Enjoying GenSan
Trip Start
Mar 21, 2008
1
7
8
Trip End
Mar 28, 2008
General Santos,
Philippines
Thursday, March 27, 2008
According to my map, courtesy of Lonely Planet, we were near the sea, so we walked down to the beach, where Yoong got angry as she tends to when she thinks we are in dirty places. I found it quite picturesque, with several fishing boats and lots of little children running around in varying degrees of nakedness. Admittedly there was some rubbish around, but I think she was mainly put off by the sand, which was black - as some beaches are. I managed to get a few photos before she dragged me away back to the road.
The rain kept off long enough for us to do a long walk around the main streets of the town and a few back roads, with a break for email at an Internet cafe. A couple of messages from our children, but mostly YouTube comments and Yoong's finance information
01 Market at General Santos
. It's not a particularly exciting city, but pleasant enough, with a nondescript park and some nice tree-lined avenues. We came across a restaurant with the ubiquitous lechon manok (chicken barbecued on a rotisserie) which we have kept meaning to have, but never quite got around to it. A bit early in the afternoon, but we hadn't eaten since breakfast and the chickens looked ready. We indicated we wanted the big P130 chicken, but they didn't seem to want to sell it to us. Possibly it wasn't ready, as they claimed. the other smaller chickens were all P110, and the staff said we could eat it on the premises. We ordered a serving of rice to go with it and sat in the dark little restaurant. It was indeed delicious, largely due to the lemon-grass stuffed inside it. However the staff did not seem very friendly and, when it was time to pay, they tried to charge P150. Allowing P10 for rice and P10 for dining in (which they hadn't mentioned earlier), this meant they were charging us for the large chicken that they had refused to sell us. Eventually they admitted we had actually had a small chicken and we paid P130. Sure it's only a small amount, but it's the principle. We would be more than happy to pay for a large chicken if we had actually been able to get one!
Further down the road, Yoong found a barber shop that offered haircuts for P25. She had been looking for such a place so she had her haircut while I went for a walk to the beach, a cleaner area than the part we had seen, but still with black sand
02 General Santos Market from the Hotel Window
. When Yoong had finished her haircut I persuaded her to come to this part of the beach with me. There was a basketball game going on, a little pier we could walk out on and lots of shouts of "Hey Joe!" with an occasional "Americano!" I tend to get stared at a lot in this town where European faces are a bit of a novelty.We walked along the beach a bit, with Yoong still a bit reluctant to walk on the black sand, then back to the road via a park, followed all the way by a man and small boy determined to sell us pearl necklaces and earrings. He started off at P1000 and Yoong countered with P100 to try to get rid of him. Of course, once you name a price, the bargaining has started in earnest, so offering an absurdly low price is no way to get rid of a vendor. Eventually she decided a string of black cultured pearls was actually quite attractive and raised her offer to P200, which the vendor agreed to just as we were leaving the park - but without the earrings. We later saw similar sets at the airport for P1000. Admittedly the earrings were included - which we could have got for an extra P50 - but Yoong doesn't wear earrings anyway, thanks to the wisdom of her father who had never let her have her ears pierced as a young girl.
The rain was starting again and we'd been out most of the day, so we went back to the hotel and caught a movie - Mel Gibson in "Forever Young." Yoong doesn't like Mel Gibson and made various disparaging comments about the acting and the plot until things started to develop and apparent discrepancies were cleared up, and she realised it wasn't such a bad story after all.
Although we were not really hungry we thought we'd better go out and find some food in the evening as we not intending to eat the next day until we reached Davao and the Marco Polo Hotel, where we planned to relax before making our way to the airport. We ended up eating at one of the rather dubious little eateries along the waterfront road where we had earlier said we did not think we wanted to eat.. We were tempted by a decent-looking dish of pumpkins and beans. This may have been okay on its own, but Yoong likes the fish soup at these places and ordered a bowl of it as well. It turned out to be completely cold, not a good sign. I wasn't very hungry and didn't feel comfortable with the soup, so stuck mainly to the vegetables.
We bought a few cakes from the bakery opposite the hotel and had them with the last of our three-in-one coffee packets.
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