bisaya na jud ko

--written october 9, 2008---

back when MBA started, i remembered hating Cebu and cebuanos because of Cebu Lakers. cebuanos are so rude when Negros Slashers are playing in Cebu. So when it is the other way around, the coliseum would be all packed with supporters to watch the Negros Slashers and Cebu game. we would in turn, be the cruel people mocking Cebu players. eheh the coli would be closed even during practice games of Cebu Lakers because everyone hates them.

i would always comment then, law-ay ang mga cebuano(cebuanos are ugly) :D but that was only on basketball though. when it was 2 years before graduation, my friends and i were all set to work in manila. but after our tour to manila and cebu, we thought we liked cebu better. less pollution, less traffic, but still plenty of opportunities.

and just like a dream come true,my first ever job was in cebu. i was lucky to find one and start immediately after graduation and the company is really good. but this means sacrifice as well. i will be leaving home for the first time. and unfortunately, my college friends are not with me. i am with 4 other BOYs from our school. im the only girl that got accepted :( one is my classmate, but at that time we had a gap :p the other one is our schoolmate which is not really a close/good friend, and i do not know the other two. the only consolation i had that time was the salary, and the fact that two of my high school barkada were there. one was already working there, and the other one will be there for review. so at least i still got company.

learning the dialect was never easy. attending the orientation and listening to our company nurse talking about tambal, etc is one thing i could not forget. i would always turn to my seatmate and ask for the meaning of the word :D but one thing i really appreciated is that we started in the company in a group. one guy also knows ilonggo so he is our translator ;) all the girls in our batch would usually hang out. and our batch had a lot of laag(out of town, or just around cebu), making it fast for me to learn bisaya.

now after 4 years and 9 months of working in cebu i am saying na bisaya/cebuano na jud ko(i am really cebuano). or i got used to using the dialect i guess. even if i talk to ilonggo or tagalog(my officemate here now are all tagalog), sometimes i subconsciously use cebuano words. even when thinking, or praying, i would use bisaya instead of ilonggo. :) good thing i am using the word correctly. some words are still foreign to me, but when i talk, im glad that i sound bisaya rather than sounding ilonggo using bisaya words ;) some would even say that they thought im cebuano and not ilonggo :p

even when i am no longer in cebu, i still have friends who are cebuano. all my friends and housemates here and of course soi are all bisaya, so i think i will never stop using the dialect. the connection i had with cebu will always be there. home for me is bacolod and cebu.

even if there are still more cebuano words to learn, i am glad i learned some of it well and am using it correctly :)