Does anyone else really enjoy living in Manila?

So I see a lot of rants about Manila all the time. But personally I like it a lot. I wanted to make the post to see if there’s other people liking living here.

I’m privileged that I control my time, so I can go out whenever I want to. It’s incredibly easy to avoid the traffic hours, so traffic is not an issue at all.

Public transport barely exists here, but who cares, just Grab everywhere. Stuff costs like 150-300php per trip. Me and my wife go together. In Europe, a bus ticket for two people would be 240php. So I would rather pay similar price for a taxi that picks me up and drops me off exactly where I need to be than do the bus.

Access to international and local events is amazing. In the last 2 years I went to multiple basketball World Cup games. 3 international high end musicals. E.g. Philippines was the first Asian country to have Hamilton. Multiple local musicals. International concerts. Food experiences with one day fine dining events from high ends chefs.

Access to the airports and everything around. The airport is huge, if you live strategically where you have good access to it, let’s say up to 30minutes drive. Then various small trips are very very accessible. There’s plenty of cheap and quick trips within Philippines. E.g. I’ve been wanting to go to Sagada but every time I think about needing to take a 10hour bus, instead I just get tickets to Bohol or some other island. 30minutes to the airport. Be there 1 hour before flight. 1h 20minutes flight. And I’m there. Pay like 2500php and you are in a beautiful island in 3hours. Besides local stuff, the nearby countries like Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong are incredibly accessible, short flight and cheap tickets.

The food options. You can truly find anything you want. All from super budget to very high end. All kitchens. There’s specialized things for everything. Often a lot of stuff is also accessible by grab and have long working hours.

Hobbies. No matter what niche hobby you have, there will be a community for it. I literally just passed by a huge tournament of a trading card game. There’s a rock climbing place that is always active. Skate park. Collectibles. Etc. there’s access to absolutely anything and people are friendly and welcoming.

Condo living. It’s actually really nice. Beautiful view. Amenities. Security. And connected to the mall that has access for shopping, groceries, immigrations office and food. No matter the weather I can always go out and do groceries or grab coffee without ever needing to drive a car.

Also side note, but the air quality is surprisingly good. Many other cities that are this big have really poor air quality, but NCR has very little industrialization/factories, so the only pollution is from the cars. Making the air significantly better than many cities in Europe that have big industrial neighborhoods or burning stuff for heating.

It’s great. Of course there’s negatives like all places have. But overall there’s so many positives that are hard to get elsewhere.