Originally posted by admin@Jul 11 2005, 07:39 AM
So you'd be happy if EVERY Filipino while you were there charged you 100 pesos?? For entering a shop, pub, toilet, street, etc.....soon mounts up, and so does all the corruption you get charged for starting at the Embassy. The majority of tourists are to dumb to realise they are being taken for a ride.

I had to buy a computer part while I was there. I new I was being over charged so went outside and brought in the wife, they reduced the price by 500%!!!! :blink: So add 500% onto everything a non streetwise tourist buys, and they are getting ripped off more than the French farmers are robbing our taxes.
Precisely.

It wouldn't matter if it was 1 peso, it's the principle. No one likes feeling like they've been ripped off, and you are made to feel that the whole time you are in the Philippines.

Most filipinas who have escaped here say they go home to visit their family, plus, of course, they have an emotional tie with the place of their birth, but other than purely human nostalgic reasons, most of them also go on to say that if their family were no longer there, they wouldn't ever go back.

Keith's computer experience is not just standard, it's almost every purchase, and even then you're lucky they haven't fobbed you off with a repackaged but faulty second hand item, knowing full well that you'd need to return with half an army just to get a refund, and you still wouldn't get it.

We'd all like to visit it more, but who wants to live in a place where honesty is almost non-existent, and the only time it is displayed it's such a rare event it makes the national news!! If they stopped lying and stealing from each other and every one else, the place would be a paradise. It has abundant natural resources which could propel it into an asian economic power and beaches which would attract people the world over if only they stopped the corruption and actually made it a pleasant place to visit.

It's not that we "hate the place" - we just find it so frustrating that a country that could have, and be, so much is destroying itself through it's own shortsighted, corrupt, greedy and selfish, self-interested mismanagement. If it weren't for that, I'm sure we'd all be relocating there like a shot.