I had never been to Cebu for the Sinulog Festival. Because this year it fell on the day of my parent’s wedding anniversary, I made the pitch of celebrating their day in Cebu. We brought Tisay along, too. It was her first time to ride an airplane.

I wasn’t able to take a lot of pictures during the grand parade since I wasn’t able to acquire a photographer’s pass or a press pass when I went to the organizers’ office the day before. They ran out of ID’s before the deadline, so I had to make do with taking photographs from the sidewalks and sneaking into the parade lane when the marshals weren’t looking.

The day started with a light drizzle, which slowly turned into rain by the middle of the morning. Despite the fact that it was literally “raining on their parade”, the dozens of contingents of street dancers continued dancing to the common beat of the drums and trumpets as they inched their way to the Cebu City Sport Complex, where their performances were to be judged and televised across the Visayas and Mindanao.

Our family friends who live in Cebu remarked that the Sinulog can get pretty boring if you see it every year. After all, the dancers move to the same beats and tunes and the same basic dance steps of the “sinulog” dance year after year. For non-locals, however, the festive and lively atmosphere barely makes for a boring celebration.

The day before the parade, around two million devotees went on the traditional religious procession honoring the child Jesus. One of the things they reportedly prayed for was for the sun to shine on the grand parade, since it had been raining for days prior to the grand culmination.

As if their prayers were answered, the sun peaked out near noon, and warmly wrapped the city with a humid mist. There were probably a million in the streets of Cebu City by noon time. It was festive chaos. By around an hour past noon, I had completely walked the entire route around Cebu City’s midtown and I had gotten back at our hotel. And yet, the parade had barely formally started and the contingents only moved a few meters from their original designated areas. I was too tired to do the route again so I decided to take a nap. By the time I woke up that afternoon, it was drizzling again but the crowd along Osmena Boulevard had multiplied to the hundreds of thousands (the news says as many as three million trooped to the streets), all merry-making with the costumed dancers despite the rain.

Still tired and unwilling to work my way through the crowds again, I watched the rest of the parade on local television from our hotel room along Osmena Boulevard with my family.