Still just rolling along hoping to avoid snake eyes here in paradise. Yeah, you’ve got to work hard to come up with something that convoluted. What else is there to do?
I got accosted stopped on the street for the first time last evening. It wasn’t a law enforcement officer, rather it was a Barangay official stationed on the corner where the street from my subdivision intersects with the National Highway. It went down like this:
“Good evening. Where are you going?” I’m going to get something to eat. “Where?” Sit-n-Bull. “Do you have a quarantine pass?” Yes, I do. As I started to reach for my wallet, he said: “Or an identification card?” I breathed a sigh of relief and showed him my Alien Certificate of Registration card. That document shows my address as Barretto. The pass puts me in San Isidro and technically doesn’t permit me to be in Barretto. Even though it is not possible to leave Alta Vista by road without entering Barretto. Anyway, he looked at my ID, said thank you, and sent me on my way.
I didn’t go to Sit-n-Bull, I went to the restaurant that still allows sit down dining, I’ll call it Gomans for now. Had me a plate of fried chicken this time.
I posted the above photo on Facebook and one of the commenters somehow managed to identify the location. I promptly deleted the post, but I fear he may be the kind of wanker who would report the place to the authorities. I hope not. Because I’ve been getting my fill of beer there both before and after dinner as well. And I do enjoy enjoying beer.
We’ll see what happens with the next roll of the dice I reckon.
That fried chicken looks well and truly fried. Nice.
I don’t envy your having to deal with the local authorities. I just heard from my coworkers that the ROK government is finally cracking down on Christians who insist on meeting for worship in the midst of the pandemic. It seems that several churches think they can go back to the way things had been, pre-pandemic.
I have mixed feelings on this score: up until today, there had been no direct orders that violated basic freedoms, such as freedom of assembly. Having the government explicitly clamp down on freedom of assembly now strikes me as a bad sign—the beginning of a trend. We may end up heading down the same road as the Philippines. At the same time, I’m pissed off by the churches that are ruining this whole fight-the-pandemic thing for the rest of us by ignoring suggestions to self-isolate. Can’t the churches figure out a way to engage in e-worship? Maybe some people are just stubborn and stupid. So yeah, I feel some Schadenfreude when I hear that churches are being expressly forbidden from congregating. But that’s coming at the expense of basic liberties.
I think I blame the churches more than I blame the government in this case: we had struck a good balance, for a while, between government oppression and personal liberty. Some churches have now messed that balance up for all of us.
Well, this is a very Catholic country so I was a little surprised to see that the Mass had been suspended indefinitely, and this was BEFORE the quarantine/lockdown was put in place. I could be wrong, but aren’t those churches in Korea that are doing these services all of the fringe protestant persuasion? I agree with you though, shame on them. A religious leader should lead by setting a good example for the congregation.
I understand what the government is trying to accomplish here, but I do have more than a little criticism of the way they are going about it. I went to the grocery store yesterday. As I was leaving I met my neighbor on the street heading towards the store. I saw her later and she was pissed. The Barangay official told her she couldn’t go shopping because they were limiting the number of people going to the store. She responded that she had just seen a foreigner (me) leaving, and he said they weren’t restricting foreigners. That REALLY made her angry. By the way, I noticed when I was there just how few customers were inside. I got my stuff and had my choice of three cashiers just standing around. Restricting Filipino customers makes no sense at all. Stupid shit like that makes people not respect the rules that might be beneficial. Ah well.
I guess we’re all clumsily figuring this stuff out as we go along. Duterte strikes me as a reflexive dictator, so it’s not a surprise that his immediate instinct is to clamp down on society. South Korea has a moonbatty, somewhat limp-wristed leftist executive right now, and he may be stuck between pot-smoking it’s-all-good-ism and his instinct to run a repressive nanny state. His internal conflict had resulted in a balanced approach to the problem, but now, I think his inner nanny-statist has taken over his consciousness, to the detriment of us all.
The first church to make the news in Korea was indeed a fringe church, although I hesitate to lump it in with normal Protestants. Shincheonji is more of a doomsday cult with a leader who claims to be an incarnation of Jesus (get in line, buddy; Korea has lots of similarly wacky Jesuses). The second church, River of Grace, was/is mainline Protestant.
Our Lady of Pious Idiocy, protect us from ourselves…