Makati Food....and Dessert.

     Hello All!  We hope you are enjoying reading about our adventure!  If you would like an email each time there is a new post, you can put your email in the little box on the left and click submit.  Several people have clicked the little google+ box, but we haven't figured out what that does for sure.  :)  Also, it looks like the easiest way to post a comment is to click on the post title on the left and scroll; a comment box appears at the end of each post.

     This weekend we hit the markets again!  Lunch on Saturday was tuna belly and teriyaki chicken skewers, 

and lunch on Sunday was some kind of squid balls (ahem...balls made out of squid...and some other things) with a sweet chili sauce and corn fritters with rice.  We forgot to take pictures of Sunday's lunch.  We are starting to get used to the way the weekend markets work.  It is important to ask how much things cost BEFORE you order what you want.  We learned this the hard way.  It's also good to taste things before you buy.  We did a lot of this...tasted more, bought less.  We drank dalandan juice and tea - green like a lime on the outside of the fruit and bright orange on the inside.  It is very mild and refreshing.  We also tried langka (jackfruit) - wish we had taken a picture of this one.  The fruit is ginormous!  And it looked like a little assembly line of people breaking it down.  It tastes a lot like banana, but the texture is very different.
 (Jackfruit)

We have found that the majority of our time is spent in some way related to food.  We are either looking for food, tasting food, shopping for food, smelling new dishes, chasing something we have smelled.....or just trying to figure ingredients out.  We tried one of the Philippines' most famous desserts this weekend:  Halo-Halo.  In the Filipino language of Tagalog, "halo" means "mix", so "halo-halo" is "mix-mix" - which is exactly what it is - a mix of all kinds of different things: shaved ice, condensed milk, sweet beans, jello, leche flan, candied fruits, and usually topped off with a scoop of purple ube ice cream (purple sweet potato).  The entire dessert is oddly delicious and thoroughly refreshing!  The ingredients are not familiar to us, so we didn't really know what to expect, but here you can see how hesitant we were to finish it:
Before:

After:

  YUM!

 

  Pay no attention to that dessert on the left.  We don't know how it got there. :)

 

 

     We are looking into doing something different next weekend, maybe a day trip out of Manila or to one of the other islands.  There are over 7,000 islands and 81 provinces that make up the archipelago of the Philippines, and every region has its own unique dishes.  We are looking forward to trying lots of them!  However, we are not the typical Makati ex-pats with the fat bank accounts here on the government's dime, so we have to be cognizant of a budget, and we are hoping to blog about traveling and exploring within our budget.  From what we have researched so far, it seems there are all kinds of places we can go and new experiences to share!  Things are expensive in the city - even at the markets - but that's because everyone caters to foreigners here.  Outside the city, it's a different world, and we are looking forward to exploring that part of the country, too!

 

     Makati is a hustling, bustling city Monday-Friday; it's the financial district with the stock exchange building, a countless number of banks, and all kinds of high-rise office buildings, hotels, and apartment buildings.  Traffic is crazy.  Cabs honking, buses honking, jeepneys everywhere.  There are streetlights, but we are not quite sure of their purpose.  People are everywhere.  When it's time to cross the street, it's like swimming upstream against the salmon headed downstream or you go underground to cross at busier intersections.  However, the weekends are quiet and peaceful here.  Seems that most people go home to neighboring areas for the weekends leaving the streets empty.  That also means a lot of places are closed - especially on Sundays - but the feeling here on the weekends is completely different than during the week.  We are getting used to things, and that feels good!

 

     On a side note, we did a little search of coffee shops in our immediate area.  In a 5km radius from our hotel, there are more than 30!  So, guess who's happy?



See you soon!
Eric and Kim