Posts tagged with family
October 23, 2010. There was some saltiness in the clear waters, but Kayangan Lake is said to be one of the cleanest bodies of waters in the Philippines. It is located inside Coron Island itself and can be reached after hiking up and down steep limestone hills covered in lush foliage. It is one of Coron’s main attractions.
After Siete Pecados, our boatman brought us to a cove, one of many, in Coron Island. After out boat docked, we walked towards a steep makeshift staircase up a limestone hill.
October 23, 2010. Our second day in Coron, Palawan was spent with a tour of beautiful Coron island, off the coast of Coron town. The cove-hopping island tour was part of the packaged tour my mom booked with our hotel.
October 22, 2010. The afternoon our family arrived in Coron, Palawan, we were taken to Maquinit Hot Spring a few kilometers from the center of town. Tourist brochures and guides claim it is the only saltwater hot spring in the Philippines, where the water temperature can be as hot as 40 degrees celcius.
(The hot spring is apparently within the private property of some company, so they charge an exorbitant entrace fee of P100 per person for the natural wonder of no one’s making.)
My family spent three days and two nights in Coron, Palawan last weekend. My mother assumed that my brother, my sister and myself would be off from school by this time of the year so she booked us a packaged tour to Coron a month or two ago. I had just finished my final exams in law school, so it was a welcome respite.
We’ve been to Palawan before, more than seven years ago, but that was in Puerto Princesa, the capital town of Palawan, touted as the Philippine’s “last frontier”. Last weekend, it was our first time in Coron, on the northern part of the country’s largest province. Coron is both the name of a town in the island of Busuanga and the name of a beautiful island off the shore of Coron town.
Our family had dinner at Ling Nam along Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City one ordinary Saturday night. There was no occasion, just a spontaneous dinner outside the house. Chinese food (Cantonese in particular) is the best. If there’s one cuisine I can live with, it’s Chinese.
We had a fastfood chain host a kiddie birthday party for Tisay's fifth birthday last Tuesday at her afternoon kindergarten class
In one of the alleys of Dapitan Arcade. Stalls were selling colorful household ornaments and since it's a few months before December, Christmas decors. The alleys were too narrow, and it wasn't even that crowded yet.
Mama asked me to drive her to “Dapitan Arcade” where, supposedly, bargain household ornaments (and other aesthetically-pleasing but otherwise utility-less) items can be had. It was a lazy Sunday and I didn’t want to do my law books that afternoon, so it was fine.
Tisay in her kindergarten uniform, at her school auditorium
I went to her school to accompany her in receiving some kindergarten awards last week, among them “Best Leader”. I wonder what that means in the context of four year-olds.
Alona Beach, Panglao, Bohol
Almost a month ago, my family spent a weekend in Bohol. We availed of the usual tour package, a two night stay at a Panglao island resort and a day tour around the usual tourist spots in the island-province. I’ve never been to Bohol till then, but because much has been written about it as as one of the country’s emerging top tourist destinations, I’ve heard enough about it to be familiar with what to do in the island in a span of three days. Admittedly too short to immerse oneself, in any destination for that matter, but isn’t that what tourism is about, to sample destinations, just the good and the beautiful at face value?
Alona Beach, Panglao, Bohol
It was the week when my mother and my younger brother celebrated their birthdays, and a short trip to Bohol was what my mother thought would be an apt way to celebrate the occasions. We stayed at Flushing Meadows Resort at Dauis, in Panglao Island. It’s relatively isolated from the other resorts clustered and located in the major stretches of white sand beaches in the island, though the resort has its cove with its own small stretch of fine white sand (which only appears during low tide, though).
I had never been to Cebu for the Sinulog Festival. Because this year it fell on the day of my parent’s wedding anniversary, I made the pitch of celebrating their day in Cebu. We brought Tisay along, too. It was her first time to ride an airplane.
I wasn’t able to take a lot of pictures during the grand parade since I wasn’t able to acquire a photographer’s pass or a press pass when I went to the organizers’ office the day before. They ran out of ID’s before the deadline, so I had to make do with taking photographs from the sidewalks and sneaking into the parade lane when the marshals weren’t looking.
The day started with a light drizzle, which slowly turned into rain by the middle of the morning. Despite the fact that it was literally “raining on their parade”, the dozens of contingents of street dancers continued dancing to the common beat of the drums and trumpets as they inched their way to the Cebu City Sport Complex, where their performances were to be judged and televised across the Visayas and Mindanao.
Our family friends who live in Cebu remarked that the Sinulog can get pretty boring if you see it every year. After all, the dancers move to the same beats and tunes and the same basic dance steps of the “sinulog” dance year after year. For non-locals, however, the festive and lively atmosphere barely makes for a boring celebration.
The day before the parade, around two million devotees went on the traditional religious procession honoring the child Jesus. One of the things they reportedly prayed for was for the sun to shine on the grand parade, since it had been raining for days prior to the grand culmination.
As if their prayers were answered, the sun peaked out near noon, and warmly wrapped the city with a humid mist. There were probably a million in the streets of Cebu City by noon time. It was festive chaos. By around an hour past noon, I had completely walked the entire route around Cebu City’s midtown and I had gotten back at our hotel. And yet, the parade had barely formally started and the contingents only moved a few meters from their original designated areas. I was too tired to do the route again so I decided to take a nap. By the time I woke up that afternoon, it was drizzling again but the crowd along Osmena Boulevard had multiplied to the hundreds of thousands (the news says as many as three million trooped to the streets), all merry-making with the costumed dancers despite the rain.
Still tired and unwilling to work my way through the crowds again, I watched the rest of the parade on local television from our hotel room along Osmena Boulevard with my family.
law student, leftist, national democratic, film school graduate, photography hobbyist