I like hotels.

I like them so much – and traveling! – that we bought our own timeshare. But like I said in my MoneySmarts guest post:

It gives birth to other expenses – yearly maintenance fees (which went up from P2,500 to P4,000 in the blink of an eye), RCI fees (S$150 annually –in Singapore dollars, but with the current exchange rate, it might as well be in US dollars), booking fees that could range from P2,500 (Asia) to almost P10,000 (outside of Asia). It does not include airfare, or the cost of food. The RCI hotels, although three or four stars, are almost always in the outskirts of the city – that means it is 30 minutes away from where the action is. With the cab fares we are paying, we could have had a decent room at a city hotel with dancing lights, Prada and great food at our doorstep.

But it is not all bad, as we have found out in our two years of owning one.

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Postscript: Man’s Inhumanity to Man

A crisis makes heroes and villains of people. While there are many stories of heroism, one cannot ignore horror stories of fastfood chains turning away people who wanted to use restrooms or who wanted to charge their cellphones (one gave an emphatic “no”, another charged a USD$3 fee), or those who pillage the houses of those hardest hit, or those who charged USD$500 at the height of the storm for the use of a rubberboat before a family can be brought to safety, or those selling (selling!) relief goods to those who cannot take another blow.

Please choose to be an angel during these times. And if you have employees, likewise instruct them to open your doors. The next life you save may that of someone you know, or yours.

What Ondoy brought was a different kind of rain. It was harsh, it was hard, it was constant. And the constancy was alarming. We Filipinos are no strangers to storms. We fear them, yes, but we have known no other life than a life with storms. We would build our lives around them, and welcome the majestic sunsets that were their peace offering. Our storms would come in gusts, but then fade into light rain, and then pummel us again, accompanied by aggressive winds, great lightning, and even greater thunder.

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They say that you get what you pay for. If you are rich, almost always, you get more than what you pay for.

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When in November 2007 a tank pummeled down the gilded glass doors of the Manila Peninsula Hotel at the main business district of Makati City in Manila, Philippines, heads began to shake. The country had been experiencing a re-emergence, a resurgence of some sorts, economically. Filipinos had begun to cling to threads, albeit thin, of hope – that the country may finally be shaking the vestiges of its zest for change and choose one unbending path as a nation.

The year was 1983. I was barely out of my childhood. The television was on and I saw my mother burst into tears. Ninoy Aquino’s bloodied body had just hit the tarmac. He came amidst the flurry of yellow ribbons (I barely understood the symbolism), against the advice to him that it would cost him his life. It was a much anticipated return, the return of a hero, who was exiled for political crimes.

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The Philippines stands on the precipice of an unraveling. Experts from the University of the Philippines School of Economics confirm a dire warning earlier issued by the chief of the London-based Standard Chartered Bank – the Philippines is going by the way of Argentina, that is, it is a ticking time bomb, precipitating towards an [...]