When a day is too epic, you can't help but blog about it. Yesterday was one of those days.
I planned on meeting Ms. Janette Toral, my mentor and the mother of eCommerce in the Philippines, before she went to her speaking engagement for the anniversary of the #phnet20 - 20th anniversary of the Philippine internet.
We ended up meeting at Serenitea in IT Park and joined the Twitter party for #phnet20. I had super fun updates also on my Facebook about my memories of using the internet back in the days (around a decade ago).
Worked on my CBF application and exam and worked/browsed the whole afternoon.
Until about 5PM in the afternoon, I felt the itch of exploring and going around the city instead of proceeding to our usual grocery routine at SM Cebu for veggies. I decided on visiting Chu-un temple.
The first time we visited the Chu-un temple was when we joined the Gabii sa Kabilin SMART event where we went around Cebu and visited historical spots and places. Chu-un was one of them. It was for that brief moment that we did some rites and left immediately as we came. I was left imagining getting some peace and quiet if only we were not in a race.
With thoughts of meditation on my mind, fired up my map on Google Maps, and saw the route. It was around or near Fuente Osmena circle. I thought it was going to be easy.
I gathered up the boys and proceed to debate on whether we should take a taxi or not. We decided to just take the jeep and enjoy the ride. We asked the driver of the first jeepney to pass in IT Park and he said that he can drop us off at V. Rama only. This later turned up a lie because he did NOT drop us anywhere at all and we were a kilometer away from our destination.
Along the way, the ride was exasperating. I was hiding my phone on the bag the whole time while taking a quick peek at the route on my Google Map just to see if we were still in the right direction. We had to endure the bumpy ride, the super fast speed, the dust on our faces, the prospect of riding with a bubblegum modus operandi gang, and the sudden stops.
Taking a peek again at my phone, we noticed that were far away from the template. We decided that the driver lied when he said he will drop us off the "kanto" and either completely forgot about it or didn't care that we were lost. My heart was thumping too fast when we got off somewhere near Abellana National High School.
From there, we decided to walk all the way to Chu-un by taking the road in front of us going to Fuente Osmena circle then turning left to B. Rodriguez, then turning right to V. Rama and hopefully arrive at Chu-un in one piece.
Looking back at our route, I just realized that it was 2.5 kilometers away.
I would have taken pictures along the way but I was very cautious because of the tales of robbery in the streets so I decided not to. This post would not contain any other photo except for our final destination - Chu-un Temple.
Along the route we followed, we estimated 30 minutes of walking. I thought of the 3 cupcakes, 1 pizza, 2 doughnuts, 1 milktea, 1 icecream, 1 bag of chips that I ate and move one step forward for our walking tour.
Even if I ended up being grumpy because we were dropped of in the wrong place, I must admit that I came to enjoy walking around Fuente Osmena. My 7 year old kiddo and the husband are both troopers. They enjoyed the walkathon the most!
Along the way, I saw different kinds of businesses, different potential customers who could really use the help of being present in the web. I saw a potential supplier for tshirts, inquired, and learned that they are not too flexible with their pricing, and left. On my mind, I felt that they lost a customer because of their unfriendly pricing scheme but maybe that's their way of filtering out small business like ours.
Aside from the business establishments, I saw schools, hospitals, road constructions, and apartments for rent. But what amazed me was the different kinds of people we met along the way.
On the way to Chu-un, we saw street children and street adults (is there such a term). We saw small stall owners along the streets peddling goods beside trees that smelled like too much piss. We saw busy young people on their way somewhere. We saw students going home from their Saturday remedial classes perhaps. We saw trisicad drivers offering us a 50, then 40, then 20 peso ride to Chu-un temple which we ignored because we only want to walk there.
We were on our last 200 meters of our trip when the roads became thinner, jeepneys still roaring through very fast and only one pedestrian lane. We took advantage of that and crossed the street looking for the junk shop that would point the road up to Chu-un temple.
When we finally arrived, we saw a closed gate. It has a sign that said Close: 6PM. I looked at my phone's clock. It was 6:30PM. We were 30minutes too late.
With the gate on our face, we sat there on the side of the gate, caught our breath from the thirty minute walkathon, distributed our last few gulps of water, and decided the temple wasn't ready to accept us yet. Maybe next week. Maybe next month. Hopefully, soon.
