What is "a little late" ? How late is late? Are there any differences between a date and a business meeting?
People look at time differently in different parts of the world. In rigid-time countries, people are time-worshipped or clock-obsessed. Punctuality is very critical for them. On the contrary, in fluid-time countries, people place less emphasis on strick punctuality and are not so obsessed with time. The Philippines happens to fall in the category of the "Fluid-time" zone (Or what's so called Polychromic cultures). In a nutshell, the closer you get to the equator, the slower the clock seems to run. I had learned of this before I headed to Boracay. However, I didn't expect that I would experience this in person.
I made several nice and hospitable local friends while I was swimming. One of them is Mike. He showed me around Boracay and introduced his friends to me. We hung out at a lot of cool places in Boracay, even local karaoke stores. He even took me to a cyber cafe and asked the clerk to put together a lot of English songs either by Filipino or foreign artists that we listened to at the beachfront bar, Pier One, and burned them into one CD for my remembrance, because he knew that I loved those songs so much. Before I took off, he also took me to some Talipapas (Souvenir or gift shop in Filipino) so that I can save more bucks. He's been a good friend to me.
However, one day before we said good night to each other after we came back from bar hopping, we made an appointment for the following day at 11:00 AM. The next day, I showed up at 11:00 AM on the dot, but he didn't. I thought he might have a hang-over and slept in. So I took it easy and decided to have sun-bathing for a while before he turned up. After 1 hour, I still didn't get to get a glimpse of him. I was so famished that I went to grab something to eat. After I got back to my hotel around 03:00 PM, the hotel cherk told me that someone was looking for me around 1:00 PM. And I knew it was Mike. I wasn't mad at all because he had been nice to me and it hit me that it might be due to either the cultural difference or his hang-over. While I was in the middle of a nap, he knocked on my door and called my name. He apologized and said he had been looking for me earlier. And I said that was okay.
Also, one time I invited Mike and his friend, Joey, to go out for dinner, and the designated time was 06:00 PM. They showed up around 10-15 minutes late and they apologized to me. I took it lightly. We still had a good time at dinner.
Those two cases proved the people at different parts of the world have different ideas about time. If I hadn't known this, I would have gone ballistic or left on the spot and lost several nice friends. After coming back to Taiwan, I asked some of my Filipino friends or Chinese friends in Manila, they all told me things like those happened now and then. Filipinos are more laid-back and not that time-conscious. Unilke us, sometimes we might feel we are slave to the time clock. One Filipino even wanted to apologize to me on behalf of his fellow campatriots. In fact, I've never blamed them for their tardiness because I know that results from cultural differences. Plus, they were always nice to me and even cooked a great deal of seafood for me as one of them used to be a chief.
This trip is really a wonderful expereince and I won't forget those great friends over there. Most of all, I did learn a lot from them and got the chance to prove the theories or what I read in the books as well. Travelling really helps people grow and enrich more real-life experience and cultural knowledge. If I have free time, I'd like to go back there sometime.
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