If you have problems with the titles of your property and need to have it changed, certified, or altered... well good luck to you.
You have to wrestle with one of the most corrupt, laziest, and inefficient government agencies here in Metro Manila. God help those poor souls who have to deal with the officers and employees of this agency.
I had the most unfortunate encounter with the QC RD and boy, it was like the worst kind of bureaucracy -- my papers have been in the process for over eight months already (and is still in the process).
The problem started when we had to fix one of our relatives' townhouse (who just left the country). To make the story short, the land was transferred to our family and we had to deal with snail-paced service of the Quezon City government. We should have ask for a real estate agent to do the work, but we thought it would be easier (quicker) to do it on our own... and we were so wrong.
Here is a step-by-step account of what happened:
(1) November 2007. Finished all the payments, tax declarations, and tranfer fees at QC City Hall. The second-to-the-last-step involved surrendering the old Transfer of Certificate Title (TCT) and getting a new one. To get a new certificate tile, you have to go to the Registery of Deeds.
(2) December 2007. Went to the Registry of Deeds (RD) to get certificate title. Apparently, the old office was burnt down, along with all the orginal documents in the department (stupid people don't even bother to get a vault to store these important documents). Rather than fix the problem themselves, the RD people decided to pass on the responsibility of reconstituting the missing certificate titles to the public.
In a nutshell, the process of re-constituting (recreating) a new title involves the following steps:
(A) get an affidavit to request for reconstitution.
(B) make sure to have all required documents ready and fixed.
(C) pay the reconstitution fee (Hell, we pay for their salaries and they still ask us to pay more for them to do their work).
(D) Wait till your application goes to the Surveyor's office (to survery the land in question) ... which takes around 4 or 5 months to do.
(E) Get the approved application and return to RD office.
(F) Pay another fee to have RD office process your approved application.
(G) Get the new certificate title.
(H) proceed back to Quezon City Hall.
(3) January to February 2008. Got stuck in Step B. I think the process would have been quicker if the RD employees were more accomodating and helpful. But they were total a-holes. Some of them were rude and condescending. Their office starts at 8am. They refuse to speak or answer to your queries before that time, cursing you for bothering them. Some of them (those in key positions) come to work around 9 or 930 am. Still others would vanish while in the middle of work. I waited 1.5 hours for one of the checkers and learned that she was out collecting her 5-6 "utang".
(4) February to June 2008. I thought my ordeal with RD was over as soon as my application went to the surveryor's office (step D). But the waiting game had just started. It took over 5 months for them to check the land title, survey/assess the land, and process the documents. I followed up every month but they always told me the documents were still being fixed. Our application was further delayed for two more months when I followed up and learned that it was "collecting dust" in one of the trays (apparently the clerks misfiled it or forgot about it totally).
(5) June to July 2008. Got the approval from the surveyor's office (Step E) and I was supposed to go back to RD to make the final processing (Step F). The whole process took another month. And I had to pay another amount of money. What annoyed me further was the indifference of the RD employees to the people they serve -- the way they rudely answer at queries and their attitudes.
(6) July 2008. Got the new CTC. I was estatic to be finally freed of RD. I rushed to QC City Hall for the final step H, only to realize that there were a couple of missing documents that the RD office failed to provide me.
I could have acquired these documents during the waiting period, but no one in RD told me or informed me. So I have to went back there again to get the missing documents.
As I was filing out the request forms for the documents, the clerk asked me if I was in a rush to get my documents done. I said yes. He told me he can help, but the people who would do the work were in another office. This means I have to bribe him and his contacts (and I still don't know how many they were). I got fed up, disgusted, and politely said no.
I could have accepted the clerk's offer, but I was at the end of the process. I'm fed with the agency and I don't want to spend another peso to feed on their laziness and corruption.
Scouting around for bargain chairs
At first I thought I could buy a nice wooden chair for around 500 to 600 hundred bucks, but I was wrong.
The wooden chairs at SOGO and Blims costs around 2k to 3k. The plastic, foldable chairs at Ace Hardware costs around 600 to 900 bucks. I realized that wood costs a lot more than plastic or metal.
So after window-shopping in the malls, I decided to go chair hunting online. I searched for second-hand chairs over ebay, bidshot, and the HMR website. There are a lot of bargains online and I took my time to look for something that I want.
Eventually I realized that I'd stick to my budget of 500 to 600 pesos, and I can settle for a nice decent chair (wooden or not) that has a nice cushion.
And I found the chair I wanted at Office Busters Philippines (http://www.licagroup.net/officebusters/index.html).
Like HMR, Office Busters sells second hand office furnitures from Japan. The store is located along Pasong Tamo extension and has tons of office stuff -- ranging from cabinets, chairs, tables, printers and copiers.
I drove there, hoping to find a suitable chair and I found tons of stuff. The store looks more like a warehouse with different types of furniture piled up on top of each other. There were a lot of second hand cabinets and tables, but there were some new ones as well.
In the end, I found the chair that I wanted. It wasn't made of wood, but it was sturdy, nice looking, and has cushions. And it cost me six hundred pesos.
Food Tripping at Mien San Dimsum Noodle House
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Mien San Dimsum Noodle House is one of the shops as you pass by Avalon, going straight pass the intersection. The small restaurant stands in front of the In and Out Steak House and, according to my officemate, serves the best xiao-long-pao in the city.
So we paid a visit at the store and had a light dinner there. And for a Sunday night, the place was filled with Tsinoy customers. We ordered an order of xiao-long-pao (4 pieces worth 60 bucks) and a beef noodle soup (worth 148 bucks).
The xiao-long-pao came first, and I was reminded of how small they were. I imagined them to be miniature bola bola siopao, soaked in hot juice, and wrapped around thin dimsum wrappers.
We quickly finished the dimsum and waited for the noodles to arrive. Jen said the xiao-long-pao were good, but Shu-zhou restaurant's is much better.
After a couple of minutes, the beef noodles arrived. We stirred the bowl and saw the noodles were hand-tossed "la-mien" ("pulled noodles"). The taste of the broth and the noodles were authentically Chinese, not the typical Chow-King noodles (or Filipinized Chinese noodles as I like to call it).
Overall, the food was excellent. Jen and I would want to come back again to try the other food. There were other interesting dishes like onion pancake (or Chinese pizza) and their fried vegetable noodle soup.
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