Day 121: Hibernation & Party

Today Shandos was on a photography walk around central Manila. She's having a good time at these things, but they're organised by the conference and I didn't register in time to be able to come along. Alas.

I played video games all day again, though I took an hour out in the morning to do some laundry and catch a shuttle bus over to the convention centre to pick up my badge and familiarise myself with the place. It's huge! Several large convention halls, breakout rooms and so on. It's nice enough, though it's got that concrete brutalist feel to it that a lot of 70s era buildings had. The whole area was a redevelopment project overseen by Imelda Marcos back when she was First Lady

Shandos's photo walk finished up around 3pm, and after a rest and freshening up we headed over to the nearby SM Mall of Asia, supposedly one of the largest in the world. It felt a bit dingy though, and I wasn't a huge fan. It was right on the waterfront though, so we took advantage of the location and time to grab a drink at a waterfront bar and watch the sun setting over Manila Bay. Beautiful stuff, and you almost forget where you are for a while.

Next stop was the official Conference Opening Party at the BlueLeaf Filipinas by Marriott. Beautiful venue and some incredible production. Lots of dancers, music, singers, with some audience participation as well. We did a bit of dancing but not a lot, as we still didn't know anyone that well aside from a couple of Shandos's acquaintances.

Food was good though I felt off colour for the next day, not sure if it was related! Definitely passed on the "balut" - it's a boiled, fertilised duck egg. Yes, you peel a boiled egg, bite into it, and the duck foetus is in there. You're supposed to just crunch through it, bones, feathers and all, but only a couple of folks were brave enough to give it a go. Apparently the egg part was quite nice!

There was a company there making cocktails with a Filipino spirit called Rakan, which I had quite a few of. Thankfully we left around 11pm before things got too out of hand - conference is starting tomorrow!Read more