namaste' my journey...

From Lombock I headed back to Ubud to collect my stuff from Maria’s place.  She is such a great girl I really enjoyed surfing with her.  She has since gave her notice at work and we are looking into traveling to India together in about a month after I do my DM.  I went into a travel place to get my ticket for the bus back to Kuta to fly out to the Philippines.  While I was in there inquiring about the ticket this kid Andrew was in there getting a rental car and offered to take me to kuta for cheaper…he could use both the company and the help on gas and I could use the cheaper way to go.  We decide to meet at 5 and he happens to be staying across the street from Maria’s place……sweet!  Now both of us have no idea how to get there and the roads are not marked very well but we finally end up getting there and I stay with Marcia.  I meet up again with Tasha was great to see them all again.  I arrive in the Philippines at 6 am and I am couchsurfing with Jaydee.  He works the night sift and will pick me up at the mall at starbucks…yes they have starbucks here…way too many.  I meet up with him he is great he hit if off right away.  He also has 3 other csers that will be staying with him…two girls from paris and one from sweeden.  We all get along great.  The next morning we get up and head to lake taal to see volcano which is still active.  You can see the steam coming from the lake that is inside the crater.  We had to take a bus to the town then a tricycle to the boat then we road horses up to the top.  It was amazing.  The next day is Good Friday and since 90% of Philippines are catholic this is a big holiday week for them being that it is holy week.  The metro is closed everyone is on vacation.  People in the streets are getting their status of Jesus out and ready for the procession thru the streets. Each town does a station of the cross (this is what their statues represent) They parade these thru town each family making t-shirts saying which family the statue has been the courtisy of.  They end up at the village church and each statue gets blessed and then they run them back home believing the first to make it home will be the luckiest.  The amount of people at the church is amazing.  They all raise their arms to get a bit of the holy water that the priest is blessing the statues with.  It is really a beautiful site to see.  The floats also have flowers on them and once they are blessed the children pass them out to the people.  I got a bunch of flowers from these kids that we were talking with.  They were so sweet and cute.  They wanted me to come back to church with them for easter sunday unfortunately i will not be able to since i will be leaving manila the day before otherwise i would have just to be with these sweet beautiful children.