Saint Illian’s Inn in Makati City, Philippines

From What the eyes cannot see

I have been to various hotels, pension houses and inns that offer roughly the same level of ineptitude in my 28 years of existence. But just like a stash of your old wardrobe, there’s always that one piece of clothing that makes you go, “What was I thinking!” A fortnight’s worth of stay for the two different times that I have been to Saint Illian’s I think is enough number of days for me to put up a fair assessment of my experiences; or to put it more accurately, my misadventures of that place.

Every traveller seeks a place to stay mainly to get some rest, wash up and go about his business, hence the location of the chosen bread and breakfast is at the top of every person’s list. This inn did not disappoint, it is located near a mall, Waltermart in Pasong Tamo, and you can literally walk for just 20 minutes to the heart of the financial center in Makati, the Ayala Triangle. This has 4 stars out of 5 for its location.

Appearance and architecture was also okay, it has this old Spanish, brick-laden, almost “Hansel and Gretel” – like feel to its walls and designs. Upon entering the place you are received by mood busting, ear tingling sputtering sound of the air conditioning located opposite to the front desk. The whole building is not really spick and span as you might expect the usual hotels to be, it has low lying ceilings and can get claustrophobic when roaming around its narrow nave. The rooms go anywhere from the first floor the fifth but guess what? They have no elevators! I had to drag my travel bag up to the highest floor, walk up and around their helix/circular steel stairs and it just felt wrong. What happened to the Building Code of the Philippines? 1 out of 5 stars.

The receptionists are professionally trained. They never fail to shoot a greeting to any visitor on sight! Sometimes it messes with your head as if the font desk people are saying, “I see you!” And oh by the way, I noticed after almost a total of 6 days of staying in this inn, that they actually do that because they want to make sure you did not slip the key outside the premises. A big kudos to them for masking the fake smile and a, “Good morning sir!” as really a “Sir, lalabas po ba kayo? Paki bigay po sa amin yung room key kasi bawal po yang ilabas.” For that they deserve 2 out of 5 stars.

Now to the most important part of every hotel review, the room. I have been with around three different rooms in this place and there is one common theme, there are no windows except for the ones beside the door, which by the way gives you a really relaxing sight of the hallway. The 3m x 2m room looked pretty standard with a cable tv, small fridge, a small table and two chairs, a cabinet for your clothes, some bath and toiletries stuff. One of the beds were bad though, it had this hollow depression on one side that tells me it’s an old, over-used bed that the St Illian’s staff did not even notice! And by the way, on all three rooms, the air conditioning sucks. It was at 17 the whole night and the temperature felt like a 30 ⁰C – ahhh.. nice and cozy, just like sleeping under the sun on a summer afternoon! And for all those folks out there that is 5’8 or taller, this place is not for you because you will find yourself very uncomfortable while taking a shower. They have a 2ft x 3ft shower room – try visualizing that! And be careful with your toes too, their faucet cover falls off without warning… I am not kidding ladies and gentlemen, my toe got smacked! 0 out of 5 stars for the bad sleeping quality, poor washroom space and the place is a health hazard.

Now on to the “face behind the name” – housekeeping, they make all our lives easy or a living hell. The people working there are honest and helpful as once I left my pants in the room and they were kind enough to return it to me. I also asked for a flat iron and they kindly brought one to my room without hesitation. However, when we had some fast food delivered to the place, we were shocked that the St Illian’s staff was so quick to bring the food to my room instead of first calling me over the intercom. Well, a second after she knocked at my door I realized it’s because they charge a 50php fee for the “delivery” from the front desk to the third floor where I was staying. So much for extortion! Be careful of your things too, because once you leave the room, their housekeeping would go inside to “check”. And guess what they did to my room? They unplugged my phone while it was charging, they also turned off the A/C (remember the 30 ⁰C???) and who knows what else they were doing inside there! Privacy is very critical in any type of accommodations and apparently not only did this inn fail in that category, but their housekeeping unplugs everything for them to save some money at your expense! Didn’t we all pay for our stay? Doesn’t that include 24 hours of air conditioning? Epic fail on this one, 0 out of 5 stars.

For a price of 1,790php a night, this is not so bad, isn’t it? Well, for Saint Illian’s, it is! In this place, they are the ones that got the bang for your buck, not you! You got bang’ed!

We chose this place because of a recommendation from a friend who had a relatively good experience with them but for me, it was just horrible. I strongly suggest that you walk the next block from Saint Illian’s and spend that extra 400 bucks a night on a more decent place as there are three or four hotels and inns around the vicinity. But if you want to prove me wrong, please feel free to check the place out.

3 AM

From What the eyes cannot see

Here I am again, it is 3 in the morning and I can’t get any of the forty winks. What’s new, right? My eyes kept staring at my laptop waiting for some idea to pop in and write about. To my bedside, a red lampshade on top of a white table, shooting the right amount of photons to keep my eyes a 20/20, being as reliable as ever. The box is on basketball TV, waiting for the latest player movements as the NBA nears the trade deadline. The sound of my A/C persists all throughout the night. It will assure me of the most ideal temperature to doze off to should I be blessed with one in the next hour or two. It continues to hum right beside these insanely thick accounting books sitting comfortably on top of a pink Jansport backpack reminding me of my college days.

Bored, I walked around the garden outside to get the purest o2’s into my respiratory system – always feels like a refreshing drink when I do this at dawn. I think of it as like feeding Mario and Luigi some shrooms. Remember those days? Mario would feel like he’s got an additional life, like he would not feel any pain as he breaks those bricks out of the way! I then saw Twixie, our pretty daschund, trotting gracefully as we slowly make our way around the house trying to stare through the shadows of the night and absorbing everything in.

Now I am back to my laptop inside my room wishing I had more time. The more we age, the lesser control we have in terms of owning our own time and deciding what to do with each hour of the day. Burdened by stress, lately I have been finding myself just peacefully staring at the telly or just not wanting to do anything at all. There are so many things that I want to do – to jog, play basketball again, read kindle books and write the stuff in my head on this blog – but sapped out of energy, I end up doing nothing.

But there is reason to take out the chinaware; I am going on leave for a week which means I would have time off work and a whole lot of time for myself. My sore body is ready to get immersed back into a different world again, a world I just got acquainted with - in less than a year ago but is slowly taking a place in my heart.

Diplomacy – getting what you want while others think they did too

From What the eyes cannot see

Diplomacy has long been a weapon of peace and of war. Ancient civilizations have sent diplomats far and wide to either beg or bully all in the name of sovereign might. Of course back then being a super power meant having vast amounts of cacao tree farms, enormous acres of sugar plantations, unlimited number of slaves from poor nations, or having bullions of gold deposits.

The queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, has always been thought as a master of this craft on diplomacy; through her intellect and her sensual ways, she had captivated not just the Roman generals Julius Ceasar and Mark Anthony to whom she loved, but she also captivated the hearts of everyone in the world. Shrewd and cunning, she slithered her way passed the pitfalls of her dynasty when she took control of Egypt and almost succeeded in keeping her country as an independent nation against the invading Romans. Her story has a lot to do with the various fields of influencing including the art of persuasion, seduction and diplomatic power.

To lessen your worries, extend your influence over them.

I always had great reverence to those people who can not only create this wide circle of influence around them, but being able to sustain such for an extended period of time. It is very rare these days that we would come across someone so exceptional that their area of concern seems to be the same or continues to shrink down to an even tinier amount.

Diplomatic leverage is like a Holy Grail for me too, how can I continue to work towards getting more control over my life while shaking some gremlins off my back at the same time? Build your network – this has always been the single most important message that our previous Client Manager has taught me. So far things are progressing really well at this stage I am slowly realizing that it is not how much you know anymore, it is about who you know. In this society, diplomatic relations is the name of the game. If you do not know anybody, then you are a nobody. Hell, the Philippines have the USA behind our backs when China starts to push us around on the topic of the Spratley’s, I guess this is the simplest form of Diplomacy at work and it surely did work in our favor.

Oh wait! Just when I was about to post this blog I saw this video showing one of Noynoy’s appointed ambassadors to China! This is very disappointing!




God save us!

Political Dynasties and Corruption of Power

From What the eyes cannot see

There is this show called Investigative Documentaries by Malou Mangahas on GMA News TV about the political dynasties and corruption of power in the Philippines. I honestly did not get the chance to watch the whole set as I only saw the last 20 minutes of it but I can say, I saw what I needed to see. Malou Mangahas and the political analysts that she interviewed easily worded my thoughts about politics and corruption in the Philippines to a T. There were two points that have really come across, that to me is really the root cause of the relentless problems we are facing right now both in our economic competitiveness and our national security.

The root causes of our problems are two-pronged of the same shit – POLITICAL DYNASTIES and LACK OF EDUCATION. Amidst the entire conundrum, it is in these two where poverty, terrorism, criminality, larger gaps between the rich and the poor, lack of national patriotism and pride, hopelessness and the absence of economic attractiveness stems from.

In the documentary, it said that there are 150+ political classes all throughout the 12 regions of the Philippines, this leaves us with more than 10 political clans per region. With a country that has barely 130 cities, this is a big problem. The concept of competitiveness requires a myriad of options to choose from – if A does not work, maybe B will or C or D and so on. It is in the competitive nature of both our local and national politicians that we should be basing our electoral votes from. But how come we still continue to vote for the same people who stole our tax money over and over again? The Amaptuan’s still won (if I am not mistaken) 19 local government positions in Maguindanao during the recent elections even after they have massacred 58 people – two years ago to this month. How can the people of Maguindanao still have this patronage over this clan when they even created 15 additional municipalities in their locality just so they can request for more money through the IRA? Yet when the GMA News team went to these municipalities, they all looked like ghost towns? Isn’t corruption very apparent to these people?

One political analyst said that unless we EDUCATE these people in letting them understand that the Ampatuans did not spend for the education, public infrastructure/services, security and etc for the people in Maguindanao, but rather, these were government monetary allocations for the people of Maguindanao in the first place – only then will they realize that they have been fooled again and again.

In addition to the lack of education in this country, the corrupt political leaders also kept the Philippines’ population for the self-confessed-poor-and-hungry to 30%. Because as part of these corrupt leader’s formula to stay in power is to psychologically have the poor depend on them for their most basic needs. “Unless we address poverty, educating the masses on choosing the correct political leaders will never materialize.” said one political analyst, “Because it is hard to preach to an empty stomach.”

This explains why we still chose political leaders that have the same last names – look at the house of senate and count the dynasties you see in there. How about the house of Congress? Your mayoralty candidates who are these names that are butting heads? Don’t they belong to very well know political dynasties? Now that we have seen what these political dynasties can do to us, why not choose for another candidate to run our government with fresh eyes?

But personally, I think there is still hope for things to change for the better even with the current “stalemate”. It is our job and responsibility as citizens who have a better understanding about these issues to spread the word. We should not grow tired of watching the news and take part in the change that we want to see. We should throw away our concept of “Sa balita, puro pulitika na naman, laging nag aaway, wala na talagang pag-asa ang Pilipinas.” This mindset will only aggravate our situation, we need to start acting as intellectuals and take part in the changes that we can help influence.

The Two Pillow Hypothesis

From What the eyes cannot see

Around two or three nights in month I would get this nasty problem of dozing off into dreamland. Some days are so-so and there are some days that I absolutely cannot afford to be staring at the ceiling the entire night. The tendency of night crawlers like me is that we really have to keep counting the number of hours slept for every 24.

Compulsively, we have this habit of always looking at the clock right before we sleep, and again on the minute that we wake up. This works fine until you realize that those nights where your eyes will stay as wide as an owl’s, not that I am denying that my eyes are already as big since the day I was born, you would find yourself staring at the time and literally see it moving minute by minute, hour after hour! And trust me, this looks all nice in the movies where you see that old grandfather clock move its minute and hour hands really fast but in real life it’s this paaiiiiiinfully slow, mind-joggling, sanity-breaking tortuous experience!

My second sleeping problem has always been that my creative mind is most active when I am in that limbo/slumber state. I can think of the most profound of things, open a can of memories and watch it like a movie, get brilliant ideas out of thin air – all absolutely at the wrong freaking time!

The next logical thing to do to get back the control of my sleeping patterns was to try various techniques that I heard from my friends, read in magazines/newspapers, saw on tv/internet and some classic home remedies. I’ve tried slapping myself, drinking bottles of hot milk, ate to the brim, did some yoga postures and even tried counting sheep but none seemed to work. (Oh, except for drinking myself to sleep of course).

Until came the Two-Pillow hypothesis, the Eureka moment was to trick my own body by not telling it to go to sleep! Hell, that didn’t work for years why not try it in reverse, right? Instead of drinking hot milk, I drank a glass of cold water. Instead of having one pillow for sleeping, I had two to recline by back by 30°! And it worked wonders for me! In a span of around 10 minutes or so, I am able to slowly get some z’s into my system. The part where my head gets all hyperactive? Well, I kept it that way too, since mandatorily shutting down my brain cells won’t make things any better. But to my surprise, this truly worked for me even until today.

The Karnaval

From What the eyes cannot see

One August evening on the night of the mid-year party in the Sarrosa Hotel Grand Ballroom, the Wiproites were treated to a phantasmagorical event that had raised the standards for all party goers. It is no longer just about food, music and fun; but it is also about carnival-like revelry. And that is what our Wipro engagement team The Krewe, gave us, the theme for this year was THE KARNAVAL. Proving that company parties are more than just getting entertained, it is about being part of the occasion. This could not have been more apparent than the princesses that embraced the theme of the festivities as they flaunted their costumes on the red carpet with their tsunami walk.

The huge crowd that night was amazing. The Wiproites came with their best outfits that some people almost could no longer recognize each other; they had to do a second glimpse as everyone was dressed to kill – a 360 turnaround from the daily “look” they got used to seeing in the office.

No one could pump up the crowd better than the dance group, BeaT All-Starz, as they shook up the stage like huge church bells instantaneously gathering up the swarm of people as they kick started the party! BeaT All-Starz, teach me how to dougie!

And all throughout the evening we were serenaded and awed by the performers for the “We’ve Got Talent” competition. All the surviving contestants were vying for the top prize that night so every groove, pitch and melody had that extra dose of attitude that electrified the audiences. Everyone had been brought to laughter, poignancy and all the wavelengths in between by the myriad of performances showcased that night. Truly, everyone was a winner. And kudos to Thony Carl Castro for bagging the biggest prize with his rendition of the F.U. song by Cee Lo Green.

The mid year party is also a night of giving back credit where credit is due because Together Everyone Achieves More (TEAM) after all. So the certificates of recognition with a couple of gift checks were handed out to those people who deserved them. They did not only work hard for the first two quarters of the year, but they also were top notch in their field. The names were called, the cameras were flashing and every top performer had their glorious moment on stage.

Walking With Mortals

From What the eyes cannot see

The world stands still, yellow lights hit the pavement, cool air around and the moon hangs above. The car engine roars at three in the morning as I whisk through the road leaving clouds of smoke behind. An open black sky serves as the window of heaven where the gods watch me as I squander away my time; baffled as I raise my hand up as if feeling the water from the gust of wind at my palm. I have driven by vehicles and vehicles have driven me by, some seem to be in a hurry and some take their time.

This is a true allegory of life in the fast lane, a life where everything just runs you by whether you are in for the ride or not. No matter how hard you keep up, some will still outrun you and you will outrun some.

By the town’s corner, people are still up working in fast food chains, the crew didn’t look tired at all wearing their smiles well. Who can blame industry when deep inside it is all in a day’s work? Like the newspaper boy lining up his merchandise all geared up for the next six hours, I bet he won’t be smiling though. They all have to make a buck just as I do.

I guess simple dreams are harder to reach these days – they are just too costly. What work requires of us is not essential to our being, but is essential to our existence.

As I move along, I was hypnotized by these big buses whose headlights cut blindingly through the windshield. As if they are Katanas inviting a hara-kiri. Whoever accepts will be enticed to do so, as the whole scene can be masked as a genuine road accident. I opted to swerve away – challenges aren’t supposed to be faced head on; sometimes I have to learn to pick my battles. Like the people walking on the side of the road bringing their net bags as they make their way to the wet markets or the people cooking at four in the morning to fill their eateries with freshly cooked food.

We can never slay a leprechaun, ride a dragon, capture a Sasquatch… these are but dreams. A dosage of unique insights from time to time will help me put things in perspective and sooner or later, put me in a situation of acceptance.