Travel Guide >
Asia Travel >
Philippines Travel >
Manila Travel
Metro Manila today encompasses four cities, 13 municipalities, and some nine million people. Manila is the primate city: an urban conglomeration that is the political, educational, cultural, commercial, religions and recreational hub of a vast archipelago of over 7000 islands. Manila is also the brain and nerve center of the country, often considered the nation itself. Since Spanish times, she has been the first and only urban center, for whom the test of the land is probinsya - the province - source of labor, supplies, and a great unstoppable flow of rural migrants.
Today's Manila is an aggregate of a city, a myriad-layered collage created by the accretion and synthesis of many cultural tides and foreign waves. Malay, Chinese, Spanish, English, American, Japanese - each new layer over the last, Manila accepts all, denies none, converts all influences into a piece of the whole. She has many centers, many souls - perhaps too much soul indeed, squandered to the winds - and she exerts a full and uncommon flair, energy and passion into accomplishing even the most mundane thing. She is the true metropolis: teeming and throbbing with various times, tastes and origins.
But for the newcomer Manila is a disorienting urban immensity. Like her Southeast Asian sister Bangkok, Manila is an old river city now held in a gridlock of vehicular traffic and pedestrians. Manila may seem ultra-Westernized on the surface - with easygoing liberal-minded people, fast-food corners and some 25 daily newspapers all dressed up in pop "Americanese".
|
