Welcome

Welcome to our new blogsite...I just want to start a small site about Guihulngan, the only hometown I have known, and a hometown many of you out there know and long for.

Yet what is there to go home to? After visiting friends and relatives, strolling around the market or the boulevard, or going to church, where and what is the real Guihulngan?

I've asked many younger friends and many older friends, they give me different answers....

My friend Junjun shares the idea of just going around, taking pictures of a beautiful Guihulngan. I like the idea too... though I am more on the writing side.

There is so much of this place that touches inside me. I think its the stories my father and uncles told us when we were young, of how our greatgrandparents who came from Barili and Toledo, in Cebu, came to Guihulngan. It's about local history...many times I really want to get in touch with someone who can tell us the living history of Guihulngan. My father used to tell us of wartime stories when they just moved around, all 10 children and my grandparents and their friends and alalays....from Kagawasan, to Lulukhan, to Villegas to Binobohan.

When I visit these places, the wind seems cooler and the mountain breeze reminds me of grandparents I haven't even seen, yet I feel this is my home!

I remember the old town market and the old movie house, the old tennis court, I must be getting old! I remember when I was about 5 years old, my grandmother Ana Vergara Trinidad ran a dressmaking school and at graduation time we would watch the graduates drink to drown their insecurities and bravely march down and around the stage to parade dresses they have made themselves.

The master of ceremonies was a grandfather who always spelled out his name B-I-A, we never forgot Tobias "BIA" Vergara...

And at the end of graduation rites, we feasted on pineapple juice and "pinisi" coated with white sugar, diabetes was unknown to us then.

The school's name was Oriental Vocational School.

We are loosing these tidbits about Guihulngan, help me recall those childhood memories that make up our living past.

Stories and pictures are welcome... Please tell the world about our hometown!