near future!

So, it's been a while since my last post, and lo and behold, I'm in Manila! Basically, I'm serving on a short-terms missions trip with some friends from school, including my roommate who was a missionary kid who grew up here.

It's already Saturday, which is hard to believe because my travels began early Wednesday morning when I took the train to Seattle, visited some SPU friends, and then spent the night with my other roommate and caught a ride to the airport in the morning. Next, it was about 20 hours of travel time, during which I MAY have slept an hour or two. The picture above is of our group in the Seoul airport, trying to connect to the free wifi.

We got to Manila, cleared customs, got our luggage, found our ride, and drove about an hour to the Guest House by the Children's Home we will be working at (absolutely fantastic food, by the way). We quickly discovered that Filipinos love their karaoke...at all hours of the day or night. I went to bed pretty quick (it was about midnight when we got there) and only woke up twice in the night, once to a torrential downpour!

Today was a pretty packed day. We took a tour, broken up into a couple chunks, of the area around the Guest House, which includes the Children's Home and a school and a seminary. It was fantastic to see the work that is going on in this community, much of which has taken place in recent years.

Next, we had some lunch, then went over to Faith Academy, Charis' old high school. We toured pretty much everywhere, and we found someone to let us into all the new buildings on campus that Charis had never seen, since she hasn't been back here since high school graduation. The campus was really nice, but it also got HOT since today was so muggy! I was dripping sweat and tired from jet lag, but none of that mattered as soon as we hit the pool. (It's been a whole week, or 6 days, if you subtract the 15 hour time difference between here and home, since I've been in the water...far too long!) Faith has a beautiful aquatics facility, including a springboard diving block, which I took full advantage of to show off my fantastic diving skills *cough cough*. (Actually, I tried to dive in...but I did a full flip - accidentally - and landed flat on my back, doing a very painful back flop. I surfaced to find my whole group cracking up at how stupid I looked and how painful it had sounded.) Besides that fun experience, the pool was fantastic.

We came back, went out, bought some fruit, came back, and went out to the ruins of a local building that was abandoned around the time of World War II. We ate rambutan, a tropical fruit that is actually from Indonesia. Rambutan is cool because it an important part of Ted Dekker's Black, Red, and White trilogy...one of my favorites. It tasted good, nice and sweet, though I wasn't supposed to eat the seed in the middle, and I ate three. Death may be imminent.

Then it was back here for dinner, and now I'm updating my blog for the first time in well over a month. That just about wraps it up! I'm pretty jet lagged at the moment, and anything I write has about a 50% chance of being non-coherent, so until next time, I'm signing off.