Change

When that bald guy who lives alone by the river promised change last year, I didn't know this was what I would get.

Since I started college I've had to deal with an insane amount of metal money. Last year I used this partitioned plastic thing I took out of a lunch box to manage my coins. All my P5 coins went in one partition; all the P10 coins, in the other. I had them exchanged for hundred-peso bills regularly.

The one-peso coins had a paper bag all to themselves, and by school year's end I had around P1,500 in P1 coins. That's 1,500 pieces of small round Jose Rizal faces. The paper bag weighed a ton. I lived a block away from a Philippine National Bank branch, and I could have had it changed for a paper bill or two there. But I was lazy. And I feared the paper bag would give up before I could get to the bank and spill my precious one-peso coins all over the sidewalk. So I took the bag home.

At the airport I had to pay P4,500 in excess baggage fees (stupid Cebu Pacific charges P150 per excess kilogram)—and that was after I decided to just carry two or three bags I had meant to check in. The bag of coins weighed around 10 kilograms, by Papa's estimate. So I essentially had to pay Cebu Pacific P1,500 to ship a bag carrying P1,500 home.

Kadugasan ng Cebu Pacific.

Not surprising considering that Cebu Pacific is a budget (read: tsipipay, make-as-much-money-as-is-legally-possible) airline.

We went to their ticketing office today to have my flight rebooked. My parents had booked the ticket two or three months ago, and when they did they paid for luggage. Apparently, because I rebooked my seat—and owing to Cebu Pacific's "Screw the standard free 15kg baggage allowance, you'll need to pay us P168 if you want to check in 15kg of bags" rule—we had to pay for luggage again!

Where the money we paid for luggage when we booked the ticket originally? Nobody knows.

Only in da Pilipens.