Roses and Thorns in PI

 Hi Everyone! 

I wouldn’t be a good blogger if I didn’t give you the full picture of my travels, so let’s play a little game called roses and thorns. 

A major thorn was breakfast at Uncle Vic’s friend’s house. Over these two days it became apparent that me and his friends had different standards of cleanliness, which reached its peak as we dined with bugs at 7:30 am in the morning. Yup, you read that right…bugs. There were ants in the pan de leche container and flies in the lonzones and little critters in the fried food left out at night. I sat at the table to be polite and you bet your money the only thing I ate was a fresh mango I cut myself. It was only extreme discipline that kept my butt in the chair for the full 20 minutes of torture. Happy to report that this will be my last meal in this house! 

A rose was that because I was starving, as soon our driver came I asked to stop at a coffee shop and ended up at a super famous Starbucks Reserve that we couldn’t get into at all for the past two days because the lines were at least three hours long. It has a great view of Taal and I got to try a vanilla mille feuille latte, thank you Asia for coming up with the best flavors! 

Another rose is that we drove to another city called Nuvali where Uncle Vic’s cousin lives and their dining table was ant free!! Issa and I were soooooo happy we could hardly contain ourselves.

They live in what I’m assuming is the lowlands, but I’m not quite sure because the name of the area roughly translates to “tall grass.” It’s a developing suburb that has a huge mall where Issa and I got lots of local snacks and even stopped for boba. By far our best find was a bookstore which carried Filipino authors and we found this awesome young adult book which is basically a k drama in 200 pages. Issa and I giggled the whole time reading together because it was so silly! Also it was so nice to read for fun again, without the need to critically analyze every single word, I really missed this.

The last rose of the day is that Auntie Weng cooked us an awesome dinner of chicken piccata, bistek, and salad. I could have cried I was so happy to have pasta! I had a double portion and did a little dance throughout the dinner, that’s how good the food was.

But as we all know, every rose has a thorn, and today I finally fell prey to faulty heating out in the suburbs and was forced to take a cold shower. Issa and Auntie Weng were laughing at me the entire time (all 60 seconds) for being such a big baby over it, but 10 years was still too soon for this! Alas, I guess if it comes to choosing between dining with crawlers or no hot water, I’ll take a cold shower any day. 

Thinking of you all and missing you!

Aisha