Things Happen When You Least Expect It…

1. Bugger! I missed my Blog-O-Rama deadline for the first time. It’s a mortal sin for any writer and I finally succumbed to the pressure. I wish I could blame my damn new DSL connection for having all these spyware, or the fact that am being smug because am getting all these Xmas bonuses, or because I simply lack the time.

I am only being human, and being irresponsible. Period.

2. On the other hand, the reason why I am in a daze and don’t have the energy for the past few days is that I just lost $100 – one hundred friggin’ dollars – to a ragin’ kleptomaniac. Again, I can only blame myself for being careless with my things in ’supposedly safe’ surroundings. Prior to this incident, I have been counselling some friends who have lost their cellphones and/or money to “take it easy, it’s not the end of the world. What you lose will come back to you.” How could I have thought it would happen to me too? Christmas really sucks in Manila. Not only does it give people the irrepressible urge to spend, this is also the time of year when holdups, robberies and other petty crimes rise. In the meantime, I’ve stopped thinking about how the $100 could have gotten me to Hong Kong. Or how I could have burped with all the hotel buffets it would give me. Or how I could have shopped till I dropped in 168 Mall. For the record, the last time I lost $100 was in a Missouri casino (but at least I had fun!)

3. By some stroke of fate, this site has been chosen as semifinalist finalist to the Best Photoblog category of the Philippine Blog Awards. Even though I am incredulous and tempted to say “why oh why?,” thank you po. I still agree with my former editor who thought I took crappy pictures and the fact that I possess a crappy digital camera isn’t helping my talents any. I don’t expect to win, silly (because annalyn.net is a blog, not a photoblog) but being nominated is enough consolation for somebody who spent ages figuring out Flickr and then looking stupid everytime she’s outside and wants to take all those food shots. My most memorable experiences as a fledgling amateur blog photog include being refused at this store in Tokyo selling condoms of all sizes and flavors and then being shooed away by this overzealous stall owner at the Salcedo weekend market because I was trying to take a pic of her giant vat of paella negra. Ang buhay nga naman!

4. My belated super-thanks to friendster Thess, the talented Pinay web whiz in Holland, for the new design of AWOTW. My site stats for November is the highest ever in my blog history, at 90,000 plus hits by the time you read this or a high of 4,200 hits per day. Ten months ago, I would not have thought this was possible. I would like to thank all my friends who have told our common friends and then told their other friends..heh heh! I wish I could blog more and I wish I could also earn from my site like what Yuga and the rest of the gang are doing. According to a link from Technorati, this site is now worth $103,875.36. Hindi ba pwedeng i-encash ito? hehe.

If you’re visiting here for the first time, please don’t hesitate to leave me a line. I promise to send an e-card to all my blog friends and commenters this Xmas!

My ‘22 random things’

My blog friend Toni posted this more than two weeks ago and since I’ve been rather uninspired in updating this site (while awaiting my DSL connection at home), I had fun doing this. It’s always fun when you don’t have to exercise too much of your brain. Call me uninteresting, call me boring but here are 22 random things about yers truly:

1. While most people love pizza, I don’t.
2. Don’t pester me with Pinoy Big Brother, I hardly watch TV. My son won’t let me.
3. I had my first boyfriend at the age of 20.
4. Que horror.In my 20’s and living alone, I woke up to an almost-burning apartment.
5. Since giving birth, my shoe size has ballooned to 8.5.
6. Am the youngest in a brood of five but was also the earliest in the family to work for a living.
7. My son calls me “fat butt.”
8. I envy people who can sleep a lot. I don’t…. I can’t.
9. Am fond of collecting notebooks, even if I hardly get to use them.
10. There’s only one person in the world who knows all my deepest, juiciest, uncensored secrets. And that’s my college best friend.
11. I compensate for my voracious culinary appetite by climbing 50 floors on my gym’s Stairmaster three times a week, at Level 10.
12. I compensate for my lack of a sex life by climbing 70 floors on my gym’s Stairmaster three times a week, at Level 12.
13. I’d rather wash the dishes than do anything that has to do with cleaning.
14. I’ve always believed that the best way to mend a broken heart/forget about men is to shop.
15. I think I have too many cookbooks (even if I hardly cook these days).
16. I eat fast. Maybe this has been badly influenced by my get-up-and-go lifestyle.
17. Come to think of it, the last movie I saw was “Kingdom of Heaven” eons ago.
18. Four of my random ‘comfort food’: cheese, cinnamon rolls, adobo and pansit.
19. I can’t start my day without drinking coffee.
20. Been professionally writing since I was 17, the reason why am quite sick and tired of writing now (not for this blog though, hehe)
21. I was born under the zodiac sign of Scorpio.
22. In my mid-20’s, I worked in Europe as a casino dealer.

Keep this moving. Write at least 20 things about you if you’re one of the following:

you like shopping!
you can’t live without coffee!
you love pizza!
you’re a fan of Pinoy Big Brother!
you’re a gym rat!

A sucker for ‘psychics’

How much of your life would you leave to fate and how much of it would you leave to fortune-tellers or self-proclaimed ‘psychics’?

I didn’t realize how my close friends were drawn to these things until I told them about how my resident psychic M accurately predicted some things in my life and they would badger me: “So who is she? What’s her telephone number and errr, how much?”

My kids would kill me if they knew Mom would pay P600 to have her fortunes told when they could have two gallons of ice cream instead. But I do see Madame M every semester or once every three months when the mood strikes me. There’s no rational explanation except that seeing her is a form of therapy sometimes and a follow-up serves to validate her previous ‘predictions’ (see how this thing can be addicting, huh!) I am very happy with the way things are going on in my life (including my lovelife, which Mme. M also ‘predicted’) but there are some things I still ‘consult’ her on such as business deals and work-related queries. Of course I’d be a fool to believe everything she says but listening to her read my cards and divine the future/present just gives me something to look forward to.

Of course not everything she says is really earth-shaking. Like the one time she told me my househelp is dying to have a vacation.

During a lull from work, I tease my housemate: ” I know Amy that you’re itching to have a vacation.”
And she turned to face me: ‘ Yes I do. How did you know Ate?”

Last week, I told my sis about Madame M. “She told me you would really like to go abroad now. Is this true?”
Older sis meekly admits to this and immediately gets curious about Mme. M. My Ate was so convinced about how my seer probed into her mind that she even asked me for her cellphone number, apparently bent on scheduling an appointment with her soon.

Some people think that seeking the help of fortune-tellers or manghuhulas is evil. I don’t have an opinion; I am amoral about these things. However, I have to admit that another person’s capacity to pinpoint certain details of my past with clear-cut precision impresses me; moreso if she tells me what would happen in the future and a few months down the road, it really does!

But as proven with some of my friends, you can’t prevent fate from happening even if you’ve been duly-warned by your fortune-teller. Take for instance my friend D who was advised against being involved with a married man. In a short while, she would meet Mr. Married and falls deeply for him. Or my friend S who was counselled to “take precautions or you will get pregnant.” True enough, she would meet this “accident” just from a one-night encounter with her long-distance boyfriend.

Recently, I met another fortune-telling fanatic in the person of Gie. She has in fact a separate folder in her mobile phone containing the names of all the psychics she knows in Manila, including one being employed by the police in locating “missing” or abducted persons. But unlike others overly concerned about their own lives, Gie is into the occult because she would like to know what’s happening in the lives of people close to her. In simple terms, nakikiusyoso.

Fortune-telling should be about having fun; it shouldn’t at all encroach on your religion or make you complacent and too dependent (magastos magpahula every week kung adik-adik ka na). If I remember right, Princess Diana went to see her psychic a few days before her Paris car crash; obviously, both of them didn’t have an inkling as to what would happen. Logic tells us that if these people gifted with the ‘third eye’ can see through everything, then this world would be such a peaceful, beautiful place. UnFORTUNEately, it doesn’t happen that way. These psychics are humans too.

One-day vacation in Bangus Country

I could say that one of the things that makes me a true-blue Filipino is my love for the milkfish, or bangus in local parlance. Go to any market (in the Luzon region, at least) and you will almost always find this gray-scaled fish in the stalls. What I like about bangus is that there are more ways to cook this than my other fresh-water favorite, tilapia. The health-conscious prefer the fat-free paksiw na bangus or the sinigang na bangus sa miso but I am also partial to the many imaginative ways our good ol’ bangus can be cooked – from relleno to the canned version in olive oil to lumpia to the bangus belly in tofu I oh-so-yummily tasted in one Chinese restaurant. And if all else fails you can just have the daing na bangus pan-fried then paired with your favorite siding like salted eggs with tomatoes, ensaladang mangga or even pesto sauce.

When my Rotary Club decided that we would go to Dagupan City for an outreach, I relented because of the lure of the bangus. The place, after all, has proclaimed itself the Bangus Capital of the Philippines. Dagupan is a little more than four hours drive from Manila and is in fact just an hour in distance to Baguio City. When we arrived in Dagupan around noontime, what immediately greeted us were several bangus stuffed with onions and tomatoes grilling in the open fire, a huge pot of sinigang (bangus again!) and a bilao of roasted eggplants, itlog na maalat and green mango salad with shrimp paste. There was also grilled liempo and I couldn’t quite forget the taste of the kinilaw na bangus which consisted of raw fillets of bangus marinated in vinegar with salted egg whites, onions and chili. Hmm, it was simply to-die-for! There are also lots of vendors selling boneless bangus in these parts and it was quite cheap – at eight pieces for less than a hundred pesos!

For great bangus recipes, I found this online.

’twas a great picnic indeed and we held it at Tondaligan Beach in Bonuan district which is like one of the biggest beaches in Pangasinan. Locals however warned us of a number of drowning incidents in this area because of the treacherous undercurrents. They say there are better beaches in San Fabian, Bolinao and even Sual. Maybe we can check that out next time. We also visited the Bangus Center and The Aquarium which is their museum of exotic and endemic fishes. On display were goldfishes, piranhas, koi and the so-called “most expensive” President’s Fish, also called “lurong.” From what I noticed in the billboards and everywhere, the local government is quite serious in projecting Dagupan as a bangus showcase . I think the experts would call this a good example of niche marketing,haha.

It was great to discover another place in the Philippines I didn’t know about. My only regret is that I wasn’t able to go to The Hundred Islands which is on my travel wishlist. Hopefully soon.

A Birthday Lunch at Mano’s Greek Taverna

With the twins out on their field trip and almost all of my close friends off on their long vacation, it didn’t look like an eventful birthday for me. Good that Z, who contributes for the Inquirer, decided to tag me along to a food tasting trip to breezy Tagaytay. If there’s something that gonna entice me to leave everything behind, that’s the smell of food and especially if it’s something I haven’t tried… like Greek food!

After what seemed like an effortless trip, we arrived at Mano’s Greek Taverna by lunchtime. The place at once looked familiar, until I remembered that this was Sanctuario Cafe’s old location, prior to relocating by the rotonda. Welcoming us was the patriarch of the place himself, Manos Sapountzakis, who opened the resto a few months ago with his Filipina wife, Es. I noticed that the place was bathed in white with transparent white curtains, posters of Greek sceneries hanging by the walls and Christmas novelty items reminding one of the impending (expensive) holidays. The place does not really exude ’sophistication’ all over but I thought, this must be how an airy, breezy Greek taverna looks like. The sight of Mano’s and Es’ two kids scampering around further adds to the resto’s family-oriented appeal.

Mano started by giving us ladies a long stem of red rose in true chivalrous Greek fashion. He came back with glasses of red wine which we were only too willing to sample. Hmm, I liked it because it was sweet and not overpowering to the taste.

Amid all the pleasantries, we must have tasted a total of 14 dishes that long afternoon. Must-tries at Mano’s are their homemade bread dipped in tzatsiki, the eggplant moussaka and the baklava. I also liked their Hellenici Salata (Greek summer salad), the cabbage rolls (filled with rice and minced meat), stuffed vegetables and lamb fricassee – a creamy stew of tender-cooked lamb seasoned with various spices. The grilled lamb ribs turned out to be beyond par and the owner apologetically explained that this was because the ribs were the last ones on the stock. Hopefully, it will be better next time. Capping our hefty meal was a cup of Greek coffee which you can order either black, semi-sweet or sweet. I ordered sweet and found it – well – too sweet Unfortunately, the gift of eloquence eludes me now to describe all the food I tasted but the pictures should speak for themselves. Aside from the fact that it adheres to the healthy principles of Mediterranean cooking with the liberal use of olive oil, one good thing about Mano’s is the price. The most expensive dish here is priced at P270 and that’s already a main course with rice or potatoes and all the vegetable sidings. Some of the items like the salads and the gyros are priced below 100.

Oh well, I failed to follow the advice of my Chinese friends to eat misua first thing on my birthday but at least Mediterranean-style fare is the next best thing since it’s always been hailed as healthy. Just don’t do it like me and try all 14 dishes at the same time!

Mano’s Greek Taverna
along Tagaytay-Calamba Road (before reaching the rotonda), Bgy. San Jose, Tagaytay City
Cellphone # 0916-4298358

… & a lil boozing at Dusit’s Fiesta San Miguel

Immediately after my Tagaytay food trip, I headed off to Dusit Hotel in Makati to meet my fellow Blogkadas led by Sachiko who planed in from Tokyo with her husband Michiyo. A few months ago, I met Sachi in Japan and so I was naturally excited to see her in town this time. First thing, she raved about how much she enjoyed her Bora vacation, the second honeymoon with hubby in their 20 years or so of marriage (whew!) And I was titillated to find out that during her Philippine homecoming, Sachi had chosen to stay in the places I earlier recommended in this blog (and newspaper articles): the Red Coconut Resort in Bora and Traders Hotel for its panoramic view of Manila.

The Blogkadas including Doc Emer & his uber-nice soulmate, Karla, and Mari met at Recipes Resto in Greenbelt 3 where we ordered food based on Mec’s recommendations. I didn’t get the names right now but we feasted on the chicharon bulaklak, crispy beef ribs, spicy squid, breaded tilapia fillet and the gising-gising, a spicy dish of finely-shopped baguio beans and grund pork simmered in coconut milk. My hands-down favorite was the pre-avian flu General’s Chicken which just had the right mix of sweetness and sourness. Its taste has got me hooked and I am definitely going to Recipes to try this again. Of course it helped that all throughout the meal, I was seated next to Tito Rolly who was eating as heartily as me (hehe). The only problem was that we thought the servings were too small. Recipes ‘ dishes are hardly meant for sharing We capped our delicious meal with sips of Japanese sake which Sachi brought in a bottle, amid our cheers of “kampai!”

From Greenbelt, we made the long walk back to Sachi’s official residence, the Dusit Hotel, to try the live band offerings of Fiesta San Miguel. Luckily for us, Sabor Latino was playing that night and they almost got us dancing with their Latin American Songs. However, I was more focused on finishing my huge half-liter mug of beer (see pic) and I did before the night was over! It was also remarkable of Sachi to be spreading her Japanese rice crackers all over the table despite the fact that it wasn’t part of the corkage, hehe. Hmm, definitely we preferred munching on omiyagi rather than sisig that night.

Finally, here’s the souvenir picture taken at the Dusit Hotel lobby that night. The Blogging Berks Manila Chapter were all glad to meet Sachiko and will meet up again for Mec’s wedding this December.

If birthdays were this fun and event-filled, I really don’t mind getting old. Cheers!