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Sunset seen from Plazuela

In Iloilo we stayed at Business Hotel (not in photo)—small, efficient, unassuming lodgings surrounded by restaurants and bars that stay open till late. If you require quiet for sleeping, don’t stay in the corner rooms with numbers ending in 02. It’s like curling up inside an amplifier: people singing Bryan Adams and U2 with varying degrees of ability. Fortunately noise lulls us to sleep; it’s silence that creeps us out. (We start imagining we can hear the neighbors cutting out letters from newspapers to make ransom notes. Do criminals still do that, or do they just use different fonts and font sizes in the same letter?)

Tuesday morning we checked out of Business Hotel, Tuesday afternoon we checked into at the Radisson Blu in Cebu. Its lobby is so vast you could play football in it. Two or three games at once.

The SM City next door is humongous.

Of course most SM malls are huge, but this one has epic scale. You know how you could be walking in a huge mall in Metro Manila and still feel cramped? The ceilings are too low, the hallways too narrow, as if the builders ran out of space? You won’t get that feeling here.

This morning we’re checking out of the Radisson, this afternoon we’re going home to our feline masters. (Holy crap, Shakespeare and Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus has opened in Manila!!)