Bar-b-q

I miss barbecue.

Whatever the world may call it.... anticuchos, kebab, souvlaki, kalamaki, satay, brochette, yakitori.... and though the word may take to mean either the process or the finished product (and sometimes a party in the garden under the heat of the summer sun), barbecue will always mean to me those thin slices of lean meat in bamboo sticks, cooked above coco charcoal in the streets fronting Tagbilaran.... the infamous Sky is the Limit.

Sky is the Limit for me, is home to the 2 peso pork barbecue, the 3 peso grilled chorizzo, eaten with the 2 peices of 1 peso "puso" (hanging rice as they call it). Its the source of a poor student's meal at night time (they open from around 6 in the evening to dawn) and an unfailing rescue when one doesn't have the time or the strength to cook after a tiring day.

I went home last June and apparently, a lot has changed in Tagbilaran even in just a year. When the Philippine Institute of Development Studies wrote some five to ten years back about tourism fueling the growth of a city, I honestly did not believe it then, and I still have doubts about it even now. But believers and doubters alike will agree that much has changed in the city in years.....and that includes the migration of Sky is the Limit from one part to the other.

I went around, noticed a stretch of barbecue stands in one place, and then another. I ended up buying the usual pork barbecue and grilled chorizo in Nang Mary's place near the old barracks. What used to be a single trip now becomes multiple, and what was then at the center was scattered all over the place.

But Sky is the Limit still exists, in different forms, and in the grandeur of its stubborn persistence. A friend of mine said that as long as there is poverty, they will continue to thrive. On the other hand, however, I think that as long as there are those who miss the scent of barbecue on a dark, lonely night, Sky is the Limit will never become only just a memory.