It was very big. Luckily, taxis were not terribly expensive.
It was very dirty. It is so easy to get used to Japanese cleanliness; you don’t even realize it until you go somewhere else and remember that other people litter.
It was clearly quite dangerous, although Aoe told us that it was actually better in terms of pickpocketing than it had been when Habitat was there two years ago.
It was sleazy: a thirteen-year-old boy tried to sell me child porn in Chinatown on the same day that we figured out that our hotel was a hotspot for old, fat, white Western men to bring their young Filipina prostitutes/companions/mistresses.
It was frequently depressing. We made the mistake of visiting the posh shopping/business area after visiting Chinatown, which made the juxtaposition between the child beggars of the afternoon and the extremely wealthy of the evening rather painfully conspicuous.
It was old. Or at least, part of it was. Intramuros has been around since the 1500s, when the Spanish built their forts and their town. It was basically destroyed by the Japanese and then the Americans during World War 2, and is now mostly a collection of ruins.
(I was startled by how much it looked like Quebec City, which of course makes sense given that both places were founded by Continental powers at about the same time. Still, it was a bit odd to feel like I was back in Canada when I was in fact almost as far from Canada as it is possible to be.)
It was very hot. Except when it was very rainy, thanks to the typhoon passing through a bit to the north.
It was basically totally unlike either Puerto Princesa or Bohol. Which made it a pretty appropriate send-off from a country that had spent two weeks mystifying us (well, at least me) with its contradictions.
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