Cebu City, Philippines

Cebu city is not our most favorite city in the Philippines. We came here for the Sinulog festival, which is supposed to be a grand cultural display with dancers all dressed up in intricate costumes parading around the city for hours on end, following by partying all night long.

This is the only picture I took of the entire event. We went to a couch surfing party on Sunday, the main event day, and they said they had rented out an entire balcony of a restaurant – we thought this was great! We can hang out on a balcony with other travellers and watch the parade! It was really hard to get to the balcony as there were so many people out, and we had to walk along some of the parade route to get there. Which was fine cause we wanted to see the parade – but the whole time we were walking along it (probably an hour, around noon when it started at 9am) no one was dancing, the dancers were just sitting/standing around eating and doing nothing.

So we thought whatever, we will see them from the balcony, right? Turns out the balcony was facing a side street, not at all along the parade route. The people there were nice but mostly expats with nothing to say, and it seemed like most people already knew each other and were just there for some heavy day drinking, along with some locals trying to make some money off of the drunk white people.

They mentioned that the best dancers would be performing the next day at the sports center for the award ceremony, so we didn’t stress too much about seeing the parade – we couldn’t see it from the balcony, the open spots along the route were in the sun and very hot, and anywhere we could find a chance to see, the dancers were just standing around looking bored – not dancing at all. And we knew where the sports center was, we had walked by it several times in the last few days.

So we hung out with the couch surfers for awhile till we got bored and tired and tried to go home, which proved incredibly difficult as the streets were packed with thousands of people drinking and throwing beer and paint and colored powder all over each other. Not really my idea of fun as I was not drunk or young enough for this and I generally hate large crowded events.

We eventually made it home and decided to go to the sports center the next day to see the dancers, since we saw maybe half of a dance the whole time and this was the whole reason we came to Cebu, to see awesome costumes and dancers at this festival. But we went to the sports center the next day and not a soul was there, and the security guard said nothing was going on that day (which made sense, it was a Monday after all..) so we went to the damn mall AGAIN and got wifi and tried to contact the couch surfers we met the day before who had gone last year to the Monday event. But we couldn’t get in touch with them or find anywhere on the internet that said where or when this event would be, so we eventually gave up and went home to relax and plan the next part of our trip and forget this stupid city.

Eventually after the event was over the couch surfers got back to us and said it was awesome, we should have been there! And sent us a map, which is no where near the big Cebu Sports Center, it was at a high school that we never would have found that they had neglected to mention the day before.

On the morning we left Cebu we did find an old fort that was pretty nice to look around, they had a nice free tour offered by what looked to be a tourism student practicing her English who gave us lots of information about the fort’s history. Apparently it is the first fort built in the Philippines by the Spanish.

Front of the fort