Welcome to the Philippines!

If you don't know anything about Asia , the Philippines is like the jolliest of them all. They're just happy fun jolly people and you know what? It's been three years. I'm not taking this anymore. I've been pushed around, I've been threatened , I've been thrown into dungeon, I've been the butt of all the jokes, I'm the Filipino one. This is my time.

Welcome to the Philippines.

Hey everyone I'm Keith and as you know, I'm a Filipino. Years ago I was looking for a job and I saw this ad asking for a motion graphics animator on Craigslist Paul and I literally met up at a Jollibee for my interview. He said I was his top three candidates. In reality, there were only three candidates that applied. So technically I didn't lie but yeah the other two people kind of sucked.

So yeah oh and back then. I had this weird mustache and Paul's hair was basically this thing. Ken and I have been talking for a long time and we agreed . Ken definitely has to be in this episode you've come so far from that Craigslist jollibee interview. You've earned this.

Ola the Philippines is an interesting country . Because there's sort of a dichotomy between labels. Maybe you ask a Filipino if they consider themselves Asian or Pacific Islanders. You might get contrasting answers. What do you consider yourself? Yeah I always thought Pacific Islanders sounded kind of cool , so I usually stuck with that. So first of all the Philippines is a tropical archipelago of over 7,000 islands about 2,000 of which are inhabited and it is the largest island nation. Without any land borders or shared island territory, with another nation, the country is located in Southeast Asia straddling the Philippine Sea.

In the north, the South China Sea in the West, and the Sulu and celibacy in the South. Just to skip away , lies the island of Borneo which is split amongst three nations. At the closest point only about 22 miles or 40 kilometers away from the nearest island that belongs to the Philippines.

Now in general, many people will refer to one of the three main island cluster regions that people are part of their Arles. Own in the north where you can find the capital Manila and where the half of the population lives Bisaya. In the center and Mindanao in the South.

Otherwise, the nation is made up of 17 regions. One of which is autonomous the Bangsamoro, autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao. This place has a high level of self-rule and on ami appointed by the government. We'll explain more about this later if you want to be absolutely technical guessing.

City a bit north of Manila is the largest city in the Philippines.

However, the surrounding sixteen towns and cities by Manila are called Manila Metro or the National Capital Region and they basically act as one unit. Otherwise, the largest city outside of the NCR are Davao City in Mindanao and Cebu in the Visayas. Manila has the largest and busiest airport. Ninoy Aquino International Airport which is basically the hub that services the entire NCR.

They also have the busiest shipping port at the port of Manila. Otherwise, the second-largest Airport is cebu mactan International and rounding up for third place is de Valle City Francisco bangoy International.

In terms of land transport , though the Philippines is well-connected amongst the islands, in fact the longest highway is the Pan Philippine Highway that stretches about 3,500 kilometers across the country. And connects listen Samar Liat and Mindanao with underground tunnels connecting them. Finally, the Philippines has only two territorial. Disputes the state of Sabah in Malaysia on North Borneo. The territory once had been part of the sultanate of sulu. A muslim state that existed the 15th century to the 20th century. And that's a whole other story as for the others, dispute as we mentioned quite a few times already.

This whole area known as the Spratly Islands, is a complete mess if you don't know anything about this place. It basically goes like this! Yeah it's pretty crazy.