Not Sweating the Small Stuff

Rockwell – A Snazzy Adjunct to Noddy Land

We’ve booked in for the three months of our stay into a unit at Manansala, Rockwell Centre, a gated estate in the Makati district – a bit like Beverley Hills in Los Angeles, or Knightsbridge in London.

Now Rockwell is a veritable Noddy Land of a mini-suburb with a boggle (the right group word?) of high-rise apartment buildings at its centre. These luxury towers surround the world’s largest swimming pool cum spa. With a plethora of restaurants and pleasuring facilities fringing ‘the waters’.

All of which extend out to a small forest, in case you wanted to … well, you know. This is the Attendant of Trees:

And here are some of the Denizens of the Forest:

And a typical woodland activity;

Adjacent to the pool complex is a four-storey mall, an old converted factory. The Power Plant has three cinemas, a bowling alley, a super fab serious bookstore, every well-known clothes designer (Salvatore Ferragamo, Kenneth Cole, … ), luxury goods stores of every conceivable kind, restaurants serving the widest range of fare … you could live out of it. A monument to high-end consumerism.

We’re on the 27^th floor of the Manansala building, with balcony views like these:

Now just to give you some idea of the insane level of indulgence here, each intersection has at least two and up to four police to smilingly assist you cross. And any shop in the mall will russle up at least two boys to assist you home with the goodies you purchase.

So after a hard day working your credit card half to death, you can collapse on a chair on the balcony to catch the knock-out sunset:

And gobble down your dins of squid and tocino:

But when the revolution comes and the poor rise up and slit the throats of the rich, we’d better bugger off back to Oz!

Particularly as poor persons impersonating the enemy.