In my last post we were still on our way to the Philippines.  I’ve been here for a few days now, and I’m starting to get used to the randomness and inefficiencies that the Philippine culture consists of.

But back to Singapore. After breakfast, we wandered around the airport.  We caught the skytrain to the other two terminals, had a wander around, continued our search for headphone adaptors, and eventually found a nice coffee place.  Over a coffee we did the readings, and had a nice long discussion about them, before heading back to Terminal 2 in preparation for catching our flight.

The flight to Manila was a little more turbulent than our flight to Singapore, but otherwise uneventful. Customs at Manila was more a formality than a thorough examination of what we were bringing in to the country, so in short order we were outside the airport, and catching a taxi to the Shalom centre.  This turned out to be an extraordinarily long taxi ride, taking around 1.5 hours to get to the Shalom center.  Traffic was bumper-to-bumper, and in typical Filipino style, appeared to be completely chaotic.  Apparently the traffic was worse than usual, because a film festival had closed one of the major roads.

The Shalom center was quite close to a major shopping centre, Robbinsons. It was there that we bought SIM cards for our phones, had dinner, and admired a pianist, saxophonist and bass guitarist ensemble ripping up some Christmas carols, before heading back for an early night.  We enquired about currency exchange, but unfortunately they were unable to help us.

The next day was Sunday, Christmas day.  This mean that a lot of the shops didn’t open till late.  We had a light breakfast at Starbucks, and by the time we got back, the van that would take us to Uncle Rudi’s place had arrived.

It took a few hours to get to Uncle Rudi’s place, and we arrived just after the afternoon bible study started, so we walked across the rice fields to get to the hall.  It was here that Phil, in his over-confidence about where we were going, managed to walk into a big patch of mud.  He got stuck, and with a bit of help, got out of the mud, minus his shoes.  His shoes were completely encased in mud – he had sunk almost a foot deep in the mud!  So we went back and he changed into some thongs before we tried again.

That night we enjoyed Aunty Leah’s cooking, and stayed up late talking with Dan and Uncle Des, before finally going to bed.  The youth conference was only around 30 minutes away, and we would leave the next morning after breakfast.