Traveling Asia: manila _ noisy, stinky, dirty… amazing

Market in a street in the inner city

These are the words to describe the capital of the Philippines from my point of view. Manila is noisy, because of the ridiculous amount of vehicles filling the streets with noise and exhaust fumes. In the streets you can see regular cars, taxis (cabs), jeepneys (you can see so many of these small public busses), tricycles (non-motorized) and bigger busses and trucks. It is interesting to see how all the drivers manage to avoid accidents, I must say that this is impressive to see how there is so much city traffic going without any formal organisation. For example nobody cares about traffic control signals (there are only a few anyway) or pedestrians.

Another thing to mention is the permanent honking in the streets. Here it's the normal way to honk because of everything, not only to warn somebody or to blame another driver, it's just the way to talk through your car.

The second word is stinky! It's really stinky in the inner city. The streets are poluted by ale exhaust fumes. Beside that there is a lot, really a lot of dirt all around. Everything is rusted and broken, the kind of housing for the main part of the population is from our european view just humiliating. The word dirty I mentioned before... and it's not only the streets, houses and cars, which are dirty, many people are dirty, too. It's kind of funny to see that the people, even the poor ones, are mostly clean all the time. How they manage to wash themselves enough is a miracle to me. I for myself am stinky most of the time, because I'm swedding a lot ;)! So, I stink more than the poors, but it's ok :).

To see a city like Manila was really exciting and amazing, even if my foretold words don't sound like that. All in all it was amazing ;). My mum described the city as chaotic and that's true, really! Our friend Viola was just speechless :D!