Ceboom or bust

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PUBLISHED ON January 12, 2007 AT 9:16 AM

I arrived in Cebu yesterday to cover the Asean summit. Haven’t had the chance to go around. The weather here has been bad for days now. Kinda dreary. The road to my hotel looks like a road in Kalilangan, Bukidnon, circa 1970s. The water from the tap tastes like seawater. A meal of chicken adobo costs more than 400 pesos; a plain rice costs about 60 pesos. Drat.

This morning, I woke up to find out that Romeo Gacad was accosted and nearly arrested by Cebu policemen for taking pictures of an Asean streamer without a permit. This place is crawling with cops and soldiers.

It also fells so cosmetic here, as the Cebu government tries very hard to impress its guests with such gaudy things as street lamps that look like thin enemy robots in a Star Wars movie and a Cebu International Convention Center that looks from the outside much like a jumble of medical equipment forcibly fused together.

If you read the local papers today, Jan. 12, you get the sense that Cebuanos are only interested in how they would look to their guests. The main story in Cebu Daily News, for instance, is about the squabble among local officials over, gasp!, the datelines used by journalists filing stories from here.

(Apparently, the other cities in Cebu were miffed that “Cebu City” was used initially as the dateline; this was later changed to “Cebu, Philippines” after officials from Mandaue City, where the convention center is located, protested.) There are stories on state dinners, on the horrendous traffic, on an SUV that plunged off a bridge, etc. but — at least in CDN — I saw no story on such summit agendas as counter-terrorism, energy security, etc.

(In fairness, CDN might have tackled these matters in previous issues of the paper. Still, if your only source of Asean news today is CDN, you’d scratch your head wondering what all the fuss is about and whether the summit is just one bacchanalia. On a dreary, drizzling day at that. Double drat.)

I’m here to supposedly make sense of this event. I’m here to supposedly make sense of this event. (I should probably torture you by referring you to this site.) Good luck to me.

[tags]pinoypress, asean, cebu, asean summit[/tags]

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2 Responses to “Ceboom or bust”

bisaya_orig Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 10:23 am
you did torture me. im a 100% cebuano and where the heck are you billeted??? meal of chicken adobo = 400 pesos? and your hotel road is like bukidnon roads of 1970s?? whew??

sounds like your food price is from above average class hotels in cebu while your hotel sounds like in the lowest class category. lol
bisaya_orig Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 10:29 am
correction…

…..while your hotel location sounds like in the lowest class category.

add..
tsk..tsk.. you only see the bad side of the picture… definitely not a cebuano.

if you are in mactan. dont bother eating in the hotels there. just a reminder - that is a resort - of which caters mostly to foriegn tourists. apparently you sound like you are staying far far away from the city.

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Ceboom or bust

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