No Words to Describe Our mis-ADVENTURE!!

Last Saturday, one of my bestest friends in the world, Trency, and I finally went on our much-awaited day trip to Laiya, San Juan, Batangas. We had the trip planned since last week, and we were just thrilled to have our much-deserved R&R! I'll post the pictures in a later blog because I just want to write about it today..despite not having pictures to support it! :)

I think our little mis-ADVENTURE (notice the small mis, but all caps on the ADVENTURE ;P) started out Friday night. It was raining cats and dogs, and little did we know we'd both be having our "monthly visit" that same night. So we were both saying little prayers, inasmuch as we love the rains, because we wanted to soak under the last rays of the summer sun!

Anyway the next day seemed to be ok! It was gloomy when I woke up at 6.15am. Nonetheless we knew it was going to be sunny down south. So I got up, called up Trency to make sure she was awake, got dressed, and drove to Katipunan. This was where the mis-ADVENTURES officially started and to make it quick, bullet points shall be used:

--> Trency fell asleep after I called her, so instead of leaving at 7am, we left at around 8am++.
--> We took C-5 hence a quick and smooth ride. But when we got to the flyover which merges C-5 to South Super Highway, that's when the traffic woes began. It took us an hour to get to the Petron gas station for our breakfast.
--> Petron was filled with weekend warriors! We almost didn't find a parking spot. The lines to the bathrooms were really, really loooong. The line for the ATM was LONG. The line to get beakfast at McDo was long. The line in Petron Treats to buy our stash for the trip was LONG. Uhm...so you guys get the idea. It was like everyone was mass evacuating I swear!
--> This was where Trency found out she left her wallet at home. Like a Momma, I gave her allowance for the trip. :)
--> Traffic yet again from Turbina, Laguna all the way to the entrance of the Star Tollway in Sto. Tomas, Batangas which is a pretty far stretch! UGH!!
--> When we got to San Juan, we really didn't have a resort in mind. We didn't make reservations since it was just a day trip. We checked out Kabayan Beach Resort, Virgin Beach Resort, Balai, and Blue Coral. All were fully-booked.
--> Also had a little altercation with the very BASTOS guard at Blue Coral. What a BIATCH! *Which reminds me, I have to write them a letter to them and tell the management about that!!!!*

Since Trency and I were on a tight budget, we looked for a resort that was cheaper than Virgin Beach Resort. We then found our DAY TRIP HAVEN at Taramindu Garden Beach Inn. I guess I'm just gonna blog on this later because it's just too good to include here. But Taramindu saved our beach trip!

All-in-all this was the best beach trip for 2010. Yes, I have to say this was better than our Bohol trip. We still got sloshed by the beach, thanks to San Mig and our chicharon pulutan! So ultimate sloshness by the beach, the sun, the sand, the surf, the great resort that saved our asses, great MUSICAL roadtrip, and a great FRIEND to be with, makes for one PERFECT SPONTANEOUS SUMMER TRIP!!! :) That's despite Trency leaving her wallet, and us squeezing our budget, and the traffic! It was a very relaxing day, and we left Batangas contented and slightly tanned!! :D

Reminder to those who would want to get on a beach trip: MAKE A RESERVATION! Save yourselves the trouble of "resort-hopping". It saves time and gas!

Bez! We have got to do this AGAIN!! :)

I am In Love!

I know I've written a very pointless blog months ago about The Third Secret. But after reading three of Steve's Berry's books I am in an ultimate love affair with his collections. I am mesmerized after every read! It all started years ago when I first saw my college friend, Ethel, who has the same passion for reading, unblinking while reading The Romanov Prophecy. I LOVE books based on history, especially World War II. It's nice to read and imagine at the same time, how this fictional book could have a great impact in our lives today, had it happened the way Steve Berry wrote it. It would be spectacular!!

I first imagined this kind of thing happen while reading The Romanov Prophecy. Imagine finding the lost Romanovs alive, hiding somewhere, and eventually rising back to power and get back everything that had been stripped away from them. Having a very powerful imagination helps, and it makes the reading more enjoyable! :)

With that said, I am still on a World War II high after reading The Amber Room. A blurb from Dan Brown saying, "My kind of thriller!" gives this book the two thumbs-up! It was so hard to put down! And yes, it is about World War II and Hitler's looting of the world's priceless artifacts. I knew Hitler killed a lot of Jews, and people der Fuhrer considered outside of the "Aryan" race. But I had no clue that Hitler stole a lot of beautiful paintings and other artworks crafted by the masters of the arts. Hitler was the greatest vandal of art! And up to now, a lot of pieces are still missing, perhaps never to be found at all!

One of the greatest controversies is the Amber Room. It was a room made of dark amber panels, and was a gift given to Russia from the King of Prussia. After it was given by the Prussian king, the Amber Room was installed in the Catherine Palace.

In 1945, when the Germans invaded Russia, the German soldiers disassembled the room and was supposed to bring it to Germany. But the amber panels disappeared somewhere during the journey never to be seen again. Today, no one knows where the amber room is, no one is sure they will be ever seen again.

And with Steve Berry's brilliant mind, he was able to make a novel with accurate details about the disappearance of the Amber Room. I'm not going to make this a spoiler, but I will be encouraging all you readers out there to go down to your nearest bookstore and purchase this book. But I swear, how Steve Berry concocted this sweet, yet super factual novel, is beyond me! I'd like to have a cup of coffee with him and pick his brain! :)

So far, my 3rd Steve Berry novels have not been disappointing. There's just something about his novels that's so addicting. For bookworms like me, I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND Steve Berry. Even when I'm at work and have projects to do, I tend to work on them later just so I could keep turning the pages. Amazing!

Hit this for more information on Steve Berry.
Click here for more information on the Amber Room on Wikipedia.

Outpour of Reality

Since I haven't been blogging about my escapades, let me just write about sudden realizations. This is about people and work. Although I should really stop talking about work in my blog. But it's something that cannot be helped...TRUST ME! So here goes my blog on reality.

Realization #1: Still lucky to be have money every 15th and 30th of the month
My best friends (Trency and Amanda) are all employed right now. Although their rendezvous with the world of employment have been anything but a smooth ride or it's short-lived, their respective jobs right now have been lucrative. Trency is enjoying extra income when she gets past her quota (which is I think all the time), and Amanda is living the high-life with a ridiculously high pay (when I say ridiculous, just trust me!).

But the sad part is that yesterday she calls me up telling me that she wasn't gonna get extended. She loves the pay, but the labor..well that's another story, a story that's not mine to share. So yeah, it just means that she has to kiss her ridiculously high pay goodbye. And I feel bad for her. Among us, she's had the most challenging experiences when it comes to work. Maybe it's just her unlucky streak which she has to break.

Well there I was yesterday complaining about my work. Although my position still hasn't changed, I am still lucky I'm here. I'm lucky that I can still look forward to the middle and end of the months for my pay. Although I'd give anything just to be a bum for a while! :)

Realization #2: I got true friends already, I guess there's less need for more
Last night, I met up with Par (a college kabarkada) at Starbucks in Valero. She's the type of girl who's very outgoing, friendly, and talkative. Because of that attitude, she's earned a lot of friends. I sometimes wish I had her personality, but sometimes that internal mataray biatch gets the better of me (:p).

But last night she shared some thing highly unusual of her. And I felt the similarity in our situation. I don't want to divulge much, I guess the sub-head gives it all away anyway. It's hard to really assert yourself when they've made certain cliques already. Me and Par haven't been "the newbies" in a long time, so right now we're still groping our way around people. It sucks I tell ya! It makes the days go by much slower, and it makes the days sad. We both said that we really don't care anymore, we both have tried and tested friends already, and that would be enough. But we both wish we still had the same kind of people in our environment. It helps a lot especially when you're not exactly thrilled with the goings-on.

Realization #3: Some people are just plain papansin
In as much as I want to be friendly and all smiles to people I have just met, it is quite hard to not listen to the voice inside my head that says other things that's really not worth saying out loud. In the comfort and quiet of my own brain, I can really make nasty comments. One of my pet peeves, besides stupidity and utter slowness, are papansin people. I hate it when they feel they have to be above everybody else. I hate people who are stuck up, who doesn't know how to have fun even if you look like an idiot while at it. I wish I could really describe in absolute detail, like that of an HD flat screen TV, how this annoying attitude pisses the hell out of me. I've suffered through a lot of talk, which are always one-sided, about that person. This and that about "me". And how he thinks he should be the highlight of every damn thing that happens.

Oh and it's not just being papansin, I may not be the perfect employee or subordinate, but hey I know how to do my job. I want to finish stuff that's assigned to me on or before. And if that person detests being on time, well SAVE US FROM IT. I, for one, isn't exactly interested in getting pulled down by such attitude. It's annoying the crap out of me.

So there. Just some realizations. You can't change people because that's how they are. But I'm just hoping that I get saved from them. That's why being alone does the trick. I have no problems whatsoever in being alone. It saves me the crap of putting up a front for people, and it saves me from getting pissed off! :) So this is how peace on our planet could be achieved, me thinks. If you just stay out of trouble, or choose your own troubles, and try hard not to be the "fire starter", I guess you're at peace with yourself and everybody else in between.

I swear I really need to stat posting pics about my escapades. This blog is getting to be a drab. :)

In Hard Times...

Mom just bought a house and the expenses are UNBELIEVABLE! I know we don't have that kind of money, I don't even know how we're managing right now. :p In all fairness to my Mother, even though I know we're struggling in the finance department and her random complaints on not having money, she makes me feel that we can survive this. The rest of 2010 will surely be tough on the both of us. At least we already have a house that we can call our own. :)

And now, one of my problems is work. I know I'm not supposed to say anything about work. Got a bad experience with that, but I'm not bad-mouthing my job. It's me! I'm not happy with the work I'm doing. I feel so trapped. 10 hours stuck in a computer desk on the 11th floor, nowhere to go, nothing to see. I was doing photography, interviews, and meeting a lot of people in my previous job in a publishing company. That's what I see myself doing...and doing for a long time. I'm willing to be a publisher's slave for all I care as long as I get to do that stuff I want.

Sure I get to have cool perks here in my current job - movie premiers, freebies from clients - but I never felt any form of self-satisfaction from it. I never really felt, after a project, that I should give myself a pat-on-the-back. It's more of a relief that I got it done, and done well and on time.

Does anyone know of a writer job in a publishing company? Please let me know!! :)

Oh! And I have tons of blogs to write. My Bohol trip and my Cebu trip. Jeez! I've been neglecting my blog for some time. I looked at the stats and I saw I only had 2 entries for the month of May. 2! Now that's just crap! :(

HALALAN 2010: 1st AUTOMATED ELECTIONS

Days leading up to the elections, everybody was trash talking about the COMELEC and SMARTMATIC because they're not prepared and they've been cramming to get all the PCOS machines to the liblib places in the Philippines. It's kind of funny actually. I had my own qualms about the automated elections as well. My Mom and I were a bit wary about the machines failing and the machines overheating because of the heat.

But come May 10, 2010 the day of reckoning has finally come! Our helper was the first to go the our precinct over at the former Makati High School (it's not called something else). When she came back she reported that there was this REALLY long line. So Mom and I decided to just go after lunch.

When we got there after lunch, making sure we were full, and brought along adequate water, the line was still as long as EDSA. And the heat added to the already more-than-worse situation. We got there at around 12.20PM. The line would inch slowly forward. It was a good thing that the Makati people thought of putting chairs for the voters to sit on while waiting.

What's actually cool about this was that people weren't hotheaded. Despite the heat and super long line, people were actually joking. I guess Filipino people are naturally happy folks. It was entertaining to hear the bantering. Here are pictures of the lines for each precincts. I felt like we were all just playing musical chairs, except that there was no music. Every 20 minutes or so we had to move from one chair to the next. And if there were no chairs left, you'd have to stand and wait for your turn haha!





The Makati COMELEC people and volunteers really organized the whole thing. We had 3 lanes for the clustered precincts (around 5-6 precincts for every cluster), so upstairs in the classrooms there were 3 holding rooms. The volunteer from the holding rooms would have to shout at the volunteers holding the "traffic". The volunteers downstairs are the ones who let the people up, depending on how many the volunteers upstairs would call out. It was a smooth run! Congrats to the MAKATI COMELEC people for a job well done! :)

We got up to the holding room at around 3.40PM. It's actually much faster once you get to the holding room. By 4PM I had already gotten that long-ass ballot. I was so excited to finally experience the first Philippine automated elections! It was soooo cool I swear! And the voting process took like 10 minutes!

We were finally out of the high school by 4.15PM. We were tired and sweaty. But it was a cool experience. Although I must say I miss the old manual process because there was no line whatsoever! Hopefully by next elections, it would be orderly!

Anyway here are some of the pictures I took while voting! :)

Mom waiting for her confirmation message at the PCOS machine


Voting for MY President: Gibo Teodoro :)


Yipee!! Our first automated elections was a success...in Makati anyway! :p