The FUGly, the Bad and the Good Enough…

Last weekend, I joined the SOCTEC2 field trip to Batangas and Laguna. It’s an overnight thing that turned into…well, at the time, what seemed to be hell on earth (or close to it, maybe especially for the students, who had to shell out an amount they don’t consider as cheap). The problem basically started when we got to the resort we’re supposed to stay for the night—the name of which I didn’t bother to remember (okay, there were the words ‘vista’ and ‘pansol’).

Here are some of the noteworthy things that happened, which hopefully be a source of hard-taught lessons:

Despite the arrival of buses after buses, the kids’ rooms haven’t been assigned yet. The organizers of the trip (let’s call them “LB”) attested that it has been arranged beforehand but due to some students with late payment, the room assignments were not finalized.

The resort ran out of food during dinner time that some students had to wait for the next batch—which was either reordered or bought from a resto outside (I’m not sure…).

We (the older kids who watch over the younger kids) were demoted to a function hall that they made into a sleeping area. By ‘we’, I meant ‘all older kids’--the faculty and discipline officers, regardless of sex. We had to settle sleeping on the floor, with a 2-inch or so mattress and almost poor quality restrooms. It’s a function hall, hence no shower room.

So my colleague Yapatoots and I looked for alternative places to shower and being a resort, we thought there *should* be shower areas beside the swimming pools. It didn't matter if we had to drag our stuff along. In the end, we ended up using the shower room in the quarters of her former students. The female shower areas around the resort DO NOT WORK.

And basically the whole place looked like it is not properly maintained (I wonder who did the ocular inspection, if at all, it was inspected) and the resort people seemed to display a lack of preparation on the whole thing. It also looked like LB had done an unsatisfactory job of coordinating the activity with regards to the lodging. Even if the students claimed that the exposure trips and community visits were not a problem, the discomfort brought by the lodging fiasco basically killed what could have been a more fruitful processing of the exposure trip.

The impact of such field trip horror must’ve subsided, now that I have access to a reasonably clean bathroom. At the time of the trip, I admit I wanted to go home so badly and suppress (with moderate success) the notion that the whole experience was a complete waste of time. Fortunately, there were ways to try and rationalize the misfortunes surrounding the trip. For instance, the night-time karaoke with the other faculty tutors made me realize how much they can loosen up and throw sexual and gay innuendos in the whole conversation. (LOL!) Also, I get to play around with my new digicam and took several pretty pictures

There’s me ^o^…

The sceneries…

And I particularly liked how the presentation of everyday earth-related objects can make nice-looking pictures. ^_^

I think one of the hardest part of the trip is sucking up all the shit that happened, try to stay professional and stick to the objective of the trip, especially since students were all over the place—there’s just no room for overt whining (it's the role-model thing). One thing’s for sure, this whole hoopla isn’t over. I can smell hints of complaints over the next few days.