So I've got a story from last night and I don't really know what to make of it. Because I'm only in Manila for a couple days I decided it would be worth taking a tour of some sort to be able to learn as much about the city as I can while I'm here. I found a guy that was recommended by the lonely planet and was told to be at a specific spot at 3pm for the tour. As it turns out, because of the iglesias de cristo thing going on (that's kind of another story but I have never seen traffic this bad before in my life) he cancelled the tour.
Well that kind of sucks, I really did want to do this tour. Now there was another guy there, an Aussie named Jack, that was also looking for a tour. Through some other random guy we ended up meeting Lance, a local who works at the national library who offered to take us on a tour for free. Well ok, that seems like a reasonable price.
So we set out and he really did know a lot of history about the country and was giving quite a good tour. I think both Jack and i were quite happy to have randomly met this guy. We ended up wandering around for a couple of hours before Lance suggested that we head to the bay to see the sunset and have a beer, so we caught a cab and went to a bar at the Mall of Asia.
Now because of all the people and traffic, the cab ride probably took close to an hour and we missed the sunset, but we were at a bar with beer and that's all that really mattered. So we ordered some beer and some kind of amazing food platter and started chowing.
At some point Lance mentioned that he has colon cancer and the doctors gave him 5 years to live. That was very unfortunate I said and I was sorry to hear it but he said that he's come to accept it and its not how long you live, but how you live that matters. I thought that was a really good way to look at life.
Well at some point a couple of beers later in the evening Lance was obviously not feeling well. He seemed to be uncomfortable and in a bit of pain. He mentioned that he gets like this every few months and he needed to get some medicine. There was a drug store nearby and he asked if we would mind paying for the medicine which he said would be about 1250 pesos. Jack and i didn't have a problem with that and we ended up giving him 1500 pesos as we didn't have change.
Well Lance limped over towards the drug store and that's the last we saw of him. Were we scammed? Did he just take us for 1500 pesos (roughly $40)? What I don't get is why did he take us on a tour and spend 5 hours with us in order to get $40 out of us? Jack and I had showed up to take a tour that was going to cost us 1100 pesos each. I was going to offer him some money at the end of the evening anyways just for his trouble. The beer and food wasn't really an expense, and we weren't going to ask him to pay anyways. I'm just really confused if I got ripped off for an amount that was basically fair compensation for the service he provided us. Shouldn't I feel bad after getting ripped off?
No comments:
Post a Comment