Tattoo Festival, Sinulog: A Wonderful Event

            If you want to know what is it all about? Well you should have visited Cebu City, Philippines. It is what we call the Sinulog Festival, in celebration for the coming of Senior Santo Niño a.k.a. baby Jesus Christ. If you are not familiar of the event, well it is actually a part of Philippine history. It is when a voyager named Ferdinand Magellan from Portugal or Spain discovered the Philippines and actually introduced the Catholic religion from our ancestors. And the rest is history.

We actually celebrate such event every year on a 3rd week of January with colorful banners and buntings. There will be no cabs and cars on a closed road since it will be full of tattooed and dressed street dancers, not to mention the enormous mascots doing the dance moves! Although it is so heavy, the person inside (or probably two persons) holding it could not resist dancing in the beat.

The event will start with a fluvial parade; it is like re-enacting our history where we actually wait for the coming of Jesus Christ from the sea. And when he will come to port, you could hear the loud “tooot” sounds made from all the ships on the port (really amazing!).

So after reaching the port, they will do the procession all the way to the church, really could not move because of the crowd attending the mass. After the mass, all the people will now go to the streets and watch the most popular dance parade where group of people from different places really will try their best to win on the competition (yes, it is a competition). These dancers depending on their theme will wear unusual attire to impress the crowd. Sometimes people will call this event as a tattoo or mask event, you can see a lot of people, including children wearing tattoos and masks (well, some of them are fake tattoos like henna that will go off for a couple of days or the water-based one). We can actually find small vendors on the sidewalk selling fake tattoos and masks.

This is one of the many floats that shows how Catholicism was introduced to the Philippines, the make believe Portugal ship..

Shown here was one colorful team dancing to the beat of Sinulog.

Some little kids acting like bees on a beehive, so cute..

Some of the tattooed street dancers, waiting for their turn in the competition.

Shown here is an image of baby Jesus, this is what we are celebrating for, his coming..

I love this one, they are actually showing an act of camaraderie.

          This event is really wonderful everyone has experienced so much fun regardless of the crowd, a lot of foreigners are really coming here to see the event, and those are the ones who can handle the tropical climate. But I have to say, the weather is fine this week, it is so windy but no storm so everyone was enjoying.

NOTE: All pictures shown in this article is personally taken by me on the exact date printed using a K770i Sony Ericsson celphone.