Kadayawan

First off, let us apologize for the lack of activity on the blog recently. We have spent almost an entire week at Norma's house in Davao where we generally do not have internet access. It was a very busy week; we went to two press conferences, a rotary club meeting, a photo shoot in the rain, watched a parade from a famous Filipino fashion designer's house, and attended a fashion show.

The parade we attended was for the Filipino festival called Kadayawan, which celebrates the country's bountiful harvest. The parade was basically like a mini Rose Bowl parade full of dancers, drummers, celebrities, and floats. We watched from the balcony of a house instead of from the street so we had an amazing view of the parade.

It was quite an amusing experience for Lindsey and I. Our favorite moments were when celebrities would approach in a float and the crowd would practically start to riot around us - meanwhile Lindsey and I were busy trying to figure out what was going on and who the famous people were.

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Based on our experience, Lindsey and I were able to determine the following basic rules of a Filipino parade (hopefully, these will give you an idea of how to behave if you ever find yourselves attending such a parade):

1. It is 100 percent okay to jump in front of a float to take up-close pictures of said float and have your friends take pictures of you standing in front of the float.

2. It is okay that Rule Number 1 forces the float to stop and the parade to temporarily halt and become divided into sections that independently travel the parade route sometimes 20 minutes apart from one another.

3. If you see a celebrity in a float do the following: scream your lungs out, run down the street to the float, push through the crowd, throw yourself at the float, take tons of pictures. That is all.

4. Feel free to just walk directly through the middle of the parade at any time you please - it is definitely more important that you cross the street than it is for the parade to keep running.

5. If you want really good pictures just climb onto an available roof to take them.

6. If the crowd or heat becomes too much for you and you feel the need for a bit of a rest, just grab a few friends and lay down on the the street in a puppy pile to take a nap.

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I leave you with the best pictures of the parade...