Hobbits, Spam, Hookers and Bad Air and Malls.

We are home safely after two weeks in the Philippines.

The air is so bad you can taste it, the diet is so heavy on fried foods it would not be out of place in Graceland and everywhere you go you are assaulted by the sounds of wild dogs, roosters, honking cars and 24-hour karaoke bars. Still, it’s never dull and I enjoy the stimulation as long as I know I can come home.

One of the highlights of the trip was a visit to the Hobbit House in Manila. The place is legendary among travelers and I’d wanted to visit for years. It’s a folk music bar that features a staff of waiters made up entirely of midgets.

It didn’t disappoint and it turned out that the music was actually quite good. The waiters were pleasant and not once did I feel as though I was going to be bitten in the knees.

The Hobbit House is located in a red light district and before stopping in to visit the wee folk we had dinner in a Japanese restaurant next door to a whore house. The women were all gathered by the door with little numbers pinned to their tiny shorts. All along the street back to our hotel we passed windows with “hostesses” posing for all to see.

We spent far more time at shopping malls than I wanted because no matter how big they are, they begin to look the same after a week. The malls are huge though. Literally the size of four American malls they each seemed to have thousands of stores and entire floors of restaurants.

Another somewhat alarming thing we noticed in the Philippines was the level of security everywhere we went. As our taxi entered the driveway of our Manila hotel, security guards stopped the car and searched the underside of the vehicle with mirrors for bombs. Once outside the car we had to walk through the kind of metal detector they have in airports to get to the lobby. This process was repeated as we entered the parking garages of the shopping malls and every store including fast food joints was guarded by guards toting sawed off shotguns. I also noticed that as employees left the stores in the mall for lunch breaks the security guards searched them by patting them down.

I always thought of Spam as White Trash food but it turns out it’s quite popular in the Philippines. At one store I saw an entire aisle, at least 50 feet long stocked with nothing but Spam in about 20 different varieties. Elvis would be proud.

Ok, that’s all for now, I’m still tired from the trip and I’m sure you have better things to do than read my ramblings.