Big Brother is Watching You

Arrgh. It may be true that the dream of most Filipinos is to migrate to the U.S. However, I didn't realize that it could be such a pain driving around in the land of milk and honey.

I found this out the hard way when I accompanied [identity-protected] and her family, as well as two other friends (who we'll disguise under the names of Cookie and Big Bear), to Subic over the weekend. For those who don't know, Subic used to be an American naval military base in Olongapo and which was later transformed into a duty-free zone/international trading port after the bases were closed.

Unfortunately, the description that driving in Subic is like driving in the U.S. was quite apt. This is not good for those of us who are used to the ah, freewheeling style of driving here in the Philippines.

Off the bat, on our way to the hotel, I got tagged by a traffic cop for swerving. And then while we were on our way to check out Ocean Adventure, another traffic cop tagged Cookie (who was driving the other vehicle) because Big Bear wasn't wearing his seatbelt. As if one wasn't enough, Cookie got tagged again on our way back to the hotel because he ran a stop sign. Fortunately, this traffic cop was forgiving since he saw Cookie already had a traffic violation citation on his slip.

Heh, it came to a point that Big Bear wanted to use the traffic violations slip as a checklist of things-to-do while in Subic.

To wit...

[identity-protected]: "This is just like driving in the U.S."

me: "Well, I wanna go back to the Philippines then!"