Day 154: Cebu City

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I'm now 2 weeks behind on blogs, thanks to limited internet access on Palawan, but I'm not giving up! Many more to come.

There isn't that much to say about Cebu City... it really isn't much of a tourist destination, more of a layover city. We decided to stay two nights anyway, and made the most of it, but two nights was definitely enough.

When we got off the boat from Bohol it was already late afternoon, so we made a bee-line to our hotel. Our taxi driver said his meter was broken, and tried to charge us 200 pesos, but when I threatened to report him he turned on the meter and it only cost 50 pesos to get there. Our hotel (Allson's Inn) was actually pretty nice but it is in a kind of crappy neighborhood. On later exploration of Cebu, though, I decided it was pretty typical of the rest of the city.

We didn't want to venture too far from the hotel the first night, so we ate dinner at the very popular fast food chain (they're everywhere in PI) Jollibee across the street. It was gross. I was expecting McDonald's quality and I was severely disappointed. That should give you an idea. While we were eating a little girl was asking us for food outside the window, so we bought her a cheeseburger. I don't know if we did her a favor or not.

The next day we went to the mall and got some pretty good sushi. The malls in PI are so westernized, you'd swear you were in the US if it weren't for 99% filipinos. We checked out the movie theater and decided to come back for a movie later.

After that we headed to "Downtown", which is the older part of Cebu City (as opposed to "uptown"). It is home to Magellan's cross, which is where Magellan first planted a cross upon Spain landing in Cebu. It was probably the most underwhelming attraction I've ever seen - just a plain wooden cross, that is not even the original. I think they encased the original one in something. Anyway after about 20 seconds we decided to explore the area a bit. We went in an old cathedral right next to the cross, and soon realized that it was Ash Wednesday. That would explain why everyone had ash on their foreheads. Duh. From there we walked toward Colon St., which is the busiest street downtown. I took a picture of a pretty nasty river of trash on the way (see below). 20 minutes later, after being overwhelmed by unpleasant smells and the same shops over and over, we decided to get the heck out of there.

Our next stop was the Edge Coaster, which is this ride on the 30th floor of a skyscraper. The views from the top are pretty awesome and the ride was actually pretty scary. You sit in this two person cart that faces outward, and it slowly goes around the rim of the building. The scary part is there is a lever that lets you tilt the chairs up to 50 degrees over the edge of the building, so you are looking straight down at the cars and people below. I had some fun tilting it back and forth while steph screamed.

We could see our hotel from the top of the building, so I lobbied for us to walk back instead of take a cab. Steph reluctantly agreed, so we set off on foot. About halfway there, as we were crossing an intersection, a little girl ran up to me and started shouting "Daddy! Daddy!" and grabbed on to my arm. By the time we finished crossing, she was joined by 7 or 8 other kids, who grabbed my arms and surrounded me. I knew right away what was going on so I covered my two front pockets, which held both of our cameras, and tried to shake them off. I always keep my money in a travel wallet around my neck and tucked into the front of my pants so I wasn't worried about that. One of the kids got in to my back pocket and stole a receipt, but other than that they didn't get anything. Finally after shaking them off and yelling at them, they left us alone. Thinking back on it, they were probably instructed to do this kind of thing by an adult somewhere. Kind of sad.

Our final Cebu City experience was going back to the mall to watch the Wolfman, with Benicio del Torro. It was pretty bad. Terrible, really. I guess I can't blame Cebu City for that one though.

Cebu was our last mediocre stop before near paradise on Palawan for two weeks. These pictures of Cebu are quite a contrast compared to what is coming:

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Comments

[Matt Potterton]

That ride....
That ride looks more like one of those Kid's Land rides, Toads Great Adventure or whatever it's called, at Disneyland. It's just flat! But leaning over the edge must have been awesome.