Christmas in Cebu

At midnight on December 23, I convinced a very sleepy Francis to come with me to pick up my good friend Maria at the airport. Of course now that Francis was involved, we were able to pick Maria up in style in Francis' awesome buggy!!! I was so excited on the ride out to the airport and couldn't wait to see my twin again and share my life in Cebu with her. For those of you who don't know, Maria is one of my best friends from UCLA.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year were very different than my typical Christmas in CA, but they were still wonderful nonetheless. For starters, we had to have two fans going at all times just to keep us from overheating! My friend Matt invited any Christmas orphans over to his house on Christmas Eve to hang out and play some Wii Fit and ping pong. After landing only 12 hours prior, Maria was brave enough to hop on the back of my motorcycle and go zipping with me through town. Her only comment at first was "If you are trying to make me nervous, you have succeeded." But after a few minutes, she was riding like a pro. But if I thought that I got stared at a lot being ONE white girl on a motorcycle, you can only imagine how much attention we got being TWO white girls on a motorcycle! After Matt's, we stopped by the grocery store to pick up some dinner supplies. Note to self: Don't got to the grocery store at 5 pm on Christmas Eve in Cebu EVER AGAIN. Filipinos celebrate what's called the "Noche Buena" which is a big feast after midnight mass on Christmas Eve so the store was crazy crowded! I left Maria outside and braved the crowds. Once we got home, we started researching and planning what we were going to do on our two week adventure in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Thailand, and Cambodia). The night air was filled with music, children carolling, and firecrackers going off randomly. But the best part of the night was at midnight when the sky erupted in fireworks! Maria and I stood on our upstairs porch and watched firework show after firework show! It sounded like a war zone but was very pretty! There were even these bizarre floating lanterns which we first thought were alien UFOs of some kind. It was definitely a memorable Christmas Eve!

Christmas Day was filled with more planning and packing. We loaded up our two backpacks and left for the airport to catch our 8:00pm flight to Singapore. Everything was going fine until we were going through immigration to leave the Philippines. The immigration officer asked me if I had some sort of security clearance document from the immigrations office which allowed me to leave the country after anything longer than a 6-month stay. My heart started racing as I, of course, had no such document and had just hit my 6-month mark in the Philippines only 10 days prior. I was terrified that he was not going to let me on the plane and our trip would off to a very rocky start as Maria left me behind. Instead, he took me aside into a small room and said that it would have cost Php1,200 for the document and that I could just pay the Php1,200 to him. Done! I quickly walked to our gate without looking back. Lesson learned: if you are leaving the country after a 6 month stay, you need some sort of document from immigration!

We landed in Singapore at 11:15pm and grabbed a taxi to head to our hostel. We first asked the taxi driver if he knew where our particular hostel was located and provided the street address. He gave us a puzzled look but motioned for us to get in the taxi. Okay, we thought... he must know where it is... Nope. We were wrong. About 5 minutes into the ride, he hands us a book of maps and tells us to find where our hostel was. Excuse me??? Although he was speaking English, his accent was such that I was having a difficult time understanding what he was asking us. Thankfully Maria had better luck and was actually able to find it on the map. We made it to the hostel around midnight, checked in, found food across the street, and called it a night. What a Christmas!

We will be in Singapore for the next few days and plan to see the National Museum, Botanical Gardens, and do a night safari and the Singapore Zoo! Then, on to Bangkok!