verging_on_random

Cost of living

February 12, 2008 on 9:54 am | In Uncategorized |

I was in the Philippines again last week and visited Subic Bay. In typical Filipino fashion, there were roadside stalls everywhere and near the coast I noticed they were selling crabs. Now the only crabs I’d eaten in PI to that stage were so small they weren’t worth the trouble but these looked the real deal so I got the driver to stop and had a look. And sure enough, they were beautiful muddies. So I bought a couple and the hotel cooked them up for us that night. Here’s mine:

It weighed 1.2 kg.  Cost? 350 pesos … $10. Aaahh the joys of developing countries.

The interesting thing was that the crabs caused quite a stir in the hotel kitchen. Fortunately the chef knew how to cook them or I would have had to put on an apron but the other staff had never seen crabs that big. Now the stalls were maybe one and a half hours’ drive from the hotel in Angeles, so if anyone is looking for a business opportunity, go to Pampanga and start a courier run from Subic to Angeles every day. I’m sure the foreigners would pay top price for them in the restaurants and hotels … oh wait, then I couldn’t get them dirt cheap at a roadside stall any more. Capitalism ruins everything