The most shocking thing from my trip to the Philippines.

The most shocking thing from my trip to the Philippines.

I have been to the Philippines nine times in total: in 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023, 2025, and twice in 2026.

This story is from 2018.

I first visited Angeles in 2017, and during that trip I spent a night with a bar girl.

After returning home, I kept fond memories of it, and a year later I got another chance to go back. I tried to recall the bar I had gone to, and I asked the manager for the name of the woman I had forgotten, wondering if she might still be there. She was still working there.

Oh, I immediately bar-fined her, and after leaving I thought about what to do next, and decided on visiting her house. Looking back now, I wonder why, of all things, I wanted to take the bar girl I had simply liked and go see her house.

Was it because I wanted to feel a sense of superiority while looking around her house, which was practically 100% a derelict house?

Was it an instinctive curiosity about a strange landscape that you can't see in Korea?

Was it an intellectual quest toward a wider world?

It's none of those, but if I had to pick one, it would be the second, and the most important thing is that I think I was simply born to crave things like that.

When I said let's go to your house, she readily agreed.

I thought nobody must be home, so I bought a few Jollibee Super Meals and rode a tricycle to her house.

After getting off near her house and seeing it, it was the biggest shock of my Philippine trips so far. First, her whole family was there. And her family greeted me with bright expressions.

I was shocked to a great degree, thinking, "Wait, I'm the man who's going to spend the night with your daughter... how can they welcome me like that?" The second was the condition of her house.

I had expected it to be near derelict, but it went far beyond that expectation.

A house is just bricks stacked up, cemented, and covered with a sheet of metal on top.

Can this even be called a house...?

The TV was an old bulky cathode-ray tube TV.

The kitchen was like a kitchen from the North Korean "Arduous March" famine era.

As soon as I saw it, I said goodbye right away and hurried back out.

The bar girl looked puzzled, and since it seemed like I had unintentionally fled, I felt sorry and emphasized that I hadn't left with that intention.

Then I told her to go to a hotel. Because I remember being incredibly scared just from seeing the house. The place I stayed at back then was a Euro Hotel.

Then I slept just like that without any extra business, and I remember that in the morning I sent her off and never looked for her again.