09/23/2011
The Land Transportation Office is where you get your driver's license and vehicle registration renewed. There are only two offices in the Province of Cebu. One is in Cebu City, and the other, in Carcar, a suburb of Cebu City. The island (and Province) of Cebu is long and narrow, like a cigar. It would make perfect sense to put one LTO at one end of the island, and the other office at the other end. But the two offices are practically on top of each other. That is why we had to drive 215 kilometers, round trip, to get our registration renewed for our Rusi motor scooter. Six hours of sitting on a 125cc motor scooter. There is a consolation. A big one, in fact. The scenery is absolutely gorgeous, traveling through colorful little towns, along the coastal highway, then up, down and around the mountain roads as we cross the province from west to east.
So, we got there. We were escorted into a small office that served as the registration renewal office and the drug testing center for those getting their driver's license. The registration part of it had two desks and one young woman at each desk. The two ladies shared a typewriter which they passed back and forth. Yes, a real typewriter, a portable, in fact, I suppose to make it easier to pass back and forth.
Both ladies hunted and pecked with their middle fingers of one hand, reserving the middle finger on the other hand for a frenzy of taps on the space bar. The lady on the right, the one typing up our application, was the slower of the two. She could probably bang out four to six words a minute if her mouth wasn't spewing out a couple of paragraphs between each peck.
She was a very pleasant woman. Both of them were. At one point, the drug testing lady and a woman from another office came in and the four ladies had a five minute chat about the one woman's gray shoes with the big flowers on them. Ahem. Really, these ladies were all so very nice I never had a negative thought about them or the way they do business. After all, it's an integral part of Philippine life to cool your jets and enjoy your life and not get caught up in thoughts about wasting your valuable time.
In truth, the American viewpoint of self-importance begins to seem rather foolish and silly, as I am gradually discovering, after 16 months of living here.
Well, the ladies' pleasant little chat gave their middle fingers a chance to cool down from their race across the keyboard. Now it was time to let the lips cool and get back to the business of filling in ten pages of forms in order to justify collecting a heavy toll for the privilege of owning a motor cycle.
With the trip to the emissions testing facility, and standing in line to pay, included, we were done in just under two hours, a dizzying speed compared to last year's two days to get the same scooter registered. (No joke. We had to get a motel room for the night and then go back in the morning because the person who hands out the plate stickers was in the city for the day. Apparently there was only one person qualified to pick up a sticker and hand it through the window. I didn't ask.)
And then we had a very nice ride home. And this kind of sums up life in the Philippines: No matter what befalls you in your daily adventures, there is always the beautiful sea, the lush tropical trees, plants and flowers, and most of all, the wonderful people who inhabit these islands half a world away from my mother land.
