The Manila, misguided by Manila-centered media, cinema, television, the fast-food culture, is tricked into thinking that the entire country has homogenized into the Tagalog culture that he is accustomed to. Little does he realize that the Cebuano goes into mild culture shock when coming to Manila, an assaulting city where everything moves so fast even if covered under a thick blanket of pollution, where everyone seems to be rushing around and where people hardly know one another. Most of all, it is where everyone speaks another language. Things happen differently in Manila for the Cebuano.

Cebu is where I wake up to a daily ritual of looking out of the window, stretching my vision past the city to fix a long gaze at the water, past Mactan Island and to Bohol at the horizon. I reconnect and breathe the sea in, a childhood touchstone that I miss in Manila where I spend most of my time these days. Cebu is one those places that is so hard to shake off your psyche.

The Cebuano takes his extraordinary relationship with the sea for granted but it is probably the strongest defining factor of the island culture that binds all Cebuanos. Something happens that connects people to each other and to their place when they all live together on an island where the shore is a visible boundary that restricts life to an area either liberated by or borrowed from the sea. Geography binds islanders for generations who eventually interrelate either by blood or friendship, establishing a comfortable cocooning among each other and a resistance to accepting outsiders from other islands (particularly from Luzon, the biggest island of them all) into their comfortable cocoons.

Insulated from the open sea by other islands, narrow straits surround Cebu on all sides. The neighboring Visayan islands are not only clearly visible across the usually still water, sometimes they appear so close that you can reach out and touch them. They are really just a short sail away, a fact that makes Cebuanos realize that although their shores define their boundaries, their proximity to the other islands extends their influence, situating them at the historic and economic center of things, positioned in what would be the navel of the country, as the Cebuano scholar Resil Mojares so correctly observes.

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