Baptism

Last Saturday was the baptism of my godchild Stefan Franco. The ceremony was at UP chapel. Joema and I on time. Although I was pretty nervous because Janice said we should arrive before 10am. Okay, I didn't know that on Saturday mornings only one gate of the chapel is open. We asked the taxi driver to drop us off on the side across the swimming pool but the gate opened that day was on the other street so we had to go around the chapel haha. I thought to myself, what if we were late just because we were walking around the chapel. Anyhoo, everything's fine because we arrived earlier than the baby and his parents.

Sefan has 8 pairs of godparents. Here he is with his ninangs.


After the ceremony, we were treated to lunch at San Jacinto Panciteria. Here I am with my inaanak.


Hehe naasar na!


And then there were the photobooth pics!

The following day, Sunday, was very apt for the just ended celebration - it was the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. I wish I had written this post right after the mass so I could write here what the priest said in his homily. But the thing I remember is that after Baptism it is the parents and the godparents who should teach the child about the Lord. They are his first teachers on religion. So yes, I want to take this being a godparent seriously, not just with giving gifts to the child but taking care of his spirituality as well.

2010 Planner

I don't really buy planners. I'm happy with the annual planner the bank provides for all the staff. I use it for work and also for some personal stuff. What I keep in my bag is the smaller diary that they give. They give us 4 calendars each year - a planner refill, which is as big as a notebook but thicker, which we use with the hard cover with our names on it (yes, personalized), a smaller planner which can fit into our bags, a desk calendar and then another calendar (hehe I don't really know if I was able to explain that clearly). Anyway, so that's why I don't really spend on planners. But last Christmas a friend gifted me with the cutest planner. It was a set actually - Lucky Purse Diary - it says on the box.

This is the planner.



When you open it, there are pages like these before the monthly and weekly planners. Sort of like ushering you to the next month. :)



Then the monthly planner.



Which then leads you to the weekly planner.



I know the pages are just so cute to write on but I am writing on every page of the planner (well, the little scribbles I have there are only until today hehe) and I plan on doing it until the end of the year. I figured, an awesome planner = an awesome year hehe! If this comes true, then I might have to buy really great planners every year from then on. :)

By the way, the set also comes with a photo album (the green one), stickers with the months written on it and a box of blank stickers.


I checked the back of the box the set came with, there's a website for it. It's www.photongift.com. But it's in Korean so you might have a little difficulty browsing through it.

Blog Friendships

My blog buddy Anna sent me a Christmas gift and I got it today! I actually received an email from Anna last December asking me for my address because she's sending me a little something. She's so sweet! This afternoon, the husband texted and told me "May package ka..galing kay Atty. Anna Patajo" heehee!

The package!!!


Maligayang Pasko card that came with her gift. Anna wrote "Here's to blog friendships! Merry Christmas!"


I knew it was a necklace even before I opened it because she blogged about it and also left me a message.



Isn't that a cutie? Can't wait to wear it this Friday! Thanks a bunch, Anna!

Update: The necklace is from Earthly Delights. Go check out the site if you also want your very own hand-painted necklace!

Win a Free Boracay Vacation Package by WOW Philippines Travel Agency

WOW Philippines Travel Agency, Inc. is celebrating it's 5th year in business during July of 2010, and we would like you to have a chance to celebrate with us, so we have decided to give-away a FREE Boracay Package complete with 5 Star accommodations at the luxurious Le Soleil de Boracay Hotel on Boracay Island. The lucky winner will win the following Boracay vacation package.
Vacation Package Inclusions:
- 5 Days / 4 Nights Luxury 5 Star Accommodations at the Le Soleil de Boracay Hotel

- Flights to Boracay from Manila to Caticlan Airport on Philippine Airlines

- Island Transfers - Door-to-Door from Manila to the resort and back to Manila Domestic Airport

- Three (3) Meals each day, Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner

- Boracay Activities - Horseback Riding, Island Hopping, Glass Bottom Boat

- PLUS - 5,000 peso Spending Cash

Read More Information: http://www.boracay-packages.com

Marathon

One of the nice things about the year ending, aside from the usual year-ender specials, are the marathons shown on television. I was able to catch Lipstick Jungle marathon on the Hallmark channel and Glee marathon on Jack TV. Then we also bought Seasons 1 and 2 of the Big Bang Theory because I had nothing left to do before New Year's day.

Lipstick Jungle

I love the wardrobe of the ladies on Lipstick Jungle. Unlike in Sex andThe City, when the clothes are sometimes too over-the-top for my taste, the clothes in this series are attainable. They are polished, sophisticated and sometimes they are really some basic pieces with a few accessories to liven up the whole wardrobe. This is where realization kicks in, I don’t really have to buy new clothes for work, I just need to buy some new accessories, a whole lot of neck pieces, some bracelets, some earrings and I am done. I also love the fact that they are all working women and that the show can appeal to almost every women of different statuses because Victory is single, Nico is married, while Wendy is married with children.

Glee

I know a lot of people are going gaga over Glee. Sure it’s a different TV show because it’s a musical. I do love the scenes where they sing and how they do their own versions of the songs, what I can’t really care much about it is the drama between the different characters. This is one of the reasons why I don’t wait for it week after week to be shown on TV. So while watching the marathon, I was doing other things and just kept it on the background. But I do know the storyline and I’m happy with the season finale when Finn found out that he wasn’t the father of Quinn's baby. Best scene for me is the whole football team singing Single Ladies.

Big Bang Theory

I know I’ve mentioned here before that I love the Big Bang Theory. We really wait for it to be shown every week. But the thing is sometimes our TV automatically locks out the channel on the day and time this series is shown, as in if we switch our TV to Jack TV on Tuesday 9pm, it’s locked out and we have to enter a password. And we don’t know the password. We still don’t know if the problem is our TV or our cable provider. Anyway, that’s why we bought the series on DVD. I would venture to say that it’s next to Friends on my list of favourite TV shows, sometimes I think it’s even funnier. Friends’ pilot episode wasn’t that funny, it took them a few episodes to get their right timing and right lines to make it hilariously funny. But with Big Bang, it was funny right off the first episode. One of my favourite episodes is the one when Sheldon “helped” Leonard lie to Penny by telling her that he has a drug addict cousin whom they (Leonard and Sheldon) are going to for intervention and hopefully convince to go into drug rehab and undergo Addiction Treatment. It was an unravenable lie as Sheldon puts it. He even hired a scientist/actor to pose as his cousin because they were unable to convince him to go into Drug Treatment.

Super Blessed 2010

I declare I’ll have a super-blessed year in 2010! I claim a year of amazing abundance for my life. This year, I shall receive more love and give more love. I shall experience more joy, greater generosity, dreams fulfilled, financial increase, open doors, new opportunities, divine connections, supernatural appointments, great miracles, answered prayers, and exponential growth—Amen!

My mantra for the year! Thanks, Bro Bo!


**********

I originally wanted to make my first post for 2010, a recap of the year that was and hope that this year will be, well, better. But as they say, positive thoughts invite positive things so I decided to make this short and super freaking positive. I am so ready for the blessed year ahead of us!

Migs Christmas

So how was your Christmas? We spent Christmas eve and day over at my parents' house. It was the first time that I ever cooked something for Noche Buena hehe. Proud moment for me. But since I don't have photos of that yet, let me share with you another party we had with another set of friends.


This year's party was extra special because Epoy was able to come home for the holidays. We didn't really do what we usually do when we see each other, like poker or Rock Band. Every minute was spent telling stories and just plain catching up. Oh, but we also had some booze - tequila! I was the designated "tagayera" hehe

Flyfish Christmas

A few Saturdays ago, our little gang celebrated our annual Christmas party. We arrived with Steve, who got lost on his way to pick us up hehehe. When we got to Jose's place, Charline and Allan were already there. And since I, Joema and Steve haven't eaten lunch yet, we ate a late lunch/merienda while waiting for the others. Our agenda for the day: Rock Band and mind games. Yeah, yeah we're all geeks that way.

And since we're always ransacking Jose's Rock Band when he hosts our party, we gave him a little gift for Christmas - The Beatles Rock Band. We were all delighted he really loved our gift.

One of the games, Jose had for us that night was this bug puzzle which everyone tried solving. In the second photo above, Weng was trying to solve it. Here, Al is trying to solve it.

According to Jose, it was unsolved for the last 9 years. I'm so proud to say that my hubby and I were able to solve it. Here they are verifying if we inded had the right solution.



Hehe so happy and proud!


And then we're back to Rock Band.

So far this is my favorite group picture..so far...Next year we'll have two babies with us and Steve's wife in the photo.



We so nailed this wacky shot. We are ready for the weddings next year!

Another One Engaged

Woke up to good news this morning! I've set my alarm at 10am today so when I heard a message alert on my cellphone I knew it was still early. But I heard another text message coming in so I got my cell and looked at the messages. First message from my friend P: "Totoo ba yan txt ni S?" and I'm like "What message?!?!?!" so immediately read the next one from S: "Praise be to God! I'm engaged!". And literally my head was jolted from my pillow as if I've woken up from a dream hahahaha. I had to call up P to tell her I was about to call S and that I can't believe it myself. See, our friend S just got into a relationship with his girlfriend for I think two months now. Not that we're not happy for him, it's just that it was sooner than we expected. All of us in the group had longtime relationships with our fiances before we got engaged so you can probably know why we reacted that way. I guess we're just worried about him because of things I don't want to get into details here. But bottomline is we really want him to be finally be happy. I for one have been praying for this, that he finally finds the right one for him. Anyway, I called up S and I can tell from his voice that he was really, really happy. The way he greeted me "good morning" told me that it was really true and so I congratulated him and asked when they got engaged and when they plan to get married. I guess I'll be attending four weddings in 2010? hehehe 'Tis the season to be jolly!

Office Party

It's less than two weeks to go before Christmas so a lot of us are attending parties left and right. Last weekend I went to two parties, one of which is our office year-end party. We had it at the Crowne Plaza and this year's theme was James Bond. I've mentioned several times that I've transferred departments so I wasn't really keen on attending the party this year because I haven't gained a lot friends yet. But all my worries were out the window the instant me and my colleagues started talking about what to wear to the party.


My department now is relatively smaller than my previous one so it really felt new to me when the party started. Dinner was first in the agenda then we had some raffle prizes given off. A group of orphaned kids performed a medley of songs and dance numbers. Then there's the game where they show a scene from a James Bond movie and we had to guess which movie it's from. I don't really know much about James Bond (maybe just the recent ones) so we hit the photobooth. Here are some of my favorite photos.

Cats

Yehey we're watching this in August! If you also want to watch and you're a Citi card holder, you still get 10% discount if you buy your tickets until 31 December 2009.

From TicketWorld website:

CATS is quite simply a phenomenon. With magnificent music composed by the legendary Andrew Lloyd Webber, including the poignant hit song "Memory", an imaginative set, inspired choreography and stunning costumes, CATS is a brilliant song and dance spectacular not to be missed as it makes its premiere in Manila. CATS is the best-known and best-loved musical the world has ever known, it once held the record for the longest~running musical on the West End, only recently being surpassed by Phantom of the Opera. In addition CATS played 18 years on broadway and has been presented in over twenty-six countries, in about three hundred cities, in ten languages. CATS first opened in London in May 1981 to rave reviews and went on to win a record-breaking number of awards worldwide including two Oliver Awards for 'Musical of the Year' and 'Outstanding Achievement of the Year in Musicals', and seven Tony Awards.

THE STORY Cats is based on a series of poems by T.S. Eliot. The magnificent stage set is a rubbish dump, three times larger that life, where the Jellicle Cats have come out to play. It is the night of the annual Jellicle Ball when their leader, Old Deuteronomy, will announce the name of the cat that will be reborn to a new life in the Heavyside Layer. The announcement will be made just before dawn. While they wait, the cats amuse themselves (and us!) with stories of famous cats of the past and present. Dawn comes, and Old Deuteronomy gathers the cats together for his announcement of the name of the cat to be reborn.

Photo also from TicketWorld.

Seoul Last

For our last day in Seoul, the first thing we did was attend mass. We went back to Myeongdong to attend the mass at the Myeongdong Cathedral. I'm not sure if the directions I downloaded from the internet was wrong or I wasn't reading the map correctly but after a few blocks of walking we kind of got lost. Then I saw some policeman so I asked them for directions, I was holding a city map when I went up to them. Tough luck they didn't know how to speak English so I had to show them the map. The first policeman I asked had to ask another colleague of him. I'm not sure if I should have shown him a map with Korean symbols written on it or if he's really not familiar with the church (to think we were only about two corners away). They said that it was straight ahead so we walked again. After a few meters, I had to ask another policeman or rather show him the map for directions. Good thing there were a group of people, maybe tourists, that were guided by another person asking them to go this way. I had a hunch they were going to where we were going and the policeman did confirm that we should follow them. So after a few minutes of walking we finally reached the church, although we were a few minutes late. One of the few things that were different there compared to masses here in Manila is that when we got to the offertory part, no basket was passed around for you to drop your offertory, rather you had to queue and drop your offertory to the person in front of the line kind of like what happens during the communion. Another thing is that there were some Koreans who were not Catholics yet but were attending the mass. I knew this because the priest mentioned about them that they can not take the communion yet because they weren't baptised Catholics.



After mass, we went back to the shopping area of Myeongdong and spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon there. We saw a lot of street food like this




We tried this by the way, it's deep fried squid.

We had the best lunch we had in Seoul on our last day. Sorry but the restaurant's name is Korean Traditional Restaurant that's what it says on their chopstick wrapper. Or maybe we just have to learn to read Korean, so that we'll know the correct name of the restaurants because all the restaurants there are named Korean Restaurant or something like that.

Anyway, we ordered that combo with the picture behind us.


Since the waitress didn't speak English I had to point it from their menu and signaled the number one, I meant one order of that. Then she had three fingers up and pointed to all of us. So I thought "ah okay she's just telling us that the order is only good for three". And then our order came, so many different bowls were placed on our table. My brother said, "Ate, baka tatlo yung in-order mo ha!" I told him I didn't, the waitress was just telling us it was good for three people and this is what the whole order looked like. And then we started eating so we totally forgot about it. We're not really familiar with Korean cuisine so we had to look at the other tables on how they eat their food hehe. But the waitress did give us instructions on how to do it (by pointing to the ingredients). So we had to grill the beef, and when it's done we can wrap it with our leafy veggies and add in the different condiments that we like. It was delicious! I was so happy with our lunch!


When Mama and I were paying for our bill, we totally thought we were misreading the cash register because it was around 86 or 88000won! What the?!?!?! I remember seeing the price of our order at around 28000won. So my brother was right! What the waitress was telling us was that she was placing 3 orders of the beef for us. HAHAHAHAHA

It was finally time to go back to our hotel and wait for our guide to pick us up and bring us to the airport.


Gimpo airport was formerly their international airport but now it's used for their domestic flights. There was only just enough time for us to check-in and eat dinner at the airport. We ate Korean dishes for dinner as well.


Then it was really time to say goodbye to Korea. Cebu Pac was on time on the flight back to Manila. As a matter of fact, it was a few minutes early :-)


The gate to our plane was in a different side of the airport so we had to take the train (inside the terminal) to go there. So if you're coming from Incheon Airport, make sure to check your boarding pass where your gate is. Another thing I remember about Korea is that the weather there is not as hot here in Manila. We were there mid-September and the weather was like Baguio weather and it was the middle of summer there - our guide was even telling us that the week before that was even cooler, it was hot during our stay there (according to him). I had to wear a jacket during the night because I was really cold. And I didn't even bring a jacket, I had to borrow from my husband hehehe.

If I go back to Seoul, I wish I can watch the F1 race there.

Yay and Nay

Yay! Just bought my Christmas present for the hubby.



Nay! I've been waking up earlier than my alarm clock. And no I don't think it's because of my body clock but because of stress. Sigh, I wish I'd stop feeling this way. I have to learn to leave my problems at work in the office and not bring it home with me.



Yay! One more day at work and it's the weekend.



Nay! I still have one more day at work.



2 yays and 2 nays but 3 out of 4 are about work. I must get a life outside work. I must!

Lotte World

Our third day in Seoul was spent entirely in Lotte World. It was easy to go there from our hotel. We just took the subway and we got to Lotte World in one piece hehe. When you go there by subway, like we did, just get off Jamsil Station (line 2) and use exit #4. We availed their passport ticket and got a discount because we were tourists.


We're really not familiar with the characters of Lotte World but here we are taking our pictures with Lotty and Lorry.
Lotte World the amusement park has two main parts - Adventure Land, which is the indoor park, and Magic Island which is the outdoor part of the park. Right after you enter, you can get a map of the whole park. Be sure to get the English map. One of the shows we watched was Fantastic Odyssey. But there's really nothing fantastic about it.

The truth is we were a bit disappointed with Lotte World. Compared to HK Disneyland, Lotte World's shows seemed like a bore, simply because the shows were in Korean (no English translation or subtitle) and we felt like there wasn't much preparation with the shows. I dunno but it doesn't feel as special as the shows in Disneyland. Needless to say, there were still some amusing things about this amusement park.

They also have a castle like Disneyland. This is in Magic Island.

Magic Island is the part of Lotte World with the dare-devil rides, like the Waikiki Wave. I made a collage of the series of pics we got of the wave. Isn't that fun? No, we didn't ride this one. We didn't go in any of the adult rides. Both my brother and husband didn't want to go, they were both queasy about it. If I had gone there with Charline and Penny, for sure we would have stayed in Magic Island the whole day. This might be one of the reasons we didn't enjoy Lotte World that much, we weren't really able to experience the whole thing because we skipped so many rides.

The one show I enjoyed was the magic show. This was because of the audience we were watching with, who were mostly toddlers. They were oooh-ing and aaah-ing to every magic trick. They were so much fun. But I was impressed with the floating lady trick.


Another highlight of Lotte World for me is the miniature village at the Folk Museum. If you get the passport ticket like we did, the entrance to the Fold Museum is free. The miniature village was one big hall with different miniatures. The details of the works are simply amazing. I went gaga looking from one exhibit to another. This I think was a recreation of a Korean wedding. I wonder if they used authentic materials for this. Like if they used old clothes to make the small ones. Or if they used parts of vintage rings or vintage pendants for the accessories of the dolls. There were a lot of vintage style rings in the National Museum that we went to the day before.

After going around the museum, Joema and I had fun riding the carousel. Look at us, we're like kids!

They also have parades. And since we were there a month before Halloween, the theme was ..wait for it...Halloween!

Their night parade was a visual treat.

One of the amazing shows we watched was this acrobatic stunt. The man is hanging from the ceiling and from his mouth he has a rope where the lady is holding on to. And then the man twirls the lady around. It was amazing!!

The finale was a laser show. I don't know if they had fireworks outside, but this was inside Adventure Land.

More photos of the trip are uploaded on my multiply. Up next, last day in Korea.