One thing that many people dont realise when moving to or retiring to the Philippines is the fact that the pace of life is a lot slower than they expect. Often things take days to do that would somewhere else take hours. Getting isolated can become easily done and more often than not people arent to aware to keep you in the loop. I have heard from several people the expat groups in CDO are better organised and more of a social gathering but im still to find out why it differs so much from Cebu. But one thing for sure is Cebu has such a mix of people here its almost impossible for them all to be in the same room nevermind socially. The majority of people here are escaping from something even if they know it or not. For me personally its always been built into my life to travel aswell as the fact im pretty much ashamed of what has happened to the UK. Politics and open markets and immigration has pretty much left the UK to its demise. But enough about that my point is if you have so many people here escaping from something how can you get them to be more social? Well what seems to happen is people are in different places with different groups although most people know of each other and the other groups existence so the best thing to do when first moving to Cebu or anywhere else in the Philippines even if your not keen to mix with other expats is just meet a few and meet a few groups. In Cebu there is football,rugby,mat bowls, Hash House Harriers and meeting places such as badgers(Bar).  For the guys that prefer to just find a haunt to hang out many are in places like the bikini bars such as lonestar or more recently people seem to be heading to Jeans Place behind Gaisano Fiesta which is a small bar ill try and get round to visiting in the next week or so to review.

But the main thing is dont get caught out with “Cheap Beer and too much time” there are a lot of expats here that drink too often and a lot of its down to nothing more than being bored. If you need a friend.. im normally around somewhere and happy to organise introducing you to some of the groups.