Games We Played When There Was Still No Ipads or Facebook to Entertain Us

Like any other kid, I enjoyed long holidays like the one we're having now!  Well, for schoolchildren, we'd have a longer vacation we call sem break and it would be about two weeks tops and it would run through the November 1 visiting of the dead ritual that most Catholic Filipinos perform.

Nowadays though, you wouldn't find kids out in the street playing siyatong or buwan-buwan or  tumba lata - and in a way, I do feel sorry for them - and I feel bad that today's parents are not even teaching their kids the games they played when they were younger.  Even freakin' jackstone!

Anyway, I loved playing siyatong as a kid. You just needed two sticks to play it with and a possibly a sandy topsoil so you can make that vertical mound needed to launch the smaller stick.  I wasn't particularly good at playing this since my hand-eye coordination was very poor, but it was fun anyway!

I also loved playing buwan buwan which was a variation of the patintero.  Since it was full moon these past few days, those were the days we played this game since we could play it at night, with the full moon and all!  You didn't need anything to play this game, just a stick to put a line were the "it" can walk and follow and 'touch' the people inside the circle (which resembles the shape of the moon - hence the name).  

Tumba lata was another fun game we played and I hated being it because I was really a bit slow as a kid but I enjoyed it when I was NOT the "it"!  It was a bit of a mean game I remember now and one really had to be quick to escape being caught or have one's slippers get caught in the circle which 'houses' the can.  What the rest had to do was to throw their slippers and make the can fall and the 'it' had to put the can back in the circle AND catch anyone who dares get his or her slipper back!  It was a fun way NOT to be obese!