Intramuros

Hello Everybody! 

Sorry for the delay in post, I was so tired when I got back last night that I crashed and slept a whole nine hours! We had a really busy day that started at the Mall of Asia. We met up with two of Isabel’s family friends who are way more capable shoppers than me for sure. It took us hours to walk the entire mall, that’s how many shops were inside! Around 5 pm we were shopped out and got to go to the historical part of Manila called Intramuros, which means within the walls. Basically it was the starting place of Spanish colonization in the Philippines.

The best part was we took a calesa tour, which is an old horse and buggy! I was so excited to be around horses. The local horses here are small and feisty, and our tour guide made an awesome joke that he was taking us around in his Ferrari with one horse power lol! 

The whole town is basically a bunch of repurposed churches, monasteries, and convents. Even the jail cells were turned into food stalls! The Spaniards were trying really hard to convert Filipinos to Catholicism which meant they put a church every few blocks in this town, but realizing that it’s now overkill, they buildings are more functional now as schools and government buildings. One crazy thing I learned was that after Spain brought smallpox to the Philippines, everyone was dying in masses. Spain wanted to send the vaccine but it was only good in a vial for 14 days and the boat takes 6 months to get from Spain to PI. So, they injected orphans and used them to carry the vaccine here as human refrigerators!

We ended our tour by going around Fort Santiago which was a mixture of U.S. barracks to prison cells and was basically their main military hub. There’s even old war cannons from WWI and WWII. But now it’s a memorial to their national hero Rizal who was executed for treason against the Spanish government. He was the leader of one of the two revolutionary groups in the country at the time and was an accomplished intellectual, doctor, and writer. We weren’t expecting to see the statue of him in the prison cell and both jumped when we turned the corner! 

All of us then went to a very touristy but entertaining dinner where we watched some of the national Filipino dances. The first was binasuan, I was so impressed when they spun around with the juice on their head but didn’t drop anything. The other dance is called tinikling where they dance between the bamboo as it’s snapped open and closed. When they asked for audience volunteers you can bet I was the first to try! It was so much fun and reminded me of the folk dance I used to do back in high school. 

Sending you lots of love, 

Aisha