Manila is hot, humid, crowded, dirty and overpriced-- a bad combination indeed. To make things worse, we arrived early in the morning and hotels not only don't allow check-in until 12 or 1, they also can't even say if they will have a room. We looked at several. Most that were within our price range were stuffy, smelly, dirty and otherwise crappy. We finally found an acceptable one where we left our bags until we could check in. Rowshan went to try to fix the computer. I wandered. Of course, both of us really wanted to sleep. We had left our hotel in Chiang Rai at 7 AM on the 21st. We longingly thought of that hotel (Morning Dew Lodge) which had been the best we'd stayed at during our travels.

We got into Bangkok around 10 AM and found the public transportation to the center 35 baht to Victory Monument, 20 baht/sky train to Siam square = 55 baht vs 150 which is they price of the standard airport bus. There Rowshan attempted to find out what was wrong with the computer. I went to Center World hoping for more interesting design related exhibitions. Instead there were just shoes for sale. Zen didn't seem as swank and color coordinated either. I don't know if it changed or my perception did. It seemed very cluttered-- like typical Asian stores.

Eventually we went back to the airport to kill time there. We had about 6 hours before our flight. The flight was supposed to leave at 12:30 AM but was delayed maybe 30 minutes. So to make a long story short. No sleep that night.

We took a jeepney to the center of Manila. Jeepneys are like Sawngthaew except instead of being made from pickup trucks, they are made from Jeeps (or at least were). It looks like they make the outside out of sheet metal-- the same stuff they use for air vents and things.