February 24 Color Me Unimpressed

By Rosebud -


February 24, 2019 


Morning in Manila. Tomorrow is another day and today will be beautiful.  The weather is lovely. We will pick up our rental car, attend the 3pm Mass, drive to our private resort, enjoy the rest of the vacation.

Yeah, no.


They keep using the word WiFi. I do not think it means what they think it means.

We already discussed the pocket WiFi.


The WiFi at the apartment wouldn't work to even reach the rental car website, much less let us log in, access our reservation and upload our documents (which we couldn't do until we were in the country).

The nearest mall is 1 km away. We'd get breakfast,  use the WiFi to log-in, access our reservation, and upload our documents.  

Except we discovered to access any free WiFi anywhere, you need a local phone number. 
Which we had. 
On the pocket WiFi. 
We already discussed the pocket WiFi.


The kids ate some really good egg custard things. 
We fought with the WiFi. 


The kids found seats at the packed food court and ate barbeque topped with fried eggs.
We fought with the WiFi. 


The kids discovered that bathrooms do not have toilet paper - you buy it from a vending machine. 
The kids ate Dunkin' Donuts. 
We fought with the WiFi.



Eventually, through an act of God, we get it working for long enough to call 2 Ubers and went back to the airport to just do the blasted paperwork there.


No photos exist of this because we were too busy muttering unprintable words.


It is now 4pm, we've eaten nothing but food court and airport food. We've obviously blown past the 3pm Mass and now we're dealing with sporadic messages - when the WiFi flickers on and off like a Haunted House - from Air B&B who had decided that they will cancel our reservation because there's a new rule that you need an uploaded photo of your driver's license.


It's 4:45. We finally have the rental car in hand. There's a 5:30 Mass, 2 miles away. We'll get there in plenty of time. Maybe we could even fight with the WiFi more.
Yeah no.


Remember Manila traffic? We got there at 5:28.


The Mass was quite nice. It was in English with many of the Mass parts in Tagalog. The choir - though only 4 people - was one of the best we've heard. 

The Communion song was "One Bread, One Body" Way to go, Spirit Vatican II Music.

Mass ended and the pocket WiFi (which we now speak of with an "icky-ptui") died. We have drained all of our battery backups. Which means we don't have the map to our house tonight and the GPS we rented with the car is vague at best. So we stopped at JollieBee in hopes of finding an outlet.


JollieBee, we discovered, makes McDonald's look like upscale food. 
Related image


It was... remarkable. 

Image result for jollibee
But they did let us use the vending machine plug, having mercy on poor pitiful tourists.

A+ for customer service.  F- for food. 
And Unprintable for the Pocket Wifi which still would not charge.


We now have a GPS that may or may not get us to a house that may or may not still have our reservation. And we're jetlagged.

Then we got pulled over for "reckless driving."

This makes us long for the calm and organized day in Monaco.

We are thus far very unimpressed with the Philippines. 

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