八八八 Part 2

They have this big new airport in manila right now, its not actually that new because I remember as far as five years ago it was already sitting there empty but then the people who built it messed up the terms of payment with the government I think , that they had to settle the whole mess for a long time in court. I knew I had an idea what the whole mess was because it was even an essay on our final examination way back when I was in school then, and I got a good grade for my answer though I really forgot all about it now.

Anyway they now got one airline docking on the new airport the last two months ago, I had a couple of things to do in manila so I decided to take a flight on this airline so I could get to see the new airport for myself too. This airline cebu pacific had some promotional tickets for sale which you could get cheap by calling up their manila telephone number 702-8888 and I wanted get a ticket on a budget too. I was surprised though when I called the number up and the guy on the phone said:

Chowking delivery!

I paused and awkwardly replied

I think I’m not hungry, I need a plane ticket

I thought I misdialed the whole thing off but the same fastfood still answered after that, I later found out that the airline number is actually 702-0-888. That’s the problem with rhythmic telephone numbers, you’d sometimes get the order of the numbers wrong, especially this one when all I could think of is that it ends with a lot of eights. It took so long for the airline operator to pick up my line when I called, I even finished a cup of coffee while waiting on the headset and listening to the airline jingle which I swear still keeps ringing in my head right now, and it was a waste of time listening to that jingle for so long because the operator soon told me that there weren’t any cheap seats left for manila that week.

So I flew to manila still through the old airport last tuesday though some other airline, I didn’t get much sleep in the plane because the toddler behind me kept banging the food tray at the back of my seat, it was so goddam annoying that I’d wish the kid would just play with his seatbelt instead or find the plane crash menu card and stare at the pretty pictures and learn to get out of the plane if it crashes. If I were only a growth fairy, I’d take a centimeter off from his height before puberty for each bang he made on my seat.

It was raining hard in manila but I worked the afternoon through, I got back to my hotel past 9 in the evening, I passed by the seven eleven beside it and got a hotdog, a bag of chips and a can of beer to go with cable TV, ridiculous but I can now drink just a can of beer for the night, their hotdogs were all frozen though, they must have started steaming them just five minutes earlier and the only hotdog which was hot was about the size of my finger, I was hungry anyway.

What they were showing on the local news in TV last night was about some government minister who’s flying back to the country, he's in trouble because he took a couple of million bucks from the government to spend on fertilizers years ago, it was pretty obvious that those fertilizers were so goddam expensive like they were made up of royal dung taken from the augean stables by hercules. So everybody started asking fertilizer bob why the hades were they so expensive (hades: hell/greek -that's how hercules probably swore when he cleaned the stables), fertilizer bob flew to america to come up with a spectacular explanation and he’s flying back here probably to show us now that his fertilizers can grow beanstalks up to the sky to some giant castle where we would find some money making fowl and harp that can repay the millions he took.