Month: February 2011

palawan – day 2

We had our breakfast at 6 am (so early!) at Puerto Pension’s Tribu Restaurant. It’s located on the roof deck and faces the Puerto Princesa Bay. Quite a view, really.

The free breakfast consists of 1) a hot beverage 2) an egg 3) bread and spread 4) fruit 5) juice.

You’ll need to shell out P88 for an upgrade. For a Filipino breakfast, you can add rice and a viand (like a hotdog), and unlimited eggs. You read that right. Unlimited eggs.

Jaykie had an American breakfast. Waffles and bacon!

Then off to Sabang Wharf. Our tour guide, Kuya Obet, picked us up in a van.

It’s a long drive to Sabang Wharf so we had two stop-overs.

Sabang Wharf. We’re early, so we went for a quick dip.

Ooh, look at the waves.

After lunch, we got on a boat that would take us to the St. Paul Subterranean River National Park.

I enjoyed the boat ride because of the waves! Whee!

We’re here! We now need to register, get a hard hat and a life vest.

I look like a guy lol.

The Underground River tour was fantastic! I’ve never been inside a cave before. The formations are just amazing. And! We saw a snake! (The appearance of the snake abruptly changed the weight distribution of our boat haha.)

That night, Kuya Obet drove us to Badjao Seafront Restaurant. (You’ll need wheels to get to this resto because there are no trikes to take you back to the hotel.)

We were told that all of the tables were reserved. But this cannot be! So we talked to one of the waiters (talked, bullied, whatever) and asked when one of the reserved tables was needed. He said 7:30. It was 6:30 then. So we took a menu, ordered quickly, ate quickly, and was out of there by 7:30. A leisurely dinner was out of the question, but I chewed my food enough to note that I loved the lemon chicken. Order it.

We tried Itoy’s Coffee Haus, said to be Palawan’s version of Starbucks.

I recommend their leche flan cheesecake and their black forest drink. Yummmm.

The Superior room was big enough to host an inuman session, so:

Okay! Time for bed!

palawan – day 1

This year’s trip with my high school friends was to Puerto Princesa City in Palawan. June booked our tickets, Ghia booked our rooms, and Grace Anne, who had been to Palawan before, took care of budget and the itinerary. Departure from NAIA 3 was at 3:45 pm on Feb. 5. Jaykie had class at UP till 1, and I was worried we might miss our flight. Amazingly, though, we arrived at the airport after only more or less 30 minutes. Hooray!

(Click pics to enlarge, of course.)

Cebu Pacific’s flight left a bit late (around 4 or so?), but we arrived safely in Puerto Princesa at 5:30 pm.

My travel-mates. :)

Puerto Pension offers free transpo from the airport to the hotel. Air-conditioned jeep!

Checking in.

It’s a nice place. Very homey.

Our room! (Deluxe B – with queen-size bed, TV, bathroom, AC unit, hot and cold shower.) There’s really only enough room for two, so if you want more space, take the Superior room, which can fit three people. Deluxe C does not have a bathroom inside (you’ll have to use the communal bathroom), but it’s of course cheaper.

We took the trike to get to Kinabuchs for dinner. It rained on our first night, boo.

We had crocodile! It was okay. The meat was tender and tasted like chicken. Not memorable though.

Then back to the hotel and then sleep. Loooong day tomorrow.

kritika kultura soft launch

Hopefully I’ll be able to attend. :)

From Facebook, and Chingbee Cruz’s blog:

Kritika Kultura and the National Committee on Literary Arts – National Commission for Culture and the Arts cordially invite you to the soft launch of the Kritika Kultura Anthology of New Philippine Writing. This event will take place on February 11, 2011, from 4:30pm to 6:30pm, at the Natividad Galang Fajardo (NGF) Conference Room, dela Costa Hall, Ateneo de Manila University.

The program for the soft launch will include a roundtable discussion on new writing, featuring the issue editors Mark Anthony Cayanan, Conchitina Cruz, and Adam David. Topics pertinent to the anthology—such as the selection process, the trends that have emerged from the contributions, and the tradition from which the “new” seems to be drawn—will be tackled. The discussion will be followed by a reading of works from five of the authors in the anthology: J. Pilapil Jacobo, Anna Oposa, Petra Magno, Carlos Quijon, Jr., and Alyza May Taguilaso.

This anthology is the first exclusively literary issue of Kritika Kultura, the international online journal of language, literary and cultural studies published by the Ateneo de Manila University and indexed by Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI), MLA, Scopus, EBSCO, and DOAJ. The soft launch is the satellite activity of Ateneo de Manila University for Taboan: The 3rd Philippine International Writers Festival.

intersections

Says the Expanded Horizons team:

Dear Readers,

Our Issue 27 is up for your reading pleasure. Four stories, by four women authors! Space travel! Mermaids! Gateways between universes! Hindu mythology!

An all-female issue, awesome! You can click here to read my short story, “Intersections”. Hope you enjoy, and feel free to share, if you are so inclined.

victory

is sweet, bitches.



Weight Chart

Remember how I was stressing out last week that I haven’t lost a pound since Jan. 11? (I lost 2.2 pounds from Jan. 3 to Jan. 11.) It was that time of the month so in hindsight I think it’s possible that I was bloated, it was water weight, etc – but whatever the cause, all is right in the world again. Considering that I had two buffet meals before the weigh-in, this is very good news indeed.

Still a long way to go, though, but I’ll get there. Eventually.

floating dragon

Floating Dragon could have knocked my socks off, but unfortunately the novel’s middle part got bogged down by too many abstractions, too much 80’s horror imagery – the pulsing red light, blood everywhere, visions in various stages of decomposition. Granted that it was written in the mid-80’s, but I’m reading this now in 2011, and it was just too much. Many times the horror becomes ridiculous, even cheesy, even laughable, far from the subtlety of his short story collection, Houses without Doors, for example.

But it starts and ends beautifully enough. The beginning reminded me of Straub’s The Hellfire Club (which, by the way, did knock my socks off), with its huge cast of characters, its Gothic feel, invented history, and invented pop culture legacy referenced throughout the story (the show Daddy’s Here in Floating Dragon, the novel Night Journey in Hellfire Club). The novel starts like a crime story: a woman named Stony Friedgood is found brutally murdered in the idyllic, middle-class town of Hampstead. But then the story gets a hint of scientific disaster: an experimental chemical called DRG is released accidentally into the air, and settles on the town. This chemical, when inhaled, either kills instantly, or turns the person insane. Did DRG just create a serial killer? All over Hampstead, birds fall dead from the sky.

Still, that’s not all: when the town of Hampstead was built in the 1800’s, a man named Gideon Winter arrives in town and brings with him a destructive force that will visit Hampstead time and time again.

It’s worth a read, if only for Peter Straub’s superb writing.

 

The Mighty Reading List!

Saturday

Feast for Crows

The Kobayashi Maru of Love

Showbiz Lengua

PGS Horror issue

Floating Dragon

El Bimbo Variations

The Tesseract

The Dispossessed

100 Bullets

Our Story Begins