Tell me why I don't like Mondays

I haven't written for a week or two - things have been fairly tumultuous around here. I won't go into details, but we have lost quite a bit of our funding and on Monday my boss had to let three members of our team go - Merry Christmas, hey? That was pretty rough - I felt really bad and completely useless, unable to do anything to help. We have a lot of work ahead of us (me primarily) as there is a big review being started of the project - I think the main goal of the leaders is to ensure I don't sleep at all before Christmas! So anyway - I have been fairly consumed with work of late, and not able to update. But hey - I still have a job, right? Albeit a volunteer one with no salary!!! So I am doing okay...

However - last weekend (not the most recent, the one before), a rather large group of Aussies descended upon the Visayas group of islands for some fun, food and partying. It was a long weekend (my last public holiday (apart from the Christmas holidays) before leaving, sadly. So Friday night, Mairin, Sally, Reggie, Ange and I flew down to Cebu, where we met up with Piers and Cho who came over from Tagbilaran (the capital of Bohol).

Maybe this would be a good time to give you a clear break up of the AYADs in the Philippines, as we currently stand:

Manila - Intake 13 (arrived April 2005):
Mairin, Sally, Natalie (sharing one flat)
Me, Ange (sharing another flat with Reggie)
Emily (sharing with her partner, Neil, an honourary AYAD who is working at the Australian embassy)

Manila - Intake 14 (arrived October 2005):
Reggie (sharing with Ange and I)

Los Banos - Intake 13:
Naomi

Ilo Ilo - Intake 13:
Sarah

Tagbilaran (capital of Bohol island) - Intake 13:
Lyndon

Tagbilaran - Intake 14:
Cho
Piers (now dating Sally (see above) and the two of them are too gooey for words)

Bacolod - Intake 14:
Elizabeth

All other places are south of Manila - Los Banos is about 1.5 hours by bus, the others are about that by plane.

(you can all do what my mother does each time I leave Manila and locate these places on a map - I think she must have begun carrying the atlas around Melbourne with her)

Okay - back to the weekend. In Cebu, we met up with Piers (called, inexplicably (Ange and I were trying to work it out last night?) Perez) and Cho. Elizabeth flew in on Saturday morning. Basically, we were there to party, however, I was still kinda sick so wasn't up to the full action. I piked by midnight on Friday night, although did hit the clubs, including a pretty cool dance club that I actually think was a tent, on Saturday night. Saturday, we had brunch at this amazing deli/restaurant, with lots and lots of foreign foods on the shelves (everything from Heinz baked beans to Barilla pasta to Guylian (sp?) chocolate) and an amazing cheese collection and wine cellar (we returned for wine and cheese on Sat night). Then Reggie, Elizabeth and I went to buy Liz a guitar (they are made in Cebu - the music capital of the Philippines) and do some sight seeing. We went to Magellan's Cross (I will write more about that later, when I can copy from my Lonely Planet!), the old Spanish fort and a too-cool-for-words Chinese temple (situated right on the river, which is always the home to a lot of slum dwellings - this blew Elizabeth's mind a little, as she hadn't seen any of these yet).

Sunday morning, we headed by ferry over to Tagbilaran. And then out to Panglao island - just off the coast of Tagbilaran and connected by bridge, to Alona beach. There we met up with Nat and her brother Phil, visiting from Melbourne. So by now, we had almost all of the AYADs together. And Monday, Ange, Nat and I went diving off Alona, mostly at a very cool place called Balicasag Island, which has a brilliant wall going down past 30m. It was during this time that Ange earned her new nickname, Floater. Primarily due to the fact that we would be descending and get to about 10m and I would look around for Ange (you always dive in a buddy system for safety and we are used to being buddies now) and she would be nowhere to be found, as she has surfaced and is currently bobbing above the water, trying desperately to get down!! You wear a weight belt when diving, to counteract the buouancy of the water, and poor Ange started out the day with 4kg on her belt and finished it with 7kg!!! Unfortunately, Ange and I were flying back to Manila the following morning so couldn't do the night dive that Nat did (she and Phil spent a week in Bohol). Due to the build up of nitrogen in your body and the issues with going to depth and resurfacing, there is a limit to the amount of dives you can do in a certain timeframe before flying, and we had reached it...

But the diving was great - I am still totally loving it and particularly love the starfish - they look like felt beanie babies, just flopped there in whatever position they land in. I would love to touch one to see what they feel like, but won't. I got my pictures from the underwater cameras developed (well - they developed on film twice and not the other one...*sigh*) - so, once they are all sorted, I will post some (they are not the best quality - being a long way underwater etc).

Monday night, Lyndon joined us (he had been off with his visiting parents the rest of the weekend) and most of the others got blind drunk as they worked their way through a couple of bottles of gin - generally not even bothering to add mixer! I was boring and responsible and thinking of having to go to work the next day, so was sober enough to enjoy Phil's drunken Riverdance, which was one of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life (better even than Ange's riverdance in Ilo Ilo and Nat doing Johnny Cash's Walk the Line on the same night - both memories Mairin had the foresight to capture on video...hee). But Phil (who I think wound up tripping and falling) really gives Michael Flatley a run for his money with his Irish Dancing, that more closely resembled the Can Can. A classic end to a great weekend.

And then of course, Tuesday morning, the dreaded return to Manila...
*Big Sigh*