Gala Pinoy Redux

“It’s more fun in the Philippines.”

Wow. It has actually more wow than one of the previous taglines, Wow Philippines. We like it, well most Filipinos at least, but why does the new tagline of the Department of Tourism work?

Here are some of the my thoughts.

1. It’s simple. Fuckin’ grade A straightforward tagline. You get it immediately. The words are simple too. Well, granted you understand English. But it’s as simple as it gets without sounding dry.

2. You can interpret it in any way you can. Because the tagline’s simple, it can excite a prospective tourist’s imagination, especially the word ‘fun’. Each of us has our own idea of fun. Beaches? Climbing mountains? Seeing the Rice Terraces? Spanish/American colonial history? It doesn’t matter. When you visit the Philippines, expect to have fun. Which is a promise, which is the basic function of a tagline, which still needs to be fulfilled eventually. But more on that later.
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So Gala Pinoy Redux (or Gala Pinoy version 2, as I would prefer to call it) is officially two years old. Thousands of miles and Pesos later, I am now a changed man. Really. Well at least, I hope I would be a changed man in terms of travel in the next two years.

Unlike last year where I traveled without any care for time and money, I have to step back a bit this year, I think. Travel ate up most of my savings, and I’m work on getting more work again so that I can rebuild my savings AND travel. There are plans for traveling free too, and I hope I could do that as well. So goes a freelancer’s life. Some days you make so much money you end up not knowing what to do with it (especially if you’re single), other days, you are dirt poor, you’d be tempted to sell your kidney just to get your travel fix.
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