Ulog # 15: A Night of Camaraderie, Moonlight and Lightning Shows

Good day, fellow Steemians! I hope you're having a great week. Also, TGIF! (Thank God I'm fantastic! Bwahahaha.). Technically, this isn't a late post since the night ended at morning.

Anyhow, I have a previous co-worker who resigned last last week. I bully her a lot and she bullies me in return, so technically, we're friends (I mean, that's how a friendship is defined, right?). Since she's about to go back to her hometown we decided to meet up. I suggested we go somewhere where we can eat TUNA! Tuna is great by the way, tuna is love, tuna is life. She has this tired/pissed-off/unbelieving expression whenever I suggest tuna because that is almost always what I would suggest. We also have a bit of a traumatizing experience with a tuna place which does not cook it properly. They just sort of use a blower on it and lay it over weak coal until it's sort of brownish then they garnish it with a brown sauce (?), and put chives over it to hide the fact that it was undercooked. Hah (okay so maybe there's a residual anger in me). Anyway, I thought she would disagree until I said we would try out the one at Camp Holiday (resort at Samal Island). She readily agreed and we agreed to meet up at around 5:30.

She arrived at the office and we set out for Samal. We arrive at the wharf at around 7 pm, and at Camp Holiday just a little while after that. We ordered Tuna and Kinilaw and a couple of beers and played billiards while waiting for the food. I can play it decently while she's just learning. We also talked in conyo (mixed bisaya and tagalog), sample "Bakit man tayo nagasalita ng ganito uy makainis gud baka malabayan tayo ng mga tao dito." It was fun, I mean, it took a long time to get all the balls in the pockets but we had fun playing.

Food arrived and it was delicious! Well, I love Tuna a lot while she just said Tuna always tastes the same to her. Hahaha. We didn't take pictures though, I mean, other people when they go out take lots and lots of picture. Maybe we both just got used to that, also, I don't like taking pictures of people that much. Taking pictures of nature though, that has always appealed to me.

Which is why, I tried to capture the full moon before we boarded the barge! (The moon is adorable, looking like another light for the barge):

Also took this pic as we were already on the upper deck of the barge: (I mean, that silver light reflecting off the water and the moon framed by the clouds is something I will consider to be a higher form of poetry than any type of poetry man may come up with.)

We didn't drink the flavoured beer during dinner, instead, we took it with us to the edge of the walkway and chilled there. Here is a toast to the moon, that majestic lonely thing:

We stayed in that wooden walkway, me lying down on the floor to look at the moon and stars while my companion sat on a wooden bench. We talked about nothing and everything, even the silence was pleasant and restful. A docked barge was creaking noticeably in the water. It would be creepy if there were no lights, but given that it was well lit and we knew where the sound was coming from then it was okay with us. She talked about sleep paralysis and we agreed that it was a nasty experience. An intermittent light caught our attention, the sky was periodically lit up by the brilliant forks of lightning behind the dark clouds.

I got up excitedly to try and take a picture of lightning. I have never tried lightning photography, and it was admittedly difficult to capture. Good thing my phone has a burst functionality, I would just keep my thumb on the capture button and it would keep taking pictures (I did this over and over, sometimes almost getting a thousand pictures just so I could capture it.) When the burst was done, I would scroll through all the captured images, select the best ones and keep those only. It strained my phone's memory so much that I had to finally delete one folder.

Here's the first decent one I got:

We felt the need to pee so we finally had to leave the walkway. After that, we exited the resort and went to wait outside to head back to Davao at around 11 pm. The barge arrived on time and left just about 10 minutes after arriving since there were still many passengers boarding it.

I repeated the same process of taking burst pictures, and finally managed to capture a lightning fork! And the one after the lightning fork was pretty cool too.

and then this;

All in all, it was an electric experience (excuse the pun). We felt a sudden jolt (excuse me again) of appreciation towards the beauty of something that at the same time, had the power to injure.

It was an awesome experience, the full moon, twinkling distant stars, dark clouds and lightning all existing in the same wide canvass of the skies. It feels great to be human sometimes, isn't it?

Bonus pic, moonlight between tree branches!

I hope you enjoyed this! And I look forward to more #ulogs and more nature pics with you guys. returns gaze at lightning

All pictures are mine, taken with an Iphone SE.