The more things change, the more things stay the same

I've got two bits of news to share...

Blogger, here I come!

I've finally moved to the new Blogger! It hasn't been allowing me to do so even when it got out of beta weeks ago. But as I was about to write a new post, voila! Move to the new Blogger I did.

I have heard there were problems with the beta phase, such as commenting. I do hope they've been fixed.

Though I'm in the new blogger, expect the same old me doing the food (sorry Princess Em, can't help it; I love food eh), movies, family, stories I enjoy writing about.


Ten years is quite a long time
I have been mentioning in my Baguio blog about my friends in college. There were 9 of us, and we were inseparable. We'd spend whatever's left of the afternoon after school and work (we were working students) together and even walk all over town to accompany each other home.

Wow... how time flies. Each has their own life to live now, we keep in touch from time to time but it's not as frequent as we would like it to be. Here's the best surprise for 2007. One of our friends have come to visit. She was gone for 10 years! She now lives in Canada, and she had a month's vacation to visit the Philippines. She spent a couple of days in Baguio. Prior to that, I also met her for dinner last week.

My wife told me they talked til late in the night catching up on each other's lives, and even baby Jo-Lo joined them in burning the midnight oil.

Ten years has gone, and yet she's still the spunky girl we know. Thanks for the pasalubong, Tess!

Here's to a year of more pleasant surprises. Happy weekend, everyone!

A whole lot of soup

I've been passing by this restaurant called The Soup Kitchen in Glorietta every now and then, and in each instance I wonder to myself, "what do they sell there? Soup? It answers a lot, given their name, doesn't it?"

Well, I finally knew the definite answer to this mind-boggling question one fine day when some colleagues invited me for lunch outside the office. Unfortunately, that's what other people had in mind. We passed a lot of fastfood stores and saw the lines grow longer by the second. Famished, we thought we'd never make it to the counter to order our food so we found ourselves walking more than four blocks away from our office looking for the shortest queue possible.

Funny how we couldn't stand falling in line but we managed to do a mini-walkathon in the search for fast food! Anyways, we soon found ourselves in Paseo Center where there are two floors of food shops. But what we thought would be a quick find for a table and food became another search for quick service and short lines. And then we saw The Soup Kitchen, which still had a number of chairs available. And there was no line to speak of! And so we moved in for the kill.

And what did they serve? Bread ... and soup! Well, there was also rice but we thought... rice and soup? Nah. Bread it was.

I don't know what got into Dessagirl. She simple loathed vegetables but she ordered something with loads of the green things in it. So imagine her starved state trying to get the veggie-loaded soup into her digestive system.

As for me... I can't even remember what I had. Wait... I remember now. Clam chowder. After a hefty slurping of soup and munching of clams and bread, I was finally able to satiate my hunger pangs. Unfortunately I couldn't say the same of Dessagirl and Irish. After her half-finished soup, we made a beeline for good old McDonalds.

Pauline had good sense in her when she ordered from Kaya (a Korean Restaurant) for bibimbap instead and joined us at the Soup Kitchen.

Got soup?

Heigh ho, to the Pig's Spine we go!

This was a trek from last year. I received the photos last December but workload was up to the ceiling so I'm finding time to update only recently.

But even if this happened last year, I can still remember the elation we felt when we finally arrived at the much-acclaimed Gulugod Baboy (or Pig's Spine). The place is named as such because a dominant sloping area there looks just like a pig's spine. The added feature of having a huge campsite makes this a favorite among big groups too. Plus, this is a relatively new site so it's not "commercialized" in the sense that there are no sari-sari stores around, no coconut juice along the way. Well, we missed the coconut juice of course but Gulugod Baboy is the place to go when you want to really feel that you "left civilzation".

We commuted on the way to Batangas, and it was already around 9 when we arrived at the base. As we surveyed the area, I thought I might get sunburned again (I turned mildly red at Mt. Maculot). Surprisingly, the trek here was shorter than the one at Maculot. It has been said that the trip going to the peak will only take 1.5 hours. But we're not like the ordinary guys out there. Nope. A level 1 climb takes us 4 hours to traverse. And this climb was not an exception. It was already mid-afternoon when we arrived at the peak. Which was not so bad at all because the sun was mid-way through its journey and the weather was cool.

It's quite windy up there, but not strong enough to blow down our dome tents. Cooking with charcoals was out of the question though, so we munched on the unroasted marshmallows instead.

What joy! The scenery was just wonderful. There were a handful of other trekkers as well, and a jolly bunch they were. Friendly atmosphere overall.

What a great time to unwind from work... really worth the weekend to go somewhere to just simply be with friends, cook whatever is there, enjoy the scenery, not think about how things are at the office... even just for a weekend.