Cebu: day 2
12:08 on Saturday, December 20, 2003 • 1 response
I’m not digging Cebu very much. With the exception of a large market which specializes in dried fish, there’s not much to photograph. The weather doesn’t help. Before leaving the hotel this morning I purchased a small umbrella—my first purchase of something other than food since being in the country. My penchant for souvenirs withered away many years ago.
Today I went to the Tabo-an market, a market kinda sorta by the shipping port. Baskets and piles of dried fish mark the pedestrian avenues through this market. Oddly, I love the smell of dried fish, so being here is as much a mouth-watering experience as it is an eye-candy festival. [Pictures of the Tabo-an market in gestalt start here. Traffic from the market was absolutely horrendous, so I walked from the market back to the hotel—a considerable distance in the rain, but I’m confident I arrived sooner than any taxi would have.
After drying off and having lunch, I took a cab up to the Taoist Temple. It’s way up the mountainside, by an exclusive gated community called “Beverly Hills”. Sigh.
The temple was beautiful and a great example of Chinese architecture, but they didn’t allow photographs and of course it was overcast. I should have had the taxi wait for me; I was pretty far from the center of town and the few others who took taxis up to the temple had their taxis wait for them. As a result, I didn’t really have a way back. So I asked someone if I could grab a ride back with him and he said no problem.
He was a big, lumbering American from North Carolina. He married a Filipina and with her was setting up some businesses in Cebu in the hopes that in a few years’ time, they would sustain his and his wife’s retirements. He was extremely pleasant, and perhaps sadly, he and I bonded in a discussion about the problems we experience in encountering Filipino culture.
I think I’ll leave Cebu tomorrow. The discotheque scene is supposed to be great here, but that’s not really my thing anymore.
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