Because it is COLD up here!

Baguio, or, Land of the Vertical

I'm up in Northern Luzon for the next couple of days. Won't get to write tomorrow, because I will be staying in the middle of a poor mining community. Weeee?
Anyway, we left at like 1 AM Friday morning from Manila, on a bus. So I slept on a bus. Sort of. I think by slept, what I really mean is bounced around with my eyes closed for five hours. The upshot of this is that when I DID open my eyes, because it was getting light out, I had a hard time believing we were still in the Philippines. The Cordilleras are WACKY, man. Sheer mountainsides covered in little houses and impossible-looking rice terraces, mist that trails around between the ridges and looks as if someone put it there for dramatic effect, and a road, traversed at disconcerting speed by our bus, that makes the west-coast US 1 look like the Autobahn. Or Nebraska. Or both? Unreal, yo.

Our accommodations here are only slightly like camping; we're on mats on a floor but it is a CLEAN floor, and the bathrooms are sketchy but not TOO sketchy. The only problem is is that there's no hot water; while this is never a problem in 1305971-degree Manila, up here it is dry and borders on cold. I cannot tell you have weird it feels to walk around in the Philippines with a hoodie on. Weird but absolutely wonderful, as my pores are no longer producing like four gallons of sweat a minute. That's disgusting. But true.

Baguio is a seriously cool (now in the figurative sense) city. It's big, but not TOO big, and has the feel of a college town because most of its population is taken up by UP's campus, which is in the middle of everything. It also has one of the most amazing marketplaces I've ever seen - It's half-covered and half-open air, and because of the climate up there, the selection of produce for sale is STAGGERING. We got mangoes, lychee, strawberries (!), mangosteen, kamote tops...they even grow BROCCOLI up here. Anyway, I kind of wish the whole program was up here - but not really really, as it is rather isolated from...uh...everything (which, at the moment, is pretty much all of its charm).

We ate tonight at, I think, the only vegetarian restaurant in the entirety of the Philippines, which is owned by (surprise!) some artsy-fartsy types in film making or painting or something. It's called Oh My Gulay, which is verruh clever because gulay is vegetable in Tagalog. So most of the things on the menu are "OMG *insert food here*", which is pretty terrific. Not to mention that the interior looks like a cross between a pirate shipwreck and a botanical garden. To flush the toilet, you push on the a little tribal wooden statue guy. Bizaaaaaarrrrrre. But tasty! Uh, the food. Not the toilet flusher. Ew?

Anyway, I think I'm done for the night. I have a cold (for real this time; I can't breathe through my nose and it SUUUUUCKS) and I'm pretty sure whatever I bought for $3 at the drugstore isn't helping. Mrrr. Bedtime. Will update in two days, provided I don't fall into a mineshaft and die. Huzzah!