JSランゲージスクールブログ | Travel tips
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Since I recently took a trip to the Philippines, I wanted to make a blog about travel tips for going there. First of all, I went to Manila. If you want to go to beaches and experience nice nature, I don't recommend going to Manila. Manila is a nice city in some areas, but it also has many dangerous areas.
If you want to travel around Manila, you should use a Grab taxi. Grab is a company that is similar to Uber in the west. It is much cheaper than taking taxis and the price is told to you before you get in the Grab taxi. This is great because that means the driver cannot up the price on you. I always took the Grab taxi while traveling around Manila.
I think the safest area in Manila is Makati. I stayed in Makati while I was there. It is a very expensive area though. The hotel we stayed at was ¥15000 per night. This is extremely expensive for Manila. You can find a decent hotel for 4 nights for about ¥10000 for the whole 4 nights. However, we weren't paying for the hotel so it was nice for us.
In Makati, there isn't really any sightseeing to do. There are only malls. There's a big mall called Greenbelt and another called Landmark. In the malls, there are restaurants and bars. We went to a nice bar near the hotel that was in Greenbelt that had live music almost every night. It was very enjoyable. The only problem with Makati is that it is similar to a lot of areas in Tokyo, so you don't really feel like you are exploring a foreign country. However, if you just want to go shopping, Makati is great.
One other downside to Manila is that the air is polluted. I had a sore throat for most of the time I spent in Manila, but once I left it cleared up very quickly.
Overall, Manila is a good city for just shopping, eating, and drinking. It is also a couple of hours from some nice places such as Taal or Batangas, so if you stay in a nice hotel, they may have day trip packages you could go on.
