All I Can Handle

My parents had spent the holiday season in the city and we experienced a tough time booking a Grab car all the time. Catching a flight home before the New Year, we decided to pay extra for Grab's Advance Booking feature. Grab Advance Booking guarantees you a driver on your specified date and time. At the time of this writing, Grab Advance Booking works only for bookings going to the airport. Prepayment is required so linking the Grab app to a payment app or a credit card is needed. In our case, we prepaid for our ride to the airport using GCash.  We had a lot of misgivings because upon reading the terms and conditions, if the driver cancels, it turns out you only get a compensation voucher (unknown amount) and a refund. So I'm not sure what the penalty is for cancelling although I would think that the premium you are paying is enough incentive for the driver not to cancel. In our experience, Grab Advance Booking cost double the regular rate. When using the Advance Booking featu...

Gold is often seen as a hedge against inflation across different cultures and several millennia. Gold advocates would cite that the price of an italian suit in the early 1900s is the same today as it was back then. Today, I came across a post on Facebook that claims to be an ad for flights from the 1960s. Since gold was still money back then and had a fixed amount of dollars associated with it, this is a good data to compare the ability of gold to hold its value. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15YufUohLj/ During the Bretton Woods era, the price of gold was fixed at 35 USD per ounce. Meanwhile, 1 USD was worth 3.90 PHP. If a flight from IloIlo to Manila was 28 pesos, this would be equivalent to 7 USD. In terms of gold, 7 USD would have bought around 7 grams of gold (1 troy oz is equal to 31.1 grams). In today's peso, 7 grams of gold would be worth more than 30 thousand pesos. Far more than what Cebu Pacific actually charges today! The truth is I already knew that the cost of fligh...

Gone are the days when people would be apprehensive about buying electronics online. For me, I started becoming comfortable buying gadgets as well as small appliances like blenders and coffee makers online during the pandemic. A month ago, I decided to buy a personal refrigerator online.  At first, I had a lot of trepidations because I have heard of stories of refrigerators that suddenly stop working from people moving to a new place. After checking out refrigerators in the mall and seeing the price difference, I decided to take the risk and buy my first personal refrigerator online. I went with a fridge with an unknown brand name and it was also the cheapest one I found online.  The Tomler personal refrigerator arrived well-packed. There was one review that said that the fridge had dents when it arrived but seeing how it was packed in a bubble-wrapped box with styrofoam, I don't know how it was possible for the fridge to be delivered with dents. Online, there seems to be a ...

In September of 2018, the Chavacano version of The Little Prince was launched. How the book came into existence was nothing short of a miracle. In 2013, one of the people reading my blog about Chavacano sent me a message about the idea of translating The Little Prince into Chavacano. He introduced me to a publisher which publishes the same book in different languages. I was disappointed to learn that the project did not involve any compensation so I shelved the idea. I think in the academe sector (where most translators come from), most people do things with the purpose of adding feathers to their cap as oppose to monetary compensation. In 2017, I no longer had a job and met a linguist (through my blog about Chavacano) who again, presented to me the idea of translating The Little Prince into Chavacano. Since I already had a lot of time on my hands, I tried doing the translation slowly, one sentence at a time.  After a few months, the translation was complete. We toyed with the ide...

A few days ago, I needed to call an office and the only phone number available was a landline. Since I only had a mobile phone, I did a quick search online for rates when calling a landline from a mobile phone and I was surprised at the exorbitant rates! Fortunately, I stumbled upon Smart's promo offer called Magic Call. Magic Call allows Smart users to call any mobile phone (all networks) as well as landlines in the Philippines. Smart Magic Call is perfect for me because the promo does not expire. I mean I hardly call anyone using the cellphone so having to call a landline is a very rare occurrence for me. When calling toll free numbers, your Magic Call minutes will not be deducted. You will instead be charged a flat rate of 8 pesos. This is useful when calling banks and you anticipate being on hold for a very long time. Otherwise, it's better to call the regular landline phone number. Magic Call is available at 99 pesos and 199 pesos. You get 50 minutes at 99 pesos which is a...

I did not expect the BPI Museum in Cebu to be open but the guard said that it was. The BPI Museum in Cebu is not to be missed if ever you find yourself in the downtown area of Cebu. The museum has a comprehensive collection of artifacts related to banking and currency. The Bank of Philippine Islands or BPI predates the Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas. Established in 1851 as El Banco Español Filipino, it acted as our first central bank. It is also the first bank in South East Asia. This is an exhibit of how banks used to look like inside as well as the first ATM in the Philippines. The BPI Museum also had an impressive collection of old maps. If you love history, the BPI Museum will give you a chance to appreciate our country's history through a glimpse of the various currencies being circulated at different periods of time. How BPI survived the second world war is also a very interesting story.

I was feeling restless at the start of the year so when I found a cheap flight to Cebu, I immediately booked one for myself even if I had no concrete plans on what exactly to do in Cebu. Since I did not do any research and I did not know anything about Cebu, I was surprised to learn that the beaches and other tourist attractions I commonly hear of in vlogs were pretty far away from the downtown area.  My friend said that the beaches near the downtown area were dirty. Where I grew up, you can stay in a downtown hotel and still get to some rocky but clean beaches just by riding a jeepney.  If it is your first time travelling to Cebu, it's best to limit your stay in the downtown area to just one or two days. Tourist attractions like Moalboal and Oslob will require you to stay at a hotel in those locations.  Since we often hear that Cebu is an island, we tend to have a false impression that it is small. That was one of the things that shocked me when I arrived here. You will ...