Filipinos do most of their celebrating of Christmas on 24th December, Christmas Eve, at midnight. Lyndal and I started the day late and then went to the pool. We had a few quiet white wines in the afternoon then Kyle collected us to take us to his family home.
The streets were lined with lterally hundreds of tiny stalls selling a bewildering array of fireworks in all shapes and sizes. The photo shows Kyle about to start haggling at one of the shops. Note the size of the fountains on the right. Massive!
We then went to Kyle's house where there seemed to be hundreds of cousins, aunts and uncles all packed into a tiny space. They made room for us and we joined in a form of karaoke. There was a guy with a guitar who played songs, while others took it in turn to sing the words from a printed song sheet. Sort of low-tech karaoke I guess. We were offered a lot of food,including lechon (spit-roasted pig), which is a Cebu specialty. There was an array of fish bits, and Gino tried to persuade Lyndal and I to try balut. This is a Filipino delicacy - an 18-day-old duck embryo in its egg, complete with feathers, beak and wide-staring (dead) eyes. No thanks. I sipped a little of the liquid and nibbled at the cooked yolk entwined with blood vessels, but I just couldn't eat the dead duckling. Luckily for us, Gino ate it.
At midnight we let off our fireworks, along with half of Cebu, it seems. The next day the papers said that 67 people had been injured by fireworks in Manila alone. We staggered home in the wee hours and had a well-deserved rest, having spent several hours fending off marriage proposals for Lyndal. :-)
Christmas Day was more like an ordinary work day in Cebu. All the shops and restaurants were open and it seemed to be business as usual. We went up into the mountains behind Cebu City to visit Kyle’s grandmother and see the place where he was raised. It was on the side of an enormous mountain, with a drop of perhaps a 100m from the backdoor to the valley floor. Perched on the mountain side was the family’s piggery, where we saw the siblings of the pig we had eaten the night before at the Christmas Eve party.
We visited a hillside park with statues of various real and imaginary animals and people. Lyndal and I were delighted to see a kangaroo statue next to one of a dancing pig.
We went zip-lining too. A cable of 400m was strung between two peaks and we were harnessed to the cable with a pulley and sent flying. It was a great experience. It was a bit of a thrill to fly over the valley floor, but not terrifying like bungy-jumping and the 37th floor roller coaster.
Finally, we went back to Mactan and I bought Lyndal a handmade guitar for a Christmas present. Mactan Island is famous for its handmade guitars and Lyndal had been inspired by the ‘karaoke unplugged’ of the night before. She spent the last hours of Christmas Day learning chords, while I spent the time learning how to use Facebook. I have finally been converted to Facebook by the multitude of friends that I have met on my travels who use Facebook to follow each other’s travels and swap photos. So Lyndal’s Christmas present to me was a Facebook account.
So our Christmas was very different from that at home, but was a great experience. Who knows where we will spend it next year?
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