Other posts with the tag: aikido
E Mall, Taoist Temple and monks
The trip is about to end and as much as I hated the heat, I’m going to miss the place.
The last 2 days are spent meeting some old friends, checking out the Taoist Temple (that some would say is like a peculiar style of Chinese architecture with a hundred million stairs) and taking advantage of those cheap drinks.
I decided to meet up with Hannah yesterday, who I met way back when I was first learned Aikido. She’s lives in Dubai now, so we both had a bit of nostalgia for the good old days of Aikido.
I meet up with her at E Mall (nothing illegal is sold there… well, maybe the bins full of pirated DVD’s and CD’s) and we head out to the dojo. We arrive to the general area of where it should be, except, it’s not there.
We spend the next 30 minutes bumming around a side street cafe while Hannah calls people to find out exactly where it was. During this time, I notice an whiteguy, running around the place (even though Cebu is home to a lot of expats, this was surely a place where any expat, or tourist for that matter didn’t belong).
There are a lot of Chinese temples in Cebu, which reflects the huge influx of Chinese immigrants.
Then I heard him speak in the vernacular language(Cebuano) with spot on accuracy on the accent. Before I could find out what his story was, someone who recognized Hannah came from one of the alleys (that we didn’t even notice earlier) and directed us to the dojo.
We finally find the dojo deep in the bowels of high rise apartments and alleys, packed with sweaty practitioners. Our old Sensei and some of his students treat us to a dinner over some street side BBQ’s. Unfortunately, I still don’t have the stomach for chicken feet, or chicken intestines. I’ll stick to the regular and some San Miguel please!
