As kind of the last hurrah for summer I went and visited L in Baybay (pronounced bye bye). Baybay is on my same island, about 2 hours away, but is quite different than Alangalang. They have a bit of a different weather pattern than we do here, but similar enough. They also speak a different language, and really no one knows Waray.
Another big difference is tuba consumption. Here they drink it because the sun was or was not out today. There they need a special occasion. It was fiesta so we stopped at her neighbors and they had some that was extra Coked down and insisted on us drinking. They thought it was a big deal, and now love that L is a tuba drinker. They also acknowledged for us in the northern part it was no big deal. While we sat there drinking there was a bunch of young twenty-somethings who just stared at us too shy to even try to talk to us in English.
We didn't just party and get stared at, we used Saturday to raise our endorphin levels. She'd heard of wild monkeys near her, so we wanted to see. They. Were. Scary.
When we first saw them we were all alone and it was obvious by the way they hissed at us they didn't like us. Then Filipinos came through and the monkeys had no problems. We walked on towards the top of the mountain and there were monkeys on the trial. They hissed and showed us their scary flesh shredding teeth. We managed to go through and get to the top where the zip line was.
Poor L. She's afraid of heights, but was more afraid of going back through the monkeys. We got strapped into the harness an flew down to the bottom. It was amazing, and thy view was spectacular: mountains, forests, ocean.
A great day. A great weekend.
