Baybay Day

(It is pronounced bye-bye, like when you’re saying goodbye)

Happy birthday to brother Brent and niece Alicia! Yay!

Yesterday morning started with breakfast with two of Denis’ cousins’ children. The view from our table was beautiful.

One of them stayed with us while we toured Baybay, Denis’ home town. She spoke English the whole time, so I was able to understand her.

Our first stop was the old church. Denis wanted to get some candles for a visit to the cemetery. The church was beautiful.

We took a look inside.

The next stop was the cemetery. It is a public cemetery, and there seems to be no plan to how graves are put in, so it’s very jumbled-looking.

Denis’ parents graves were off to the side. We had to wind our way through. There were people living in the cemetery. We had to walk through their kitchen to get where we were going.

That kid in the background followed us the whole way. He was waiting to see if we wanted to hire him to clean up the gravesite.

For the memory archive:

After the cemetery, we headed into downtown Baybay and walked around. It was crowded with people. I loved it! The roads were full of bicycle and motorcycle taxis.

We stopped at the house Denis grew up in. It’s empty now, and in disrepair, but family members have plans to renovate it.

Denis’ dad’s doctors office is in front. The house is in back

Here is the main living area upstairs:

This is Denis’ old bedroom:

After a little more walking around, we took a motorcycle taxi to Denis’ brother’s house. I took a picture of the living room while we were waiting for lunch to finish cooking.

Lunch was really good. It included steamed crabs! They didn’t have Old Bay on them, but they were full of delicious, sweet crab meat. Mmm…

After lunch, we went back to the hotel for a bit, then joined Denis’ old classmates at a barbecue place. It was another night of good food, lots of laughing, and conversations whose contents I could only guess at.

People feel embarrassed about their English, so they don’t like to speak it, but everyone was very friendly to me and kept offering me food and drink. One man there teaches, and teaching here is done in English, so he was more fluent and spoke with me for quite a while.

After dinner was more talking, and nibbling on lanzones, a fruit that is in season now, and one of the reasons Denis wanted to come here in October. It’s juicy and refreshing. I think it tastes a little like sweet grapefruit.

The last stop of the night was on a hill above Baybay. An artistic/tourist installation has been done up there that consists of 16,000 led lights in artificial flowers. Red flowers amongst the white ones spell out: “heart” Baybay. The view of Baybay is beautiful too.

Today we head back to Cebu.