Shboom Cebu
I’d like to say we visited Cebu, but the truth is we flew into the Cebu international airport, took a hotel car into the Mactan Shangri-la, and stayed put for four days. The trip left me no less ignorant about the seat of “the second widest-spoken Philippine dialect”, the “second most populous city in the Philippines”, the “center of Asian furniture-making”, and the home of those awesome dried mangoes.
The start of a beautiful friendship
What did I know about Cebu? Not much. For starters, in fifteen-hundred-and-twenty-one (sing along if you know the tune), Portugese explorer Fernando Magallanes was killed by Cebu chieftain Lapulapu. So ended Magallanes’ dream of circumnavigating the globe, but I think it’s really cool that the “first to circumnavigate” honors go to the Sumatran slave Enrique who was his interpreter. Magallanes always seemed to me like a downmarket Christopher Columbus, not least because for years I just knew him as “that guy Lapulapu killed and who got a subdivision in Makati named after him”. At least Lapulapu gave his name to a fish and is invoked everyday in Philippine fish markets and the odd recipe book. Magallanes Village on the other hand was only fashionable for about 5 years in the late 1970s.
Mindful of his place in history, Magallanes also had the foresight to bring along a navigator and chronicler who paid him to come along. Pigafetta’s extremely entertaining account has such fascinating tidbits as a religion ministered to entirely by women, deflowering virgins as an occupation, and a ring of little balls, uh, “worn” by men, for the purporse of keeping their women, ahem, happy. If you’re thinking now that the Spanish took all the fun out of the Philippines, I will have to agree with you. Pigafetta also tells us that Magallanes had the extreme misfortune of stumbling into a tribal war and siding with the wrong guy. That’s the short version of the Lapulapu story.
Fifty-odd years after Magellan, the powers behind the man decided to come back and take the land and its people for their inbred long-chinned sovereign. And what did they get for their efforts? A colony that was still in the red two hundred years later, a populace that refused to stay conquered and yes, less than a hundred years after they’d thrown that darned Boabdil out of Grenada, retaking Spain for the Catholics and traveling halfway around the world to spread the faith, a freaking Muslim proto-Sultanate in the south. What was a good colonial administrator to do, especially when all the able-bodied colonials were heading off to South America? Why, send over a few hundred priests to “conquer with the cross” and breed with the locals, obviously! This wise decision produced the only Catholic country in Asia, Imelda Romualdez Marcos, and of course scores of comely mestizas that sent Mickey’s heart aflutter when they descended onto Ateneo de Manila in 1989.
Columbus, meanwhile, got the Spanish their gold and silver mines.
Those bee-yootiful beaches
Unfortunately for Cebu, the Spanish chose another small fishing village in the north of the Philippines as its colonial capital, making Manila of course the most populous city in the Philippines, seat of the most widely-spoken dialect, and center of commerce, finance, education, culture and sports. Growing up in Manila therefore, all I knew about Cebu — apart from the Magallanes story — was that Cebuanos talked funny but were more or less normal (unlike the crazy people from neighboring Negros), and that there were lots of Cebuano mestizos and beaches; I also had an inkling that Cebuanos felt somehow cheated out of their rightful place as the center of the Philippines. Later, my family became friends with a guy from a Cebuano family and when we went to their castle-on-a-hilltop-complete-with-belltower on my first visit to Cebu, I quickly revised my opinion that Cebuanos were less strange than Negrenses. But I came away with my beautiful beaches impression intact.
This trip, I’d like to say that we visited Cebu, but like I said we made a beeline for the hotel and stayed there. The Shang, of course, is a destination in itself, so the natives say, with a private beach, its very own Chi spa, three buffets and two other restaurants, and lots and lots of other fun stuff to do. In fact I’m pretty sure that the hordes of Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese tourists had only a vague idea that they were in the Philippines at all.
So what did three and a half days and four nights in this little pocket of paradise get me? Well, a very relaxed husband, a slightly distended belly from my three-buffets-a-day diet, marvelously unknotted shoulders, passably tanned legs, and the twin discoveries that (a) the female segment of the abovementioned Taiwanese, Korean and Japanese tourists wear high heels by the pool, and (b) they do indeed have short bow legs. I also have sand mite bites that are just beginning to fade, and sunburnt toes because I forgot to put sunblock on them.