Tagalong with Valli to the Philippines: My First Trip to Cebu, Second largest City in the Philippines

March 15, 2013

View of Cebu from our room

I came home after being at the office only an hour and a half to find my laptop had been stolen out of my room. Up until this time I hadn't been keeping my door locked but from this point onward I sure do. Now we’re all more careful about locking the front door and the gate to the street. Someone must have been watching me and the house very closely and knew everyone was gone and/or busy out back at the restaurant.

Norma and Anita BFF

This same day I was leaving for Cebu with Anita and her friend Norma who was flying back to the States. Norma has been living in Arizona for over 30 years working as a nurse like so many Filipinos living and working overseas.It was stressful. I had a couple hours to deal with changing passwords to different accounts and found my system had already been hacked. I had everything backed up on an exterior hard drive, thankfully they didn't take that, and regularly transfer photos to it. #1 Lesson learned-don't have your computers set up to automatically log you in to everything on start up. Keep it so a password is needed before anything else opens.

I made the trip to buy a wet suit with scuba certification and Reef Check training coming up soon.We stayed at a pension house, did a little site seeing including many churches where Norma and Anita attended mass. Cebu is the second largest city in the Philippines and a little overwhelming for me. I was grateful to have them with me to help me find the dive shop and I’m so excited to be ready for diving.

The Basilica of de Santo Nino

I didn’t make it to Cebu for the Sinulog Festival (other PCVs did), Cebu’s famous festival commemorating the Filipino people’s tribal origins and their acceptance of Roman Catholicism. I watched some of the parade and dance performances on TV. The pageantry was spectacular. All the groups perform to the same music which I found a little monotonous, and they act out the same theme, wonderfully, re-enacting Ferdinand Magellan’s arrival on April 15^th, 1521, the planting of the cross on the shores of Cebu and presenting an image of the child Jesus, Santo Nino, to the queen.
http://www.philippines.hvu.nl/culture5.htm

Interesting, Magellan’s landing in Cebu was within days of Cortez’s landing in Vera Cruz, Mexico. Those Spaniards were certainly getting around.

I enjoyed visiting the Basilica of de Santo Nino (baby Jesus) in the main square where the heart of the festival happens and seeing Magellan's Cross.

inside the Basilica of de Santo Nino

wonderful ceiling frescos

a gorgeous interior courtyard

Cebu has four big mall and we went to them all. A mall is a mall and overwhelming to me no matter where it is. Still I like the Ayala Mall the best with outdoor terraces surrounding beautiful landscaping and water features and MANY places to get coffee including Settle's Best and Starbucks! I was in coffee heaven sitting outside Starbucks sipping, reading my Kindle and waiting for Anita and Norma to finish shopping and looking around. Everything was so expensive. Buying coffee was a splurge.

there's even a Prada store

nice place to sit and read and drink coffee

We met up with close family friends who live in Cebu and drove out of town for dinner.

Bimbo's an environmental planner

Joy's a dentist and their son Andrea

The richest man in the Philippines started out as a shoe saleman and now owns the SM malls. If a town is big and prosperous enough to have a mall; it will be a SM mall. There's already a SM mall in Cebu but a new huge one is being built across from the new Saint Pedro Church, both near the floating restaurant we went to.

I've never seen so many cranes working on one project

Saint Pedro, 1654-1672, of Cebu was recently canonized by the Pope Benedict XVI along with 16 others, one of whom was the first Native American to be sainted.