Bus Terminal

I’m supposed to be blogging about my new Cherry Mobile Flare that I bought for myself for my coming birthday this month, but then a huge boulder of bad luck was dumped on me. And when I say a huge boulder of bad luck, it something that cost me almost my entire life of fortune. Like, seriously.

So last Friday, I rode the a bus in Cubao terminal headed for home. I left my bag inside the bus and told the my seat mate and the bus driver to please not leave me and that I’ll just be going to the toilet for a really short while. The bus driver even told me to be fast with it because he’s leaving the terminal soon. When I returned back from the toilet, about 3 minutes later, the bus already left. I went up to different buses to check up it the bus I rode before just moved locations, but unfortunately, it didn’t. I went straight to the terminal dispatcher and told him about my situation. He told me to ride this certain bus that leaving the terminal to chase after the other bus that just left. When we finally got to the other bus, the bus driver said that he wasn’t the driver of the bus where I left my things in. At that moment I thought that I’ll never get my bag back.  That bag contained my personal laptop, external hard drive, my wallet, my pouch, our Dev funds, an old mobile phone that I borrowed from my mom, and my older brother’s PSP. I rode the same bus to Dau terminal where I’m supposed to go. While on the road, I called my mom to bring money and redeem me from the bus station when I arrive and told her what happened. When I arrived, the dispatcher told me that they asked each and every bus that came from 6-9pm about the bags I left, and they found nothing.  They asked for my number just in case my seatmate or someone else found it and returned it to them. And the last text message I got from them was Last Saturday night saying nobody returned my bag.

Honestly, it’s just plain idiocy on my part. I shouldn’t have left my bag inside the bus.  But by the time this sank in on me, I was already at the toilet so I immediately ran back, but it was too late. The bus terminal staffs told me that, apparently, this is not the first case that this happened and that my bag was probably stolen even before the bus left the terminal. According to them, in the past weeks, they’ve caught several people riding on the bus that are not really passengers. They sit around the bus on the seats that has bags where the owner is either not around or not paying attention.
Then start pretending that these bags belonged to them and soon, make up some kind of excuse to get down the bus while taking those bags with them. The other passengers wouldn’t be able to know if that bag was theirs or not and they ran off with them.

I’m blogging about this to let people know these things happen in terminals when you travel. Especially here in the Philippines where there’s never a safe place.