When we travel, we get a chance to talk to different people and in our trips, we always make it a point to strike conversations with cabbies.
In our trip to Manila last week, it was actually the cabbie that started conversing with us when we asked to be brought to Camp Crame early evening to be with classmates from the PMA Sambisig class of 1991.
The driver probably heard the Cebuano language when we talked with one of the mistahs over the phone and started the conversation by asking us from what province we come from.
Ever a proud Cebuano, we declared, Cebu, without batting an eyelash and not scared that the cabbie might pull out some tricks as he knew we were headed to the headquarters of the Philippine National Police.
The driver told us that he loved Cebu when he lived here for a short period when his father, who was with the now defunct Philippine Constabulary, was stationed here in the early 1980s.
He shared tales about his father’s strictness and how he made sure his children would not use his being an officer of the PC as a means to get one over the others.
We were ten minutes on the road when suddenly the cabbie pointed to us a man on a motorcycle saying, “pulis yan.”
We asked him how come he knew when the guy wasn’t in uniform.
He said it was simple as those who refuse to wear helmets are policemen and a few blocks later we saw one policeman in uniform riding his motorcycle also without a helmet.
While the taxi driver’s misgivings about policemen wasn’t a surprise so was the refusal of the people in authority to follow the law as we see many of them disobey traffic rules here in Cebu.
The problem is not exactly limited to Metro Manila.
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After only a few days in the Big City we are once again happy that we live in Cebu.
The reasons are obvious. Here, traffic is not so bad. Here, you can make it to appointments in ten minutes or less even if coming from another area. Here, you can be at the great beaches in less than 30 minutes and would also take about the same time to go up the mountains.
Here, floods do occur, but after a few minutes they’re gone. Here, a little rainfall doesn’t cause a monstrous traffic jam.
We can go on and on, but there won’t be enough space for all our reasons.
One more thing we’d like to add though is that we still believe that our traffic authorities can do better if only they try harder.
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We would like to bring to the attention of authorities the fact that many children, who are sniffing ‘rugby’ can be seen roaming around the city.
We called up Councilor Jack Jakosalem the other week to inform him of how a young girl was openly pouring ‘rugby’ into plastic bags for other children to sniff at corner San Jose St. and Gen. Maxilom Ave.
We also saw many children near that bridge beside the USC-North Campus doing the same and also at corner Colon and Jakosalem Sts. These children are a major safety concern on our roads.
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