My Graduation Party!

Two weekends before my actual graduation ceremony, I decided to throw a party with my closest friends and colleagues in architecture celebrating my graduating! I decided to graduate early and not late because the week after the ceremony was Holy Week, the weekend before was my sister's birthday weekend, so I decided to celebrate on March 9.

MY THESIS: Eglise de Saint Therese de Lisieux || A Modern Parish Complex in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig

Wow, I can't believe it's been 2 months since my last entry! I'm so sorry I left all of you, my readers, hanging in the air but I was busy closing the biggest and most important chapter of my college life: my thesis!

GIF Party: Ayala Triangle Gardens!

Are you feeling the Christmas spirit? I definitely am! :) The other night, I dragged my family to watch the light and sounds show of the Ayala Triangle Gardens.

Sigh :(

I know, I am a pretty bad blogger. :( It's not my fault I'm so busy all the time! I hope to be more motivated as the days go by. I was supposed to "test myself" and blog religiously for a month and if I passed, on my standards of course, I was going to get myself my own domain. But I think on anyone and everyone's standards, I failed! I promise to try harder soon.

Today I indulged in an official rest day! I ate everything and did anything, including this:

No schoolwork done today. I can catch up on that tomorrow. :) My sched is terrible! But more on that next time. Toodles!

P.S. In case you were wondering, yes that is me :D And wow, the last time I posted was EXACTLY a month ago! I really am bad at this. :( :(

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!

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. :)