Family, Friends, Festivals, Food, and Flowers - these are the five Fs that summarize my most recent vacation to my homeland - the Beautiful South, the Fruit Basket of the Southern Philippines - my beloved South Cotabato province.
Family bonding in SM City GenSan
I arrived at the booming port city of General City just in time for the celebration of the Tuna Festival which is celebrated each year every 5th of September commemorating the city's charterhood.
(TRIVIA - GenSan, as Dadiangas is now popularly known, is considered as the Tuna capital of the Philippines. It has over 85 tuna value-added processors, 7 of the country’s 10 tuna canneries and hundreds of allied services all contributing 61,000 jobs for the city.)
My family met me at the newly-opened SM City Gensan. The kids, my son and nieces, were jubilant when we brought them to shop at the Toy Kingdom. Afterwards, we had a hearty lunch at Maxx's, a popular food chain in Philippines that serves fried chicken as their best seller. We left for Koronadal City, some 35 miles north of Gensan, before sundown where the much-awaited distribution of pasalubong followed.
Tuna Festival streetdancing and float parade
Aboard an impressively new and modern Yellow Bus, I returned to GenSan that Sunday, 9th of September, to witness the street dancing competition and float parade. I arrived around noon and had lunch at Casa Ilongga but was a bit disappointed that my favorite Kadyos is not well-cooked. But since I was rushing, I didn't have the time to complain. After filling my stomach with enough food to last until dinner, I went straight to the Capitol ground before 1pm. I was informed that the parade will start at 1pm but it didnt until after 2:30pm (Filipino Time? Or should i better say Indian Time?)
The strong beating of the drums can be heard from a distance, that signifies the start of the parade. I was told the starting point was at the SM City where I had lunch, I should have just waited there, I reckoned. But my slight disappointment faded when the motorcade finally came into my full view. So I quickly pulled my camera out of my bag and fired hundreds of shots. When I saw the last group of participants at the end of the parade, I rushed to the Oval, ahead of the paraders to do my second round of shots, close-ups and some actions shots. It's to my delight that the entry to the Oval was slow, that gave me enough time to ask some of the picture-worthy kids to pose for some snapshots.
Before the day ended, my Nikon D90's 4GB memory card finally indicated "FULL".
My friend Anne and her daughter picked me up at the Oval. We head to their home at Camella, the city's newest exclusive subdivision, after eating some Halo-Halo at Chowking.
Childhood Friends
We rested for an hour or two before we picked up Edgar and Donna for our much awaited reunion dinner, Edgar and I haven't seen each other after graduating from High school which is like 18 years already! Thanks to Facebook, reconnecting with long-lost friends had never been easier.
We had our dinner at a fine dining resto near KCC Gensan. The meals were superb and cheap (compared to their counterpart's prices in KSA). Then we proceeded to Pahayahay (a Visayan slang which translates as "To chill out" or "To relax") to basically chill out and do a lot of catching up while having some ice cold beer. The band playing on-stage is so good we couldn't help but sing along or stomp our feet to the rhythm. I'm so glad that despite the many years and miles that separated us, almost nothing changed. It's as if we were in high school again, only 18 years older. It was hard to depart from each other that night because we were having a blast reminiscing high school adventures, crushes, lovelives and all. We called it a night at 1am.
(To be continued...)
