If I feared that the fourteenth would be a letdown after yesterday, that fear lifted when a tiny girl approached me in the town center this morning, chanting "Ba-dok! Ba-dok! Ba-dok Obamaaaaa!" I laughed like a fool, and we exchanged thumbs ups back and forth for a little while before her mother led her away.
After a quick snack of red rice and lipton tea, I decided to turn down a tree-lined street on the way back to my room. Around the first bend, I found a couple kids shooting a worn basketball against a homemade backboard, and decided to join them. One of the boys ran off to get his cousin Shen, the resident English scholar, and I sank my first three shots--much to everyone's delight--before missing about 19 in a row. At one point I chased the ball into their front yard, which was populated by dozens of beautiful fighting cocks. "Is he gonna try and fight me?"--stepping gingerly around the scary looking bastard, his thin leash too long for my liking.
I told them about a story I read in Granta, on the tradition of cricket fighting in China. Shen ran to fetch their fighting spider, a creature in a velveteen box with a massive abdomen, and told me he'd be battling at 1 pm that day, if I wanted to see. As a culture tourist, I probably should have gone, but as a spider-lover, I couldn't.
After the seeming selfishness of Cebu, I had hardened myself, and I was unprepared for the generosity of these kids. They offered me pork kebabs and lemon water and marijuana, but I was vaguely afraid that they were after my internal organs, so I left, but not before beating Axel in a game of one-on-one. My final shot was an unlikely spinning jumper that kissed gently off the plywood backboard.
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