Mich’s Journeys

While in Manila, I got the chance to meet up with our friends from high school. The first one was also to meet up with N (who is also based here in Sydney) and her hubby and daughter J at Fely J’s in greenbelt 5.

With kiddos.

All girls!! I didn’t bring E with me during this meet up.

With my god-daughter T, this one was at the chinese resto we had dinner at on our way home. The pose was her idea, such a sweetie!

And the other one, which was not really planned at Cafe Breton in Tomas Morato just a couple days before we were scheduled to leave.

E with A, who doesn’t know her ninang mich

See the gallery for more pics.

Went to watch the movie last Wednesday with my mom and aunt. It’s a fun fun fun movie, I really enjoyed it a lot. My mom super enjoyed it that she is adding the Abba songs to her repertoire on their karaoke nights. Meryl Streep is such a good actress, you can really throw any role at her and she’ll just shine. And I so love Pierce Brosnan here. 

While in Manila last January, my mom took us to dinner at Metrowalk and we saw that they had a dolphin show there (Wonderful World of Dolphins) and of course E wanted to see the show. It was a bit pricey though at P300/head, and at the same rate for both adults and kids but we still watched since the guama wanted to please the apo hehe. So we watched the show with I think about less than 40 people in attendance. But the good thing about it was E got chosen to go up for the sea lions, he didn’t know what was gonna happen that’s why when the sea lion kissed him he didn’t like it. As soon as he stepped off the stage until he got back to his seat, he was wiping off his cheek with his hands and saying “eeww!”. After the show though when they were announcing that you can have your picture taken with the dolphin, E immediately told me that he wanted to do that. And after asking him a number of times if he really wanted it (obvious ba na ayaw ko nung una kasi may bayad eh :p) we queued up. And yes, we ended up buying his pic with the sea lion as well.

To our extended family that is. Our new baby niece - Mika.

Congratulations Ival & Cathy.  Welcome to the world baby Mika.

We celebrated E’s birthday last January in Manila. At first we thought of planning a big party (this would be the first time we would celebrate his birthday in Manila with our families) but we opted to just throw him a simple birthday dinner. Good thing my BIL’s wife has a restaurant (Tony’s Bar & Grill along Mindanao Avenue) so we just reserved the function room and ordered a buffet dinner.

One thing we had to take care of before going home to the province for the new year was to order E’s birthday cake. So off we went to Goldilocks at Trinoma. After going through the cakes album, we decided on getting him a Cars-themed cake and had E choose which design he wanted.

On the day of his birthday he was so excited to get his cake that when we loaded the cake in the car he kept peeking around the tissue cover. He had lots of fun at the party running around with his cousins and playing with his uncles. I think the most fun was when blowing out the birthday candles. He had so much fun hearing everyone sing him the birthday song and knowing that once the song was finished he would get to blow out the candles that we did it five times.

Here are some of the pics:

with ichi’s fam	with my fam
with my cute goddaughter A	e with his godsister T
singing happy birthday	blowing his cake
E was super happy with the birthday song and blowing of the candles that we did it 5 times
birthday boy	family pic
family friends	with hs friends
lim cousins
getting the cars	E with his uncles, cousins and godsister

more pics here.

Help vote Manila into the wildcard cities for the Monopoly Here & Now: The World Edition. Just go to the monopoly website and vote your favorite 10 cities from a pre-selected list and then vote Manila or any other city not in the list for the wildcard cities. Who knows we may just end up seeing Manila as one of the cities in the world’s first global Monopoly.

Voting for the top 10 cities ends on February 29, 2008 and March 9, 2008 for the wildcard cities.

We spent new years in the Philippines this year and on my mother-in-law’s side of the family the tradition is to ring in the new year at ichi’s grandfather’s province in Nueva Ecija. Growing up in the Philippines you always ring in the new year with firecrackers and fireworks and with ichi’s side it’s no different. Every year my brother-in-law (BIL) is tasked with buying the fireworks, the aunts and uncles would just give him a budget but this year they forgot that my BIL and his wife were not going back as they’re on their 8th month of pregnancy. So some of the cousins made a quick run the afternoon of December 31st to Bulacan to purchase some fireworks. E had a lot of fun watching the fireworks, he wouldn’t even let me cover his ears, telling me that it wasn’t loud at all.

Here’s a short clip of one of the fireworks.

The other day I was able to meet up with an old college friend. It’s our first time to meet up since we graduated from college. Shortly before graduation we got into a misunderstanding that got blown out of proportion. Thinking back, we both could have done something about it but didn’t. We were supposed to meet up a few months back when she was in town but things didn’t work out and finally this time we were able to. Ej, if you’re reading this thank you for being the first to reach out months ago (wonders of technology na din :p) and we had a really fun time catching up. See you again and here’s to the start of a renewed friendship.

happy birthday mumsy! we love you!

credits here.

I was chatting with my youngest brother yesterday about some things that we (Ichi and I) told them. And at one point in the conversation he told me about his positive outlook on a situation that we (my mom & siblings) have been facing for several years now. Instead of assigning blame he chose to look at it positively and thus have a brighter take on things. I know of other people in the same situation or have gone through similar situations that are up to now stuck in that rut because they chose to point their fingers. I was really happy and proud about it that I started crying. I’m so used to seeing my youngest brother be this happy-go-lucky type but this shows that he has a good head on his shoulders.

Good luck with your new job sioti! Love you!