My wife, who travels often for work, has been telling me that the air conditioning at the airport has been pretty inadequate for some time now, which is something the people in charge of that facility should’ve noticed and rectified already, but apparently nothing has happened. What is interesting is that I usually bring her to the airport for the first flight, or pick her up during the last one in, when the ambient temperature isn’t even that hot yet, so I can only imagine what it is like for air travelers during noon time.
Hopefully she is just unlucky to catch the airport AC at the bad time always, or perhaps because of her early flights, the AC is just turned on so the pre departure area hasn’t cooled down yet. But if the airport has a chronic AC problem, that has to be addressed by management ASAP because even after all the revenge travel, normal travel is already pretty busy and it would leave a bad impression of our island if the airport can’t even get its AC to work right.
If you come to think of it, that airport has gotten pretty old really quick, which can only be attributed to poor maintenance. Aside from the unreliable AC, the seats and trolleys are shabby, everything needs a fresh coat of paint, and the lighting is generally dim, giving our supposedly “international standards” airport the feel of a dingy warehouse.
The general state of the Bacolod-Silay airport makes me wonder if they should just pour fresh concrete over it, because that seems to be the only thing our government is good at in this country. The airport road to and from Silay City, which is just about 15 years old, is already getting extensive “repairs” but the airport terminal and its facilities don’t seem as fortunate.
*****
Last week, a tweet (I refuse to call it an X) by Actor Jake Ejercito achieved viral status.
“But lol at those wearing ‘West Philippine Sea’ shirts but were as still as the grave between 2016-2022,” he posted, ending with a clown emoji.
During that evening, the Philippines was playing against China at the FIBA World Cup being hosted by the country. Our team won, beating the Chinese squad 96-75, earning its only win in the tournament. That evening, several Philippine senators who are at the game were seen wearing shirts with the words “West Philippine Sea.”
They must’ve thought it would be cute and patriotic to “protest” China’s presence in the West Philippine Sea during a basketball game, but as the Chinese team got wrecked the Gilas, those senators were destroyed by a tweet that reminded us of their hypocrisy.
For those who don’t remember, the Philippines was supposed to have earned a major win in its long-running territorial dispute with China in 2016, when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled in our favor. However, unfortunately for the Philippines, our government leader during that time decided that it was going to be pro-China and refused to take advantage of the historically significant legal victory. As is usual with Pinoy politicos, many bootlickers also kept eerily quiet as far as the issue was concerned during that time, and for 6 years, from 2016 to 2022, our country lost all initiative as far as that territorial dispute was concerned. Whatever momentum that was gathered by the Hague ruling was lost by the silence and inaction of all three branches of government. And now, some Filipino senators think they can make things right by wearing T shirts at a basketball game.
No wonder that tweet went viral.
Because we have lost so much time and territory over those 6 years of clamming up, I hope those who were embarrassed (granted they have any shame) by their T shirt stunt will now do more than just pull stunts and get to work on protecting our territory and our interests from the constant threat of China.
*****
The final plebiscite weekend for the Ceneco-Primelectric JVA has been cancelled because the “yes” side was able to garner the required votes. That’s an interesting ending for Ceneco, which should be a billion-peso enterprise, had it been run properly. Instead, it seemed to have been self-sabotaged by its own management team, who are interestingly at the forefront of the push to sell it off rather than save it. Those so-called stewards signed the JVA, and then took the lead in convincing their consumer-members to lap up the weird argument that selling the billion-peso franchise that they failed to protect is a good solution.
Now that they have apparently gone through the process, the next step would be for us to lie in the bed we made, which we somehow voted to allow to be converted from a not-for-profit to a totally-for-profit one. Unless it is proven that their process is not aboveboard, and the courts somehow stops or reverses the sale, that is how Ceneco as we know it ends.*
