Cebu City Part 3: The Carbon Market

The Carbon Market in Cebu City has everything that makes the Philippines fascinating about it. It's a colourful, cramped maze of dirty alleyways and piles of strange and delicious looking food filled with exotic smells and the occasional stench. Children and livestock wander the narrow paths between the stalls and the vendors observe you as you pass but never stare, just shout the occasional "hello". It's an intensely foreign feeling and you know that you are thousands of miles from home but nobody makes you feel out of place. It feels like a place that could absorb you but as you come out the other side you realise that you have not been absorbed. For that, you would need more time, always more time.

It's a place where the pictures tell the story best, so here are some of the best pictures (with thanks to my friends, who actually remembered to take their camera!)

Cebu Part 2: Seeing the Sights

The first thing you need to know about the sights in Cebu city is that, officially, there aren’t many. The second thing you need to know is that this doesn’t matter in the slightest, because just by walking down the streets you will see sights far more interesting than any historical monument or tourist trap. Nevertheless, a couple of things are worth visiting.

We started our sightseeing trip with the cathedral. Apart from a few ugly statues, I quite liked the architechture and the interior because I'm a sucker for light airy buildings with lots of gold, but more interesting was the schedule of masses outside. Colonised by the Spanish from 1571 to 1898, the Philippines is overwhelmingly a Catholic country, and the evidence is everywhere.

Our local parish church in Cebu attracted up to 20 000 worshippers on a given Sunday, so the pressure on the cathedral must be immense. We had a little chuckle at the idea of weddings being carried out on a “first come, first served” basis but presumably this does mean when you book in advance!

The man in the picture is about to become only the second-ever saint from the Philippines and his beatification is clearly a very exciting event. I love the lack of cynicism revealed by "with more priests" being touted as a unique selling point.

After the cathedral, we went to Magellan’s cross. It was Magellan who brought Catholicism to the Philippines and he seems to have done an excellent job of implanting it in the culture before being killed by a tribal chief after he invaded Mactan island in 1521. The cross you can see in Cebu supposedly contains fragments of the original cross that Magellan planted when he arrived in the Philippines.

The final stop on our tour was the Basilica del Santo Niño. The Santo Niño is a statue of the boy Jesus dressed as a Spanish prince, and was presented by Magellan to Queen Juana, wife of the Rajah of Cebu after her conversion to Catholicism. While not officially the patron saint of Cebu because it represents Jesus himself, the locals are devoted to it and queue up to pass in front of it and touch the bullet proof glass that protects it from attack.

Then, having done our duty to official tourist, we headed back out into the streets to experience some more of the endlessly changing sights of everyday existence in Cebu.

Cebu City Part 1

In Cebu city, the green hills behind the city merge gently into the smoky horizon and the turquoise sea laps softly at the dirty shore. Tower blocks look down on the mazes of the shanty towns and wooden shacks sit precariously among solid concrete. Advertising shouts down from every wall and roof top and rubbish builds up in silent piles in every corner. The traffic roars, the engines splutter, the crowds swirl and in the midst of it all, the people sit by the market stalls and on the kerbs, staring out at it all in quiet contemplation.

In Cebu city lives are lived piled on top of each other, wealth, desperate poverty and everything in between. Trying to understand its endless contrasts and contradictions was the most culturally difficult part of my trip, but when the end came and it was time to go home, Cebu city was the place that I didn’t want to leave.

I didn’t want to leave because I hadn’t finished with it yet. I didn’t feel that I had completely understood. When I went to the Philippines I knew that I would see poverty on a scale that I had never seen before, and I did. Whole families sleep on cardboard boxes, mothers desperately try to bathe naked children in the gutters of the main road and frail elderly women pick through the rubbish looking for things to sell. I was anxious about seeing all of these things and not liking my reactions, of feeling guilty and finding it all to easy to flee.

What I wasn’t expecting were all the other layers of the tapestry, the interwoven threads that twist and merge and make it impossible to straight away point a finger and say, yes, this is what I see. For me, part of the difference was due to the climate. It’s not shocking to spend a large part of your day out on the streets when the weather is consistently hot but it is shocking to have nowhere to go at night. It doesn’t matter if the bus has no glass in the windows, but it does matter that people’s homes can be blown or washed away when a typhoon comes.



A second element in the picture is the fact that there are plenty of rich people in Cebu as well. Large 4x4s with blacked out windows wend their way between the tricycle taxis and the jeepneys. If you want to buy designer clothes, or even just shop at Promod, there are three air-conditioned shopping malls to shop at. The Philippines is poor compared to Europe, but per capita income is four times higher than in many of the poorer African countries, for example. But because on equal distribution of wealth, it scores relatively badly, there are extremes of poverty and extremes of wealth, as well as everything in between. There are plenty of sad and shocking things in the Philippines, but they don’t jump out and strike you straight away. You have to look carefully at the tapestry to begin to understand the picture.

Arrival in Cebu

I was lucky enough to be met by my friends at the airport and given a lift back to our acommodation because dealing with public transport, directions and the need for local currency would have been an extra bit of stress at that time. They are living in a Salesian community in Cebu city and working as volunteer teachers in a technical college for students who otherwise wouldn't be able to access higher education, and I was staying with them on campus.

The community is quite small (around ten people) and most of them were leaving for the week just around the time that I arrived. We had lunch together, then spent the afternoon interspersing exploring the campus and the local area with naps for me to catch up on my sleep.

Not that I did a huge amount of that. As it was Easter Saturday, we went to vigil at the college chapel in the evening. The service started with a bonfire outside the church which was then used to light candles for the vigil. It also involved the blessing of bottles of water and liberal sprinkling of it over the congregation, but having been brought up as a Protestant, I don't know how many of the things that were new to me were specific to the Philippines and how many are common to the whole of the Catholic church.

After the vigil, we headed back to the boarding house for a bit of a party. And in the Philippines, I learned, no party can take place without a bit of karaoke, or videoke, as they call it. Parties with priests being no exception. So the Salesian Fathers, Brothers, my friends and I ended the evening belting out Bohemian Rhapsody and I Will Survive until the early hours of the morning. Jet lag? What jet lag?