Slip of the Pen

If the title strikes you as a bit something straight from a soap opera, then I’ve already succeeded in conveying my sentiments. I approached my recent trip to Boracay two weeks ago with the same melodrama attached to telenovelas — yearning, apprehension, suspense, jubilation, love. Granted, a beach is a beach, nothing more. But when that beach is part of your home province and was your regular haunt — was, because you haven’t visited it for an effing decade already — then a little melodrama is justifiable.

Yep, my family is from Aklan, proud mother of Boracay, and that is why in my childhood years I was able to enjoy the white sands almost every year. But somehow since I stepped into high school, I couldn’t find the time to visit my old love. My trips to Kalibo, capital of Aklan didn’t stop, which just made the yearning for the beach grow stronger — I often found myself just a two-hour ride and a short ferry trip away from Boracay!

So you could just imagine the almost surreal feeling I got when I disembarked from the rickety boat onto the fine, ivory sands dotted with…seaweed. Yeah, the whole (extended) family made the trip in Boracay’s off-season — the merry month of August when tourists are relatively scarcer, the winds are fierce, the suntan is a near impossibility, the rain is intermittent, the waters are choppy, and the waves are huge (you’ve got to experience being slammed back onto the shore after wading chin-high in the water just two seconds earlier!). At least, you’ve got the beach all to yourselves.

How was world-renowned Boracay from the perspective of someone who went AWOL for ten years? Great, as always — the beach was magnificent, the nightlife was crazy, and the food was sumptuous — though I took some time to absorb the changes that have marked Bora’s landscape since the last time I roamed it. Here’s a trifecta of them:

1) The small bamboo/nipa cottages have almost gone the way of the dodo. Most of them have been replaced by concrete inns and apartelles, not to mention the sprawling hotels (some of which have been developed by Koreans to accommodate…Koreans).

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It’s been an effing long time since I’ve blogged here, and frankly I miss Slippy. Right now I want to post something more than an announcement here, but trust me, this announcement’s quite big.

If you’ve been keeping tabs on this blog for more than a year already, then you’ll remember UP ACM’s stunning triumph in the international scene. To recap last year’s event: our student org beat first-world universities en route to bagging two of the five Student Chapter Excellence Awards given by ACM International. And you know what?

UP ACM has done it again. Yes, yes, the Filipino has won again, bigtime! Read my announcement on Crimson Crux for complete details. Ang galing ng Pinoy!


[If you've been wondering where the hell this corsair has been, this'll sum it up for you: In the last three months, I've went to two major family reunions slash vacations in Kalibo and Boracay, which ultimately resulted in a lot of work piling up. I'll give a little story on Boracay this weekend.]