Greetings from Megamall, one of the many malls in Manila (and one of the largest). We arrived this afternoon after a 1 hour 45 minute flight from Davao on Cebu Pacific airlines. The highlight of the flight was Joe’s amazing win during the in-flight contest. He was the first one on the plane to hold up his safety instruction card, which won him a Cebu Pacific cellphone holder! Now he just needs a phone. It helped that they asked for the same items they did on our previous flight with them. (He already had the card in his hand before they asked.) I think Andy should have won the second contest (it looked to me like he had his boarding pass up in the air first), but I think they didn’t want to give the Americans 2 prizes in a row.

We leave tomorrow morning for our flight back to LA. Due to the recent terror threats, we are packing very carefully. Northwest has explicitly informed us we can’t have any liquids (not even a water bottle – even if we drink out of it ourselves to prove it’s water), gels, lotions, aerosols or “similar items” in our carry-on luggage. That includes hairspray, toothpaste, deodorant, chapstick, and shampoo. Recently they have lightened up a bit and allowed contact eye solution, in small amounts. What does this mean? It means we need to warn those picking us up at the airport. No one is going to want to be very close to us when we step off the plane in LA after our 18-hour flight from Manila with no toothbrushes, deodorant, or showers. =)

Of course, it could be much worse, since there have been many passengers recently not allowed to bring any carry-on luggage.

Things were quite strict on our domestic flight today, as well. It seems the Philippines is trying to up their security as well. Or at least try to. They demanded to check our carry-on luggage for forbidden items before we entered the airport in Davao. But their rigorous search was completely useless, because they did their search before we checked in our check-in luggage, and relied on us to tell them which bags to search (they asked us only for our carry-on luggage). So pretty much you could decide which bags they searched, regardless of whether you were actually going to take that bag on the plane or not. I guess at least it looked effective. Don’t tell anyone, but we accidentally took a jar of peanut butter on the plane in our carry-on.

Alas…I remember the days when I used to take my Swiss Army knife on the plane in my pocket.

Oh, and in case you are wanting to hear more about our trip (and that 2 week period in which we didn’t post anything to the blog), details will be coming. We have been working very hard on editing photos & videos, and writing about the whole trip so that we can share with all of you about it.