I was in Cebu from August 18 to 21 for a workshop on quality management system as our office is angling for ISO 9001:2008 certification by year end. We stayed at Golden Prince Hotel and Suites, just a hundred paces or so from Ayala Mall.
My friends, upon knowing I was where I was, sent text messages, urging me to dine at The Terrace (this one’s beautiful!) and raid Fully Booked (this one’s even more beautiful!). I went to The Terrace and Fully Booked alright, but no dining and raiding happened! For sure there were some covers, mostly by Filipino authors, that caught my eyes but I held on to my hard-earned money knowing I have gazillion unread titles stashed somewhere in my room. I bought six back-issues of
My Home, though.
Ahh, but I bought shirts and jeans. Shoes and watch, too! I just realized that for over five years now I haven’t done some serious shopping for myself. (How did I survive those years? Through the benevolence of friends outside the country and yes, the ever dependable "UK" vintage.) And so I spent my 5-digit honorarium from a recent racket like it was a cellphone load that needed to be consumed else it expired.
But one thing bothered me that made me sad in a way that I couldn't explain. It just struck me that like Manila, Cebu no longer enthralls me. Could it be that I have come to realize that one can only eat so much lasagna and drink so much fancy coffee? No, scratch that; I don’t eat lasagna and drink fancy coffee.
Must be the eternal
promdi in me because on the second day, I was already itching to go home and revert to the life I have long ago learned to love and like.
The Friday I was to fly home, I woke up early because I wanted to take a trip down memory lane. I rode a jeep and when it zipped past University of San Carlos, my heart skipped. My alma mater looked massive than when I first entered it 28 years ago, on a rainy Monday in June. As the jeep headed for Colon, I looked back, and with USC looming from a distance, I felt proud and grateful: If not for that school, I wouldn’t be confident to write this post in English!
Colon was another matter; the landscape had changed drastically that it looked different from the Colon of my time. Nostalgia hit me so bad that I would have wept if only I was not sitting next to an old woman fondling a rosary. I closed my eyes and then in a beautiful montage everything came back---Fairmart, Gazini, Happy Emporium, Brutus, Ding Haw, Cloud Nine, Gaw!
Sorry if I'm feeling
senti today.
