Culture at the Cantata

Last night I went to the Christmas Cantata at GCF East - a local Church that quite a few Faith families attend.  I have been going there to listen to their cantata about 6 years now so it is sort of a Christmas tradition to me. (Steve says - "you've seen/heard one, you've seen them all").  Rose's teacher, Betsy, came with me.  Because this year they were doing the cantatas at the times of their services I could only go to the 4 p.m. service, which I realised after we got there was obviously the Tagalog (ta-ga-log) service as we were the only non-Filipinos in there other than some members of the cantata and the guest speaker (who spoke fluent Tagalog).  We were, then , rather conspicuous especially as we had arrived on time and most of the congregation arrived in Filipino time so we had seats near the front.  So the Pastor got up to do the introduction and mentioned the "foreign friends" - several times, in fact!  And every so often he would translate a phrase into English for our benefit.  It was a little bit uncomfortable.

Anyway, the programme said that after the last song they would be "welcoming visitors" so we slipped out of our seats at the start of the last song, listened from the back and left so we wouldn't get completely embarrassed if they singled us out (highly likely in my mind).