Philippines

Manila hit me differently than I expected. I'd imagined something tropical and easy, but the city is layered — colonial stone walls from the 1500s sitting a few kilometres from glass towers in BGC that would look at home in Singapore or Dubai. I spent a morning in Intramuros walking the old fort, where the air felt heavy and damp, and the moss-covered walls swallowed up the city noise completely. Then an afternoon in Bonifacio Global City where the streets were wide and clean and the buildings caught the afternoon sun like mirrors.

The Manila American Cemetery stopped me cold. I wasn't expecting to feel much — just another historical site on the list — but those rows of white crosses stretching out under enormous rain trees, with high-rises rising in the background, made the scale of what happened here very real. The grass was so green it almost didn't look real, and the whole place was quiet in a way that felt deliberate.

The food and the details are what I keep going back to. The coloured xiaolongbao at a dim sum place in BGC, each dumpling a different shade — grey, red, green, yellow. The dramatic bronze sculpture outside La Cathedral Cafe in Intramuros. The jeepney I found parked on a side street, chrome and paint and old American muscle, somehow still running. The Philippines doesn't try to be one thing, and that's exactly why it stays with you.