Day Sixty-Six: Hotels, Ziplines, and Disgraceful Shoes

8/18/14, 12:01 AM PDT

If you've ever been at the beach, you probably know what a bad idea it is to wear oversized flip flops while treading on muddy ground. Because of how rigid they are, when you take a step, it'll flick up any mud on the back of your flip flops and launch it onto the back of your legs until you look like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Fun fact: One of Pollock's paintings sold for 164 MILLION DOLLARS.

Collectively, these legs are worth 328 million dollars.

So we bought these to make our legs a little cleaner.

This was not my decision to make.

I wore these reluctantly. And for the first fifteen minutes or so, I was absolutely ashamed to be caught in public wearing not just Crocs, but knock-off Crocs.

Yeah, just get it over with, might as well.

But after seeing a couple wearing flip flops, their backs looking like a brown tie-dye painting, I came to accept these Crocs. I mean if it looks stupid but it works, it ain't stupid, right?

Right.

Anyway, today we had lunch at the fancy fancy Shangri-La hotel in Boracay. Look at this place. Seriously, every picture I took made this place look like paradise.

And honestly, it probably is.

I absolutely LOVED the fact that their walkways were bordered with water.

You know it's fancy when fish are spitting in your water.

Beautiful.

There was also a piano in the lobby. So naturally...

Badly, mind you.

We made our way down their mountain (yes, they owned an ENTIRE mountain) to their restaurant. Because we had connections with their General Manager, this was waiting for us when we got down.

I know that

I'm not supposed to

Post food pics but

I couldn't resist.

It was DELICIOUS. And even though I couldn't finish everything (even though I tried to, dear god did I try to), the staff here have a cute little policy on leftover food:

They feed it to the local birds.

"Should we tell them they're eating chicken?" "...Nah."

Here's a few other pictures I got of Shangri-La.

Poolside restaurant, with the beach visible in the background.

"Life's like a box of chocolates..."

Looks relaxing. Was relaxing. Until a spider crawled on my arm.

Poolside again. The edges of their pools turn into waterfalls, which is crazy.

I wasn't kidding when I said they owned a mountain.

Good enough to be a background for Videoke.

Later, we left the hotel and drove to this adventure island place where I got to drive one of these things:

I think they call it a "Mud Go-Kart."

It's actually an ATV, and it's pretty easy to drive considering I didn't crash even though I didn't have my license yet.

Pictured: Me not crashing.

...Actually, I lied, I veered off course and got stuck in a hole while driving it. Eventually, we made it to our destination though: Boracay's highest zipline tower.

They had a golf course that we flew over.

And some sketchy rusty wires too.

Boom. Gifs on gifs.

Yeah, I did the cheesy Superman pose for most of it.
I don't care.

Oh, I also filmed a few underwater fish.

Huh.

RFotD: I'm sorry that these are super late.

SGAT: Finished Lit homework.

Day Sixty-Five: Boracay? More like Fun-acay

8/17/14, 12:01 AM PDT

Woke up at 5 AM to hit the airport for our flight to Boracay. Found a few neat things while looking around the airport.

These are banned in America, right?

Seeing as they're seldom seen in America, I would've bought a Kinder Egg, but at a dollar each, that price was a bit too steep. No way was I gonna shell out a precious 53 pesos for glorified chokeolate.

You know what I was more willing to spend my money on? This cute little drink with Nata de Coco (the fancy name for "jelly things") floating around in it.

The natives call it "Mogu Mogu."

I call it "Effing delicious."

IT IS SO GOOD. I don't know if it's just because of the jelly bits in it, but I can NOT put this drink down when I take a sip. Since I'm writing this from the future, I'll give you a little foreshadowing by telling you that you'll definitely be seeing more of this drink as my vacation passes.

We flew Cebu Pacific again. Which means I once again volunteered for their piece-of-cake coin purse raffle.

Ooh, inverted colors.

More interestingly? We flew to Boracay in this plane:

It's... kinda small, huh?

Notice the starfish-like things on its wings. Yeah, those are called "propellers." They spin really fast to "propel" the plane forward, hence their name. Then the wings take care of lift and all the jazz, magic happens and the plane's in the air.

You know what's equally magical? This video of the propellers I got in action.

What the heeeeeeeeeck? Why are our propellers all broken? And how are we not falling right out of the sky, requiring us to drop the load? The answer: Wizards.

"You got me, Michael."

Just kidding. It's a weird little phenomenon that happens because of how my iPhone camera works. See, when you take a picture, as hard as your camera tries to, it probably can't capture every pixel instantaneously. Instead, it has to take pictures line by line, rolling in one direction as it does so. This is what is called a "rolling shutter," as illustrated by the gif below.

Science!

This rolling shutter is normally fast enough to not cause any noticeably changes in the picture, but when things move faster than the shutter can roll, you get distortion, as illustrated in this gif below.

More science!

Taking that pinwheel to the real world, since my iPhone's shutter goes from left to right, you get pictures like this:

THE PROPELLERS CAME OFF OH GOD OH GOD WE'RE SCREWED.

In the case of the video above, my iPhone's frame rate (the number of "pictures" it takes per second when it shoots video) exactly matched the propeller's revolutions per second (the number of times it makes a complete spin every second), which made it look like it wasn't moving at all.

Yeah. I'm a nerd. Deal with it.

So when we landed, we immediately looked to see what the island had. And boy, it didn't disappoint. The water was INCREDIBLY CLEAR, it was like liquid glass except it didn't hurt.

Woah.

"Stretching to infinity, in such a way that the boundary between
sea and sky blurred, the two becoming one."

I'm actually ankle-deep in water right now, if you can't tell.

We rode a speedboat and explored the periphery of Boracay, during which I took a bunch of pictures with my GoPro. Pardon the fisheye and the bad composition on some of them, the GoPro doesn't have a viewfinder so I had to guess where the frame was. I also have a bunch of videos, which I will save for a big edit later, so for now, have these pictures:

The speed boat we rode on. Notice it is owned by the police.

The iiiiiiiiiisland.

The family, holding on for dear life.

Pretty island thing.

It sorta looks like a Torterra. The pointy triangle rock is the head.

These things remind me of muffins for some reason. Maybe I'm just hungry.

Our boat captain had an awesome pose.

The sandcastle building skill.

This picture was taken underwater, can you imagine?

RFotD: Yes I know, summer's already over. Shhhh.

SGAT: None.

Day Sixty-Four: Jubeat Copious, The Greatest Game Ever

8/16/14, 4:19 AM PDT

This morning, I FINALLY found a reliable and decently-fast WiFi connection, so I dumped a hell of a lot of blog entries. I would've dumped more, but the one I was about to upload had some errors with uploading pictures, so that might have to wait until later.

Hit up yet ANOTHER mall today. Big ol' Glorietta mall in Makati. And I mean BIG. Glorietta is actually composed of five big buildings connected, each designated as Glorietta 1, 2, etcetera. In turn, the Glorietta buildings are ALSO connected to other malls, which include SM, Rustans, Greenbelt, and Landmark. It doesn't really show the immensity of it, but take a look at the picture I grabbed of the spot where the Glorietta buildings all meet.

Biiiiig.

We visited Landmark first since mom wanted to buy a sweater. They had a whole Chinese theme going on to celebrate a Mooncake festival or something.

Not very Mooncake-y, don't you think?

Asking for this picture was a pretty awkward ordeal,
but I did it for you guys.

While looking around, I found a pretty cool pair of sunglasses with one of the lenses missing its reflective bits. I know it doesn't make it too practical, but hell, this pair of monosunglasses is cool.

Maybe if Cyclops could only fire lasers out of one eye, he'd
appreciate this.

But the bulk of my time spent here was in Timezone, the local arcade. Played a bunch of shooting and racing games with my sister, including House of the Dead, which Megan was surprisingly good at.

Firing Glocks and... Kicking rocks? Rhyming is hard.

Being the rhythm game enthusiast that I am, I of course played Guitar Hero, where I got a high score playing Knights of Cydonia on Expert.

It would be impressive if most of the names on this high score list
weren't the default names.

I also found this AWESOME new rhythm game called Jubeat Copious. What first attracted me to the game was it's crazy cool futuristic look.

Look at those crazy squares.

Trippy stuff.

See those white squares in the first picture? The way the game works is that notes would flash on those squares and you had to press them to the beat. Simple, yes, but it gets CRAZY FUN, especially in the fast songs that require you to stretch your hand out and use multiple fingers. Songs kinda like this:

Thanks, Jubeat Copious, for making me live out my Launchpad/Midi Fighter fantasies. I spent around 300 pesos in total playing you while I was here, and those were the best 300 pesos I've ever spent.

"You're welcome, Shawn Wasabi."

I wasn't the only video game virtuoso here though. Check out this guy, who absolutely ROCKED OUT on this drum game.

Oh and we found Om Nom from Cut The Rope impaled on a spike too.

The humanity.

RFotD: You can buy your very own Jubeat Copious machine for the low, low price of 8,000 dollars. Or you can download the free iOS app and try it yourself right now. DO IT.

SGAT: Figured out that I really want that game in my life.