On Sunday, my 16-year-old daughter took the entrance exam at the University of Santo Tomas. She had already taken the UP College Admissions Test and, next weekend, it?ll be the College of Saint Benilde. Her father and I drove her to the UST campus and we were there an hour before the exams were scheduled to begin. Because we were looking at a five-hour waiting time, we decided to go to Dapitan and do some shopping. For a Sunday morning, the Dapitan crowd was surprisingly thin. Then, I remembered that the Pacquiao-De la Hoya bout was scheduled later that morning and understood. Despite the Christmas shopping rush, a lot of Filipinos would not leave their houses until the fight was over.
I can only roll my eyes but to each his own, right? I can afford to show some sense of humor. But the fact that there were very few traffic cops and aides on the streets was not funny at all. Cops may be Pacquiao fans but that?s no excuse to leave the streets unattended. Around noon, after we picked up our daughter from UST, we got caught in traffic along a narrow street en route to the Banawe area. The cause? The narrow street ends at a wide one and on the corner there was a huge KTV bar and restaurant that was showing the Pacquiao-De la Hoya fight on a movie-size screen. A fire truck was trying to maneuver and park in front of the building. By the time we managed to break free from the traffic, we saw that the vehicles parked in front of the KTV bar, including the blasted fire truck and at least three police
