cultivating our love for cheap travels because there’s just no other way to go about it through the fancy route, my friends and i decided to take the bus and head down to dumaguete for another long weekend in another island cebu is neighbors with. four hours of bumpy bus travel to santander, a ten-minute bladder stop, fifteen minutes of waiting for the bus driver to eat his dinner, ten minutes of getting the bus into the barge, forty minutes of sea travel to negros, twenty minutes of bus travel to dumaguete, and finally, a three-minute walk to the pension house where we would be staying. if all these is making your head spin, you can just imagine what it was doing to me during that time when i was busy nursing a headache. i was ready to throw my lunch up. although i can’t remember what it was, or if i ate. all i know is that the chinese people must have done something right to have come up with that herbal concoction called white flower.

so there we were, right in the heart of negros oriental — dumaguete city. famous for its boulevard, sans rival, silvanas, and everything else it is famous for. things i have yet to discover because dumaguete felt like blur. a side-trip to someplace else.

my sister recommended that we try cafe antonio, so we did. truth be told, the food wasn’t really all that great. so-so. and they only do individual servings. but the place was beautiful. a quaint little cafe with an unassuming splendor. it wasn’t crowded considering we were there on a saturday. the only other customers i saw there were these two women who were probably studying or something. did i say already that i loved their swings? it added a nice touch to the place. only, i doubt if you can both swing and eat carbonara at the same time.

taking another pedicab ride to the boulevard, i noticed that their pedicabs are different from the ones that we have here in cebu. just as the ones they have in bohol are different there too. to each city her own, i guess. if it works for them, why not? although it’s stupid how, for the life of us, we couldn’t get two pedicabs for us all so that instead of cramping ourselves into one pedicab, we would’ve been more comfortable in two. but it was our stupid way of bonding, i guess, with jelvin bonding rather heavily (and physically) with the pedicab driver. jelvin loving every moment of it. the driving cursing under his breath.

i heard the gourmet pizza at hayahay is really good. again, it was just so-so for me. i’m thinking perhaps street food ruined my taste buds. but i know what i like. i know when my taste buds fall in love. like love, there’s some form of magic involved. don’t make me explain.

the boulevard on a saturday night sure was crowded. i loved the open space, with the sea breeze blowing on my face when a group of locals wasn’t obstucting it. i loved the band that played that night. it’s so rare to hear bands play old-school alternatives these days that it made me wish there were more bands like that here in cebu. i loved the girl vocalist. if i were to choose what kind of singing voice i want to have, it would have to be something like hers. very rockista, with all that hoarse-sounding effect. unfortunately for me, ram deleted my one and only photo of the band. because i told him their lead guitarist looked like my former ex. ex-crush. a technically-married ex-crush. ram said the guitarist in question was ugly though. can’t blame him. i’m on a quest to find beauty in the ugly. off the record, he’s an ongoing little experiment. haha. kidding.