Because of our hotel fiasco our plans in Baguio got a bit turned around. We didn’t get to see everything we had planned to, but we still saw a lot of fun things. Baguio is where Jon’s mission office used to be so he was pretty familiar with the area. Baguio is located up in a mountain valley, so it was nice and “cool”. We even had to where our sweats and jackets out at night. Pictures speak louder than words, so mostly pictures with captions for this post.
When we took off from the City Light Hotel on foot we realized that the hotel was located across the street from the chapel Jon used to attend when he was in the area on his mission.This cathedral was right up the street from our hotel every morning they would play bells on the hour. At first I thought I’d be annoyed, but I actually really enjoyed hearing them play.We walked this street many times on our way to the open markets. The sidewalks were lined with shops and vendors of all kinds. This spot had key makers lined up and shoe repairmen waiting for customers.The first stop we made was to the open market. There were probably hundreds of stalls and most of them had specific items that they sold. Lots of the shops had clothing and household supplies. Others had handmade brooms of all sizes, veggies, fresh fruit, meat, fish, candies and souveniers. Jon is a much better bargainer than I am, so we got better deals when he’d speak Tagalog.The fully covered area of the market had this glowing green roof. Most of the shops under this area were full of local candies and peanut brittle stands.The Philippines was once known for their rice. This stand had all sorts of different types of rice for sale by the kilo. I’ve eaten rice all of my life and didn’t realize there were so many different kinds! These days a lot of the rice is imported, but during our trip to the provinces we still saw a lot of rice farms and farmers drying their rice on the side of the roads. They’d just spread a tarp on the side of the road and leave the rice to dry.The main road in the city is called Session Rd. All of the streets are lined with restaurants and shops. Whenever we were walking on it, I always felt like we were going up hill for some reason. Baguio is like one big hill 🙂Ibay’s is a great silvershop located in Baguio with many branches throughout the country. It’s owned by a church member so they had a lot of Mormon themed jewelry like CTR rings and necklaces, Moroni pins and even items with Jon’s mission logo. While we were inside looking around we felt a huge shake and our saleslady screamed. I thought it was a truck running into the building, but we found out it was actually an earthquake! Supposedly Baguio has been having them in varying degrees almost every day recently.Even though I don’t wear much jewelry the prices at ibay’s had me really going. I had a great time shopping around. We got a bunch of items, but my favorites were these silver rings for $2 and a tie tack with Jon’s mission logo. Maybe next time we’ll go back for a huge silver statue or something, but this time we stuck to the smaller items.If you read our blog you know we’re big fans of shawarma. We saw these shawarma stands all over the place and Jon was brave enough to try one out. It wasn’t quite the shawarma we were used to. The meat was sweet and it was served with cucumbers, tomato and mayo…Jon haggled with this salesgirls for a long time to get us a good deal for t-shirts and other souveniers. When Jon came back to ask if we could take a picture with her all of the other salesgirls at neighboring stalls giggled, we could here them giggling for a few hundred feet as we walked away.We did a lot of shopping in Baguio, but we really wanted to visit this woodcarvers area of the city that we had read about in our tour book. The tour book mentioned what the roads name was, but didn’t mention an intersection. Since we didn’t know the area well we decided to take a taxi and told him the road name. We figured we’d just get off at the first woodcarver’s shop we saw. When we asked hiim to let us out he seemed sort of confused but took our fare money anyhow. After getting out and talking to the shop owner we found out we were about 4 kilometers from where we wanted to be. We had fun walking down the road and taking in the sights. I’m pretty sure we saw every wood carving shop available too. Lots of the shops had similar things, small statues, bowls, utensils, nativities, furniture etc. We asked a store attendent to take this picture for us, we can’t tell if they framed with with wings coming out of Jon’s head on purpose or not 😀We made it to the last shop on Asin road and were lucky enough to catch a jeepney heading back to the city.This is what most of Baguio looked like outside of the city center. Really serene and relaxing.
We ate lunch at this restaurant at SM. We really wanted to be able to sit and relax. I guess we picked the right place, we were the only customers for most of our meal.I wanted to try as many halo-halos as I could while we were in the Philippines. Halo-halo means “all mixed up”, it’s a dessert with everything imaginable in it. This one had red beans, coconut milk, shaved ice, mango pudding, bananas and some sort of cake in it. When you get it, you stir it all up so it’s one big happy bowl of yum.Even though I like halo-halo my favorite sweet treat was the soft serve at McDo’s (that’s what they call McDonald’s). An ice cream cone is only 10P (25 cents)! If you’re feeling really rich you can dip it in chocolate, ube (yam), or strawberry for a little more. They had these little McDo dessert-only shops all over the place. All they sold there were desserts! Hurray!One of the things Jon always told me about from his mission was the hills full of the houses. I didn’t know what he was talking about until we visited Baguio in person. Now I know why he wants a house on a hill so bad and why he gets so nostalgic whenever we’re standing on a hill overlooking a city in the twilight.
The center of the city has this huge park with all sorts of things including these cute paddle boats.Jon’s favorite part of Baguio was when the mist would roll in and touch the tops of the hill tops. He said it was like walking through clouds. Jon’s correction: it is _literally_ walking through clouds.
This was one of the old roads Jon used to walk on while tracting, some of it has changed, but a lot of it is still the same.Soccer field at Burnham ParkStatue at Burnham Park
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