On
the second day on working at the shipyard , we were told to dress up in proper
clothes (civilian) and meet at the entrance of the local hotel nearby.
Apparently according to what the captain says that some top brass at the office wants to have dinner with us , kind of like a
meet and greet stuff to the crew. Some of the crew thought earlier that this is
some sort of official meeting and that there will be a formal dinner of sort on
the reception at the nearby hotel, Even I myself thought that this might be the
case since after all the meeting place was at the hotel.
To
everybody's surprise, there is no dinner at the hotel but the "company
representative" just randomly picked up a local pub for us to eat and that
was just about it. No formal classy dinner , just a random meet up and go to
the local pub to meet the company representative. Anyway it's not surprising if
you have an Indian as a representative, they usually just go for appearances
like assuming that the dinner as on the hotel , when in reality it was just
going on to the local pub. Very underwhelming and a letdown.
At
around 8pm the dinner was over and some of us went back to the hotel were
staying. I on the other hand went on wandering on the surroundings and see if
there is anything interesting around to look at. Fortunately for me there is., and it’s a local mall . I had a keen interest
in that place because of the idea that there may be video games sold in that
area and there is ., but to my dismay it turns out that the shops selling video
games were closed at this hour , so it means I'd just have to come back the
next day , if I wanted to buy one.
When
I returned to the hotel were I'm staying, I saw some of my crew mates still
outside and waiting for something . I went closer and asked , they said that
there going on the bar nearby and probably have some drinks there. I decided to
join them since that there's still enough time for me, and it would be boring
just staying at the hotel for the whole night.
The
nearby bar was just like any other bar around , but compared in the Philippines
that is usually filled with people at night time., this bar is just empty and
waiting for people to come in. Apparently the reason why its empty was the fact
that the bar was probably reserved for foreigner. Well I'm a foreigner in a
sense if you looked on a Korean perspective.
Good
thing the bar had Filipina GRO's , to serve drinks and I won't have any
communication problems with them when I'm talking. I just ordered a tall glass
of whiskey and enjoyed the drink and listened to their stories. Apparently from
what I heard from them is the typical story of a Filipina migrant worker who
goes overseas and ends up doing worker as a bar worker (or maybe in often cases
work as a whore). As I listen to their stories , I didn’t blame them for ending
up doing work that kind of way. Employment in the Philippines have always been
bad for decades and 7 out of 10 adult Filipino's just simply want to get out of
the country just to find work.
 |
| apparently from what i had notice , the transit hotel we were staying at was in the middle of a red light district |
I
didn’t stayed long at the bar and after drinking two tall glasses of whiskey
(which drunkenness have already set in on my senses), I told one of my crew
mates that I'd be going back to the hotel to sleep.
Three
days have passed and we were told that there will be a "selected few"
crew that will board the ship early on once the ship casts out of the ship
yard. I was selected as the "few" who will board early and told that
we should be out of the hotel and on the meeting point by as early as 6am. On
the night before , I already packed my luggage back from the hotel room was
already prepared., I took a good night's rest and wandered off to take a good
look at the surroundings (which after all Its possible that I won't see land
again for a couple of months). One of my
crew mates suggested to go to the local restaurant and have some Korean grub,
he suggested the "no chairs while eating" kind of restaurant nearby -
it was a good suggestion having to eat on a restaurant that feels like the
authentic "native Korean" experience ,problem is that there's no
price tag on the menus they were serving
and I'm weary that I might overeat or the food im ordering would go over
budget. So we find another restaurant nearby and unfortunately it was chairs
and feels more like any typical western restaurant serving Korean food., anyway
we still proceeded in dinning at that place. The Korean food they were serving
was delicious if I could just ignore the hot and spicy part , the Korean wasn’t
bad I just never liked the food setup to be hot and spicy. My stomach was never
good on that kind of flavour.
 |
| To be fair korean food dishes don't taste bad , in fact it taste good however despite theyre delectable, they spicy and hot nature is a big turn off to my taste as i really hate thier hot and spicy food . If koreans couldnt only remove that factor on their food then i could say that its edible. |
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| by the way their liquor taste like rubbing alcohol bought on a local Philippine Pharmacy (to be specific "rhea" rubbing alcohol) , although not bad in general it just simply taste weird. |
