My trip to Philippines

Hello. My name is Takeshi Mori. I am exchange student from Japan, Hokkaido University. Today, I would like to tell a story about my trip to Philippines last March.

A suggestion from Kei, my friend since junior high school, brought me to visit Philippines. Before that trip, he have already visited there and told me about that. Then, he told that there were some cheap tickets to Philippines. As you see, Philippines is a country of southeast Asia in western Pacific Ocean, with about 9 millions population.

After the flight from Tokyo, I reached Mactan-Cebu International Airport. Since it was night and I had not visited Philippine, I was nervous. My image for Philippines was not a safe country.The first point I noticed was that most prices there were very low. At the airport, I got a very kind welcome from a friend of mine named Jensen, with luxury limousine. I was surprised and asked Kei about that, but he explained I do not need to worry. It cost just about 10 dollars, even though we used it from airport to the hotel for about 30 minutes. And the hotel was cheap too. It cost only 100 dollars even though we had the largest room for a week.

The second point I want to tell is that Philippine was a much more well-developed country than I had thought. The next day after we arrived there, we went to shopping to the mall called Ayala Center Cebu. Here is a picture of it. I could not imagine such a huge and beautiful facility there. Let’s compare with a Japanese shopping mall in Sapporo, close to my home town. I never thought there is such a better mall than Japan. Nevertheless, the price of almost everything was cheap.

What I experienced was not all comfortable things. I will show you one of them. In the evening, when we were waiting for taxi to go to Ayala, we were suddenly surrounded several kids, screaming something to us. Because they spoke us in Tagalog, I could not understand what they said, but could guess. They want money. Fortunately, there was other friend, Leah, and she dealt with the situation. From that experience, I learned that I need to be more carefully for such kind of things.

In the end, I would like to describe a city Butuan, where I could spend the most enjoyable time. Butuan is rather small city than Manila or Cebu, so there was not well developed transportation. So there were cars called “Tricycle”. This is a Tricycle. It looks like comfortable, but actually dangerous. Several people get in the car. I have got in the car with other six passengers. It was so horrible for me. After that thrilling adventure, we reached Gaye and Louradelle’s house, both of them are also my friends. The house was so large, but not like Japanese nor American type of building. It was typical countryside building, that’s why I really like it. They had their grandfather’s 60 years old birthday party there. So we celebrated his birthday. We had a great time with them.

These are some parts of my experience during the trip to Philippine. These are not all story. I want to visit that excellent place again.