We arrived safely and excited into the capital of the Philippines, Manila! As soon as we got out of the plane, weirdly the smell of the airport took me back to the first time I was here 3 years ago! I had never actually left the airport the last time, just got a connecting flight to Iloilo city. I'd heard that Manila wasn't the nicest of cities so I wasn't really looking forward to our stay here. We fortunately had another flight out of Manila to Cebu booked the next evening.

I had researched the nicest area to stay in Manila which I found to be Makati. We collected our luggage and exchanged some US dollars for pesos as the ATM wasn't working. It's always good to carry USD! We got into a metered airport taxi and set off for our hostel. 400 pesos later, we arrived at 'Our Awesome Hostel'... yes that's the name!
The hostel was perfect! Clean and modern and very cheap! The wifi was great too which is always a massive bonus as a lot of places advertise wifi but it doesn't actually work when you arrive which is super annoying!

We headed out for some food and found a clean looking place called Greenwich which sold mainly pasta and pizza. We were both starving so ordered a meal deal between us. I remember from the last time I came to the Philippines that the food was not to my liking at all! It's either strange looking and smelling curries with chicken feet and rice or very sugary and over processed food- if that's what you can even call it. I was hoping to change that this visit but this meal didn't help. The food was edible but almost plastic, but we were so hungry we didn't care. Back at the hostel, we both showered and rested for a few hours after the long flights. We started our nap at 5pm and ended up sleeping right through until 7am the next morning we were that tired!