Rotring Tikky Special!

I'm sure most of you don't know what I'm talking about. For the first time, I'm going to write about a drafting tool! I was so excited to start on this on my way home. Haha! So I just stopped by the local art shop on the street of my building in school, and to my surprise I found colored mechanical pencils for the first time! As in a serious-working pencil, but in fun colors like tiffany blue, rose pink and sea green! I had the impulse to buy them all at once but I had to restrain myself and get just the pink one first.

These were exactly all the colors that I saw, and I was so happy to find that Rotring made these shades of pink, blue and green :) They really happen to be my favorite shades of each color! This is a bit selfish of me to say, but I think that they were made for me! So I think I have the right to buy every color. HAHA!

Of course I did my research on the Rotring Tikky Special line, and I discovered that there are so many colors! I think the complete collection can only be found in Europe and Japan because they didn't even carry the Rotring brand when I checked around in the States.

In my architecture world, we have two leading brands which are Rotring and Staedtler, which are both from Germany. I really love the Rotring mechanical pencils but the Staedtler technical pens. I once bought a Staedtler pencil to replace a Rotring pencil when I accidentally lost one out of many, and never lost it. Isn't that funny? The ones we treasure the least are the ones we never lose. Haha!

I guess now that I have my new pink mechanical pencil, I'll be setting aside my Muji one for now. My cousin Monika gave this to me from their Hong Kong branch. :) My Staedtler one has long been retired and is only used for when I absolutely do not have any other pencils to use. Yes, I hate it that much. It looks so utilitarian!

So there. hope I didn't bore you with a post about pencils! Haha :)

*All photos were taken from around http://images.google.com. Hope you don't mind!

Sunday dinners out!

Every Sunday, we usually have dinner with the family on my Mom's side but unfortunately my Lola hasn't been feeling well enough to plan and host the dinners, so my Lolo decided to take us out instead.

Last week's dinner was at Peking Garden, and even though I wasn't too excited for that we had such a good dinner! I really enjoyed it and tried something new for the first time, it's something called Xiao Long Bao. Unfortunately I didn't bring a camera with me, but here's a picture c/oPetit Chef :)

They may look like ordinary siomai dumplings but no! They're dumplings with a twist :) Aside from the usual meatball inside it there was soup! It sounded to me like a sketchy idea and at first I didn't want to try it, but my godmother who was sitting beside me just dumped one on my bowl and urged me to try it. It was love at first bite! I catch myself craving for these during the day. After the first dumpling, I just couldn't resist having a second one!

Anyway, for the dinner tonight my mom suggested we eat in this little hole-in-the-wall in Little Tokyo called Seryna. It's a nice and quaint place, I'm sorry I forgot to take a photo of the outside. :( I should work towards becoming a better blogger! I also just borrowed my mom's point-and-shoot: WRONG MOVE. Looking at these photos now, I wish I had brought my DSLR :( The photos are so out-of-focus!

The celing was very interesting, it came up in our conversations more than twice. Since my mom and titas know the owner, they saw it as his idea right away. Apparently when he designs spaces, he loves putting wooden bars wherever he can. It's a very unique look that you can tell took a while to complete.

So first up on our menu was sushi! I honestly don't see sushi as an appetizer because rice is incredibly filling, but everyone else at the table thought otherwise so it was ordered before everything else. :) The first photo is their Chicken Teriyaki Roll, and it was very good! It was like having a bite of chicken and rice. The chicken was crunchy too so it was a nice contrast to the soft rice. :) The second photo is their California Maki. This one was honestly disappointing because it didn't have any crabstick, just huge chunks of mango. :|

For my main course, I had wagyu steak! It was good, but next time I'll just order good old rib-eye. For me the texture of rib-eye is better because there's less fat. The sauces it came with were really good though! One was a sweeter sauce and the other was a soy sauce blend so it was more salty. I mixed both of them together and poured them into my rice bowl. Yum! :D By the way, as usual I forgot to take a photo when I first got it. So it's not really this little. This was when I was about halfway done already. Haha :)

My dinner was capped off by a melon shaved ice. :) In my head, melon is a light orange but it was still good anyway! A little bit too sweet but they gave me condensed milk to pour over it which was very good! Their shaved ice was really nice and fine, which reminded me of my warmer days in Hawaii when we would drive over to Waiola. I'll blog about that soon on another day. :)

So all in all this was a good dinner, everyone enjoyed their orders and as usual, we all had a great time bonding over food. 'Til next week's dinner! :)

Seryna is located right outside Little Tokyo on Chino Roces Avenue, right arcoss Makati Cinema Square. :) Check it out!

Paul Smith

Last week, at the height of my preliminary exam week, my mother decided to go shopping. And who was I to protest and stay at home? I came along, of course! We looked in Tory Burch while waiting for my dad but didn't find anything that either of us liked. When my dad finally arrived, we went into Paul Smith and my mom found something right away! It was a new hand-carry.

On the outside it's just simple and black, but when you open it, surprise! The lining is a deep shade of purple. One thing I hate THE MOST about travelling is airport security. It KILLS ME! I hate having to remove my laptop from my hand-carry and putting it on a separate bin, lalala and removing my shoes, jacket and belt. :| Just thinking about it makes my blood boil. But what solves the laptop problem better than a separate compartment that zips out and flat onto the conveyor belt? :) Look at the photo below! It also has a red snap-on envelope that screams out to you reminding you not to forget your passport. The snap-out feauture is designed so that you can carry it around through customs and immigration, hassle-free! Is Paul Smith a genius or what? :) I'm so excited to travel again so that I can borrow this bag! Shanghai maybe? I heard it's a must for this year!

Of course, since this was my mom's purchase, I got to pick something too. On the shelves behind the counter I noticed boxes of perfumes that had the word ROSE all over them. My absolute favorite flower is the rose, and though it is a cliche I love everything and anything roses! rose tea, rose fragrance, rose color! Fun fact: my prom dress in high school was the color of old rose and it won me best dressed. Heehee. :)

I especially love this scent because it's not purely rose. If it was then it would remind me of an old grandma. Haha :) It's a mix of two kinds of roses and iris, plus musky bottom notes of amber, white musk and cedar. :) Not really an evening scent, it's perfect for every day! I was getting sick of my Strawberries and Champagne by Victoria's Secret anyway. :)

Now to get ready for lunch! Toodles!

*All photos are from the Paul Smith website. He has a store in Greenbelt 5 if you're interested in shopping over there :)

Singapore!

What does an architecture major do while in a foreign country? GO SIGHTSEEING, of course! :) I just realized that I can't post all the photos of everything that I saw, so I'll just post some of my favorites. :)

I took 3 days off school for this vacation, and wow I missed a lot but it was all worth it. My mom and I were lucky to have been shown around by architect who worked with us for 7 years, and in that time eventually became our friend. :) Since she now works in Singapore, she's taken part in constructing some of these buildings! How cool is that?

After lunch, we around a little and ended up in Wheelock Place by accident, but it was a good thing because we could see Ion at Orchard right across! It was the first thing that Mae wanted to show us. :)

Wheelock Place was pretty impressive too. The cone was so interesting! :) This is a photo that I took from the escalator going up to the ground level.

Of course one of the places that we had to visit was the Marina Bay Sands hotel. The Marina Bay Sands is a 7-star hotel that stands at 57 storeys high. People who aren't staying at the hotel can go up to the skypark on the top floor for to view the whole city. It's the largest public cantilevered platform with a 67-meter overhang! It also has a 150-meter pool so its lad is incredible. It must have been a nightmare for the engineer to create. But whatever happened to them, they gt the job done and did it so well!

We were also able to visit the Esplanade, which locals call the "Durian." It was so cute and reminded me so much of my hedgehog back at home! :) Sorry for the poor quality of this photo. I'm still trying to get the hang of night photography.

What I really loved about Singapore is that they're so green. Everywhere you look, it's all trees! That's part of what makes it so clean. Imagine, in our world today you can drink their water out of a faucet! Even in the States you can't drink tap water anymore. Singapore is a little gold mine :)

Another thing that I really liked was that their government passed a law that the oldest structures cannot be changed with regards to exterior design. The structures in Chinatown haven't changed, but they're allowed to paint the buildings different colors and transform them into little side shops. :) The next photo is an old abbey called Chijmes, and now it's a strip of restaurants :) It was so pretty in there. One of my favorite places in Singapore :) It doesn't show but this facade is Gothic, but in the inside it shows some characteristics of early Christian architecture. Very interesting! :)

In five days I saw so many things, and I'm pretty sure that's not even all of it yet. Here's to more trips to Singapore! I promised myself to return when the green house is finished. :)

Cats Live in Manila!

So I decided to cut my last class today for a ticket to the matinee show of Cats. At first I had my qualms on doing this but when I got there, WOW the stage was so beautiful! I was debating with myself whether I should post a photo from my lo-fi built-in phone camera, and I've decided to share it. It's much better when you see it in person, I promise! I'm disappointed as always, when what I see with my naked eyes isn't what ends up on the screen of my camera. :(

Sorry, I know that photo-taking is not allowed in stage shows but I just had to show how beautiful it was! The stage was a mash-up of odds and ends that with the lighting could look like foliage, but when under ordinary white lighting it transformed into a dumpster! The moon-lit sky was even dappled with little lights that looked like stars, twinkling in the background. The stage floor was a huge mural with images, I couldn't make out all of them with all the singing and dancing that I only noticed the face of a tiger in the right side.

I really thought about watching Cats because my initial thoughts honestly were, who wants to watch screeching cats for two hours? HAHA and from what I heard from other people, it's either they loved it or got so bored that they fell asleep in the start of the show and never woke up again. Haha but I'm so glad that I was presented with this opportunity and took it! :) Not a single line was spoken; the lines were all sung. And a lot of the parts were just dancing, and being a dancer myself once upon a time, I was actually able to appreciate the beauty of contemporary dance because they were cats and not people. I honestly always found contemporary dance so weird but did it anyway, and this afternoon I clearly saw a place where it could be used. :) The singing was wonderful as well, and what touched me most was when they sang the chorus of Memory in FILIPINO! It was a real pleasant surprise for me and I found it really sweet of them to include that in the show. :)

Our seats were wonderful! We were in a Parterre box which was an elevated box with 6 seats right on top of the orchestra, so it's like we got a bird's eye view of the whole play. I can't help but gush over how nice our seats were and how lucky I was to have the best view of any show I've ever watched! My neck definitely didn't hurt from looking up because I didn't have to. :D Thank you so much to my Tita T and our sponsor, (Tita?) Lulu Belle! :) I really, really enjoyed. :)

Cats was really good all in all, but I'm not sure if I want to watch it again. It's kind of like the movie, Avatar that was also very good but long, that if you watch it one time you'll enjoy it but the next time, you'll get bored and fall asleep. So maybe only one time, big time for me. :)

I just realized that I haven't blogged yet about my Singapore trip, will blog about that soon! Preliminary exam week is coming up for me which really means relax week because I'll only go to school for 3 days next week :D So yay! :) Off to get some sleep! Finally :D

Finally!

After months and months of waiting, I finally got my Louis Vuitton Mon Monogram Speedy 30! The reason to why I got it so late is because just in case it didn't arrive on time while I was in the States, I decided to order it through a Tita who was going back and forth between Hong Kong and Manila. It's a pain that LV-Philippines doesn't offer the Mon Monogram service, but it was definitely worth the wait! My Tita placed the order in Late May and picked it up just a few days before the end of July. I just got it yesterday, August 4! The best welcome back present ever. Hehe the minute I landed from my flight from Singapore, I went to her house to pick it up!

I played around with a few other designs that I made on the LV website before I finally decided on sticking to this one. This was my original choice because I really love the combination of pink and white, and those are my intials at the center. :) I chose ivory instead of white though because I felt that the whilte stripes stood out too much when I tested them on the site. I'm happy to say that I have to regrets on choosing ivory over white :)

I don't understand why people don't customize their Speedies. Personally I'm not a fan of handbags, I really like bags that go over the shoulder more. I decided to get a Speedy Mon Monogram instead of waiting for the Mon Monogram Neverfull to because even though the Neverfull goes over the shoulder and can apparently hold 200 kilos, I really don't think it's safe for anyone to go walking around Manila with an open bag! I really live in fear of my things getting stolen. Hahaha oh this world I was brought up in.

So there, yay now I have a Speedy (finally, it's about time!) and it's really one-of-a-kind! :)

PEACHES

I've always loved peaches :D I live in a tropical country so unfortunately, we don't grow them over here and we hardly import them because they spoil easily. I've never seen them on the market over here, but if I did, no matter how sour they were I would go crazy and buy at least half a dozen! Ahhh I looooove peaches!

So you could just imagine my surprise when I saw a box air-flown from Japan in my Lolo's living room! We get fruits a few times throughout the year, sometimes we get apples, strawberries or whatever's in season. The best Japanese fruit I have ever tried is seriously the peach. Words cannot describe how much I love Japanese peaches. Haha

When I saw the box, I immediately asked for three to be peeled and cut. They were very ripe already and had to be eaten within the day before they became too mushy. They didn't disappoint me at all. My sister says they taste like cologne, and I guess that's what they taste like. They taste like they smell good. Am I making sense? They're sweet, soft and juicy! :)

My Lola insisted that I bring a small tupperware of peaches on my plane ride to Singapore. I'm glad that I finally agreed to bring them with me despite my worries about the juices leaking into my handbag. They were soooooo yummy! :)

When I got to Singapore, SURPRISE! Look at what I found in Chinatown! :)

These peaches were imported from the USA by an old Chinese man, and I almost didn't buy any because I remembered from my past visits to the States that they were very tiny, firm and sour. These were about 3/4 the size of a Japanese peach and though his sign said "please do not press!," I still checked on them and they were pretty tender from the outside. So when I had them peeled, WOW I was smitten from the first bite! Not as good as the Japanese peach but definitely the best US peach I have tried :D

Ahhhhh I love peacheeeees!!! Now to stop dreaming of peaches get back to work. 'Til next time!