Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

2. There are now several extra pages - Poetry Index, Travel, Education, Childish Things - accessible at the top of the page. They index entires before October 2013.

3. I will, in the next few weeks, be adding new pages with other indexes.

Sunday 2 August 2009

Philippines 1995: Part 2

Note: this trip was made at Christmas 1995. In the time since then I'm sure much has changed so it may not be a great idea to treat this as a guide. Treat it as a memoir, which - give or take some editing - is exactly what it is.

There are probably few places in the world that look more forsaken and forlorn than a twenty four hour a day bar and grill at eight O'clock in the morning. Rosie's Aloha Hawaiian Bar and Restaurant was no exception. At that hour it was almost deserted. A couple of tired looking waitresses hovered around us taking our breakfast orders without enthusiasm. A solitary drunk was asleep on a stool with his head resting on the bar. Empty, and in daylight, the place was dispiriting and glum. The small stage in the corner had amplifiers and instruments piled at the back but without musicians looked rather sad. The posters, rather bizarrely of Wakiki Beach and Honolulu, seemed embarrassingly out of place. The empty beer stained tables were mute monuments to a place that was momentarily separated from its proper time and function.
I examined the menu which seemed to have been put together in random order with pages of drinks interspersed with dinner menus, bar snack menus and breakfast menus. When I found this last option I discovered there were plenty of choices. There was the American breakfast - two eggs, fried potatoes and bacon. There was the Mexican breakfast - two eggs, salsa and tortillas. There was the Australian breakfast - two eggs, vegemite and fish and chips. After careful consideration I decided that as there was no English breakfast the American one was the better part of valour. As I ate, I did what everyone always does at the start of package holidays, I covertly assessed my fellow travellers. They were about as mixed a bunch as it would be possible to assemble - young and old, male and female, smart and scruffy, singles and couples, half a dozen nationalities. I started to figure out which ones looked as if they would be the most congenial company but before I could make many such snap judgements, breakfast was over and we were on our way.

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