Day 137: Doggie Cafe

Finally our last full day in Manila. It honestly can't come soon enough - I really dislike this city. There's nice parts to it and some interesting stuff, but large areas are just run down and awful, it's full of sexpats, it's not that safe, the traffic is horrendous, the list goes on. But I'll probably be back another time, maybe I'll enjoy it more then.

Today we had our big outing for our holed-period - a dog cafe about 10km north in an area known as Quezon City. It's technically not part of Manila in an administrative sense, so I guess it's like going to Chatswood or something. Seems like a slightly more suburban place than Manila, but it's still very similar in that there's lots of concrete and very little greenery.

After our usual breakfast we headed off in an Uber up to Quezon City to the cafe, arriving around 12:30. The main reason for coming was (yes, really), one of the dogs is a dachshund, and since we're both missing Schnitzel a lot that was the main reason for our visit. Happy to say that the dachshund (Kaoroo) was a very nice dog, though we were both a bit jealous that he cuddled up to other people and not us!

He had a good run around though, and so did the other dogs (mostly larger dogs like Labs). We also had burgers from their coffee shop after spending about 90 minutes inside. Good fun all around, though the cafe in general wasn't quite as nice as the one we'd visited in Bangkok a couple of months earlier. Those dogs were better behaved and didn't seem quite as over-stimulated as these dogs (there were quite a few people in the play area).

Afterwards we went back to the hotel, thankfully with good traffic since today and tomorrow are a public holiday in the Philippines so many people are out of town. It's only a 10km drive from Makati to Quezon City but it can sometimes take a couple of hours (yes, really).

Rest of the afternoon was spent looking at hotels and options for our next destination (Palawan), before late in the evening we went out for dinner. A few weeks ago (the night before the conference started) we'd been to Z Hostel which was actually only a block or so from our current hotel. Next door to that were some cool little places we wanted to try, so after some deliberation we settled on a craft beer and tapas place.

I had a craft beer (had to limit my choice to just one from about 15 options!!) and we had some Filipino pub food tapas style - adobo chicken wings which are marinated in a soy & vinegar sauce, crispy grilled pork skewers, and a plate of kassava and taro crisps with a prawn dip. Food was great though not quite enough (again it was a bit expensive, not Sydney prices but certainly above average for the Philippines). All up for 3 tapas dishes, a pint of craft beer and a calamansi mojito was about $23. Again - it's not expensive expensive, but when you're on a travelling budget it definitely feels expensive!Read more