Score one for Itaewon

i set out on tuesday determined to find at least one store worth writing about for my article. after the beautiful dud that was the beautiful store, i had started to worry about getting lost all day and finding nothing good to write about in six days.  doomsday scenarios for a girl writing a shopping guide!

luckily, seoul delivered! my first find was a cute little boutique in itaewon, a shopping district known for its international community (which i would discover much later) and bargain shopping. with colorful, funky displays and salsa music blaring out the front door, it wrested my attention away from the other shops in itaewon, many of which were the "wanna louis vuitton? genuine imitation, you see..." variety.

one thing i really like about writing on assignment: being "forced" to engage with people. so very different from writing for corporate or blog purposes. sometimes the story isn't in a place, but with people. after buying a really cute dress for 49,000 won (about US$49 -- a nice easy conversion there, just drop three zeroes), i unleashed my chika powers on the store's funky manager, jina, and her assistant ayumi. jina's atrocious english made for a rocky start, but once i had gotten it into her head that me = overseas publicity, she and ayumi instantly loved me! 

 
then i discovered a few shops that sold itaewon's best-known secret -- designer clothes made in korea but for some reason or other do not pass muster with quality control, identifiable only by their slashed tags and whatever fashion stock knowledge you have.

i was tempted to buy a dress that i saw hanging in an itaewon shop (i now realize it was a short version of the evening gown worn by riyo mori, miss universe 2007! and it's gucci!) but didn't. a week later, i see oprah wearing it on perez hilton.

i think it's safe to assume that she didn't get it at itaewon. 

i discovered to my shock, horror and rage that i had run out of cash -- and that marlon's atm card didn't work at any of the half-dozen atms i tried! i returned to the hotel on the warpath with the universe. i found it ironic that a girl writing a shopping guide would have so many thwarted attempts at shopping -- first the dud that was the beautiful store, now the atm! 

in hindsight, the universe may just have been trying to stop me from succumbing to this temptation at victory town.  

i know, i know. i live in singapore, what the heck would i do with a silver leather jacket?

before i left itaewon, though, i spotted... a first-world kariton! when the street vendors want to pack up and go, they literally close shop and tug it all the way home.

dinner was at a restaurant behind the hotel in the business district of gangnam. 

we would be joining marlon's multifunctional team, adding pinoys to a table with an indian, thai, brit, pole (as in person from poland vs piece of infrastructure), and several japanese. it was the second time i would be sitting down with a gaggle of p&g'ers (including members of the leadership team) for dinner. the first time was a year ago in mumbai, during which someone at the table called me "incredibly brave" for coming to dinner.

then, i was the only girlfriend to come along for dinner; this time, i was the only wife. but who cares when there is... korean barbecue!!!

and lots of soju (korean sake) which i didn't like. marlon drank my share, but the brunt of the soju-drinking fell to young umeki from japan, who ate like a horse and giggled, red-faced, through the tail end of the meal. 

i wondered if this electric fan was for exhaust purposes or if it had had too much soju.

at 10:30 pm, kaisy was still raring to shop, so we hit doosan tower (doota) in dongdaemun. jon, i think this is one of the 24-hour malls you were talking about! i asked one of the stall owners (who spoke decent english) what time they closed and he just twirled his finger around in a circle.

doota was great -- the ubiquitous kukur was augmented by lovely handmade shoes and clothes from young korean designers. 

wouldn't you know it. fifteen minutes into my shopping paradise, i discovered that i was wallet-less! after putting some cash into my wallet, marlon had left it in the hotel room l instead of returning it to my bag. 

as you can guess, we had an awful fight about it... after i bought a pair of lovely gold-brown leather shoes on sale. but we made up quickly enough. who can stand to be mad when there's too much fun to be had, an article to complete... and more shopping to be done?

Monday night in Myeong-Dong

(last monday that is. i'm finally back-blogging seoul! yippee!)

my first day in seoul was composed of the following: an overnight flight, massive morning traffic (and a wee nap), a few hours of brainstorming/work, getting acquainted with the seoul metro system, an hour and a half traipsing around gyeongbokgung, another hour traipsing around outside gyeokbokgung looking for a metro station, yet another hour getting lost in and around the anguk metro station only to arrive at the most hideously disappointing "vintage" store ever (eksklusibo! lonely planet, sumablay!). 

i had planned to write about it for my shopping article, but i was crushed to find out that manila mrt-side ukay-ukays had better stuff than this crappy place. so naturally by the time i met up with marlon and his colleage (and our mutual college friend, kaisy) at myeong-dong, seoul's frenetic central shopping district, this was the state of affairs: i was cranky, my feet were sore, and everything was a complete blur. 

okay maybe not a complete blur. a couple of things did register, like sitting down to rest my poor feet at gusttimo, an italian gelato chain with branches all over seoul.

i'm not a glutton, the default serving really is three scoops! promise! i had tiramisu, coffee yogurt (which was a little weird, i should have just had the coffee), and hazelnut. summa that plus a cappuccino was enough to haul me back from zonktown.

we walked around myeong-dong for just about fifteen minutes, which was enough time to buy myself a really adorable umbrella (you don't believe that an umbrella can be adorable? i shall show you proof in my next post!) and a red leather sling bag. i also ducked into a couple of stores and turned up my nose at the kukur fashions while marlon tried some of the street food.

and that, folks, is about all i have to say about myeong-dong. how sad no? consider it proof of how zonked out i was on my first evening in seoul. marlon, by the way, went straight to six hours of focus group discussions upon arriving. the poor dear's eyes were terribly bloodshot by the time we met up. 

marlon's colleagues in seoul had written down a couple of recommendations for dinner. we did not get to any of them, thanks to a rather strange taxi ride where the driver suddenly got all agitated and sputtery after a relatively placid fifteen minutes of driving. and i mean literally sputtery -- poor bewildered kaisy, who was sitting shotgun, had to wipe off a considerable amount of spit from her face! 

the driver zoomed into the nearest narrow sidestreet (we were somewhere near gyeongbokgung by this time) and deposited us at a restaurant that was most definitely not where we had intended to end up. but, as randy jackson would say, he worked it out, dawg... because dinner was actually quite fabulous and something i would never have discovered on my own. and for that, as ali g would say, respect!

yes yes i know. mukha siyang lugaw na may squash seeds... pero huwag ka! what we were told was "chicken soup" by a harried middle-aged waitress with limited english turned out to be a whole chicken in a rich, thick broth served bubbling hot. in the mix were over fourteen ingredients, including chestnuts, spring onions, ginger, and yes, squash seeds. 

the absolute best part -- breaking open the chicken meat with my chopsticks to discover gloriously fatty, sticky, starchy rice inside. yum! this beauty stayed piping hot for the whole forty minutes that we sat down at low tables, for our first korean-style dinner.

obvious ba na masaya kami?

Gorging on Gossip

at the rate of two to three episodes daily, i am fast approaching the end of season 1! a few more observations:

1. serena speaks like one side of her jaw is wired shut. this is one of the reasons why i am on team blair.
2. i heart lily!
3. why does chuck purse his lips and give us cheekbones after each line?
4. why does he never stop squinting?
5. yuck kaya ng vanessa-nate angle. hindi patok sa akin ang tambalan nila because vanessa sucks! does the lone "artsy" chick on the show have to look so tasteless and be so annoying?
6. omg eric is gay!
   
7. when asher revealed his true (rainbow) colors, he also revealed a creepy resemblance to perez hilton.
8. omg georgina is a total freaking psycho! the moment when she said "hi... my name is sarah" gave me the biggest chill to ever be caused by a television show since that friday the 13th series back in the 90s.
9. from some angles, michelle trachtenberg, who plays georgina, looks like an evil scary white bratz-doll version of my friend mayte. the resemblance ends with looks -- mayte is one of the friendliest, funniest, most unassuming girls i know. we could make mayte undergo an intensive six-month bleaching regimen and put on some celia rodriguez eye makeup to close the gap.

michelle trachtenberg na nagdidiva-divahan

mayte and i in parc guell, barcelona in 2006

Back from Lothlorien

i have left the kingdom of the dewy, glowing and eternally youthful elves and am now back home where i feel less ugly. singapore is being surprisingly kind in an effort to welcome me back -- it's much less humid than when i left a week ago, and when i walked to the corner chinese restaurant to meet marlon for dinner, there was even a cool breeze. thus the adjustment from the gloriously dry and cool spring in seoul to the sweltering humidity of singapore much easier.

it was my first time to come home to cactus drive and feel like it was really home. the last two trips have been to the philippines, so it was always a journey from familiar (cactus drive in singapore) to familiar (home in mandaluyong) and back. this time, traveling to somewhere truly foreign (seoul) then back to familiar really made me feel like this was my home. the relief, the comfort of being in surroundings that i had created was more pronounced that it had ever been.

i spent the day being bangag but thankfully still managed to get some work done. i wrote my first-ever quotation for copywriting services (this sample was a helpful guide) and rewrote a press release for a long-time client back in manila. 

other than that, i indulged in decadently unproductive pastimes both old (a few episodes of gossip girl, the usual round of daily internet haunts) and new (surfing for my entry point into the land of designer handbags). the handbag thing seems to be a seoul hangover. the past week has made me conscious of two things i never gave a fig about prior to the trip: bags and skincare. after a while i just decided to stuff it -- do i really need to spend time finding more ways to spend money that i'm not making yet? :P

i'm looking forward to getting back into the groove of writing and really taking the new macbook out to write. apart from articles due for two different singapore magazines (i'm happy to be getting more freelance commissions!), i have a week's worth of seoul snapshots and stories to blog about! it boggles the mind that i actually only blogged about my first few hours in seoul yet it was already enough for quite a few posts. so much happened from monday evening all the way till yesterday... and i'm excited to share every last detail. 

but that's tomorrow. tonight is for reclaiming the familiar: reading in bed with my husband, legs entangled, bedside lamps glowing.

good night!

Commercial break

we interrupt our regular programming with a commercial from my regular old life in singapore. 

just when i swore off shopping (and spending) for the foreseeable future, i get an email from my flamenco teacher. she's ordering for flamenco shoes from spain in june and is opening the order to all her students so she/we can get a bulk discount. the shoes are about $200 each, so my first thought was "no thanks". i have a second-hand pair that's serving me quite well and no two hundred bucks to spare. 

but then i had to go to the shoemaker's website... and damn! these shoes are cute! click on the link to check them out (i don't know how to take screenshots with a mac).

okay, that's it, just presented the dilemma. now back to regular programming.

Taking a breather

help, i have shopping fatigue. this to me is very strange, because a) i have actually done very little shopping myself, and b) i never thought i could get sick of shopping!

the culprit seems to be my latest writing assignment and one that i've dedicated this seoul trip to: a shopping guide for an inflight magazine. without the impetus of an article to write (and the payment that naturally follows), i probably would not have spent the past three days trooping to seoul's shopping districts with such diligence. 

i stumbled through myeong-dong on monday, hit itaewon and the most popular 24-hour mall in dongdaemun on tuesday and traipsed around two school zones, hongdae and ewha women's university, yesterday (with a second trip to itaewon). as you can guess, i came home dead tired each evening.

this morning i woke up and found myself close to puking at the thought of doing more shopping. i would have blogged about the stuff i scored and shops i saw, but right now i would rather jump out my window than see more clothes and shops, even if i was ecstatic about them yesterday.

i did a quick check on how much material i have for the article and found that i only have to hit one or two more shopping districts. yay! this leaves me time for blessed rest till about after lunch, after which i plan to check out the up-up-upscale shopping district, apjugeong. this will be window shopping lite -- it's very near my hotel and far beyond my budget. i've reserved insa-dong, the arts and crafts area, for saturday with marlon, my favorite art attack partner. 

more shopping pics, mishaps and musings later. for now, i'm crawling back into bed. 

Springtime palace

haha, doesn't that sound just like a koreanovela title? well, it is springtime and i did go to a palace for my first sightseeing jaunt. 

ironically, though i used to work for a television network that imported all the best korean soaps, i know nothing about them except for a handful of titles. never even watched a single episode! the ones i remember are my name is kim sam soon, emperor of the sea, jumong, coffee prince, spring waltz, winter sonata and of course, the biggest rater of them all, jewel in the palace.

it was jewel that came to mind when i visited gyeongbok-gung, reportedly the grandest palace in seoul and a shooting location for historical soaps (i don't know which ones). the morning gray had cleared considerably, and i really got how spring can be so lovely. it was nearly closing time when i arrived, and i was with what seemed to be an entire school of the most chic (without being TH) 12 to 14 year-old students i've ever seen.  

spotted: two ladies in hanboks (korean national dress) hurrying out of the palace grounds. i fought the urge to shout "jang geum! jang geum!" after them. check out the teenager with the visor -- just goes to show you can never start your skincare regimen too early.

this is my pathetic attempt to have at least one photo of myself in the palace.


i found the palace to be a mix of chinese epic-scale grandiosity and japanese serenity. it really was quite tranquil. the mountains behind the palace make you feel like you've gone back in time, until you turn to face the entrance and see all the skyscrapers just outside the main gate.

kick-ass pagoda-type building is the national folk museum, which was closed by the time i got there. fortunately there was lots to see (and snap) on the museum grounds. like the cutest stick-your-head-in-for-a-photo standee ever! and i mean ever!

squee! isn't it adorable? i was dying to have my photo taken, but there was nobody around to do it for me. bah.

one of the signs on the mini exhibits outside the museum. i thought it looked totally out of this century with the misty mountains and trees in the backdrop. this sign could say "toilet" or "atm" for all i know.


a small section of the grounds in front of the museum held a collection of these old stone totems used to ward off evil. they look to me almost like modern cartoons, or very graphic depictions of grumpy neighbors and evil aunties.

upon exiting the palace grounds, i promptly got lost. i spent an hour walking the palace's perimeter walls in search of the metro station i had come from, which is equivalent to the amount of time i spent inside the palace. bummerrrr.

interesting walk, though. the most bizarre thing about it was the troops and troops of police in full riot gear at every street corner. and i mean every street corner. i was too whacked out by the sight of all those policemen to even take a picture. a lot of them seemed really young, which puzzled me till i found out korean men are required to do army service in their youth. upon comparing notes with marlon, the mystery of the myriad policemen was solved: a military exercise was scheduled in the city for 2-230pm the next day, during which hotel guests were advised to stay indoors. scary.

there were other, less paranoia-inducing sights, however. the area around the palace has interesting little artsy cafes and galleries. i actually found i didn't mind getting lost, because i never would have caught the sneaky surprises tucked into quiet alleyways like this.

the walls held a small collection of gorgeous stenciled graffiti, like this protest-themed piece of art...

...and, tadaaaah! a classic miss universe coronation moment! i truly fell in love. the person who can identify which beauty queen is being crowned gets a prize from me! i wonder what underlying theme led to this graffiti. let me guess: "world peace!"


you know you're in an artsy neighborhood when you peek around a corner and see a giant spotted pear. or is it a pumpkin?


a man with an earpiece and wearing a dark suit stopped me in front of a building where there seemed to be an abnormally high concentration of policemen. i turned his suspicion to my advantage and asked for directions to the nearest metro station; he obliged and gently shooed me away (what was in that building, i wonder?). just as well, i thought -- miss universe graffiti and giant pears are fun, but my feet were really starting to hurt.

Metro mishaps

my first engagement with seoul was learning how to take the metro. i stepped out of the hotel monday afternoon after finishing some writing work armed with nothing but a copy of an expat magazine with a map of the seoul metro... and this icon filed away in my short-term memory from the morning we arrived.


the hotel i'm staying at, the renaissance seoul, is located in gangnam, the business district south of the river. all the streets look like ayala avenue, but extremely wide and festooned with coffee shops. the first thing i learned about my street is that the nearest metro station, yeoksam, was a convenient five-minute walk from the hotel. what i learned when i started walking was that it was majorly uphill.

okay, it doesn't look all that challenging from this photo, but by the time i got to the metro station i felt as if i had been sufficiently punished for the box of guylian bonbons (and maybe the ice cream and famous amos cookies i had last saturday).

i got on line 3 and crossed the han-gang river to go downtown, into the city center where all the shopping areas and a few major sights are.

considering that the korean signs were a little disorienting at first, figuring out how to get where i wanted to go was quite easy. english words seemed to leap out at me from the jumble of korean characters, ensuring that i had enough information to propel me forward. the disembodied voice on the train not only provides an english translation, but even tells you which side of the train to exit from at a particular stop. nice.

while on the train, i played paparazzi and shot proof of my first impressions. this is what i'm talking about with the suits and sun visors.

i had no trouble getting on the train, but getting off it was a major production. for some reason, the turnstile kept spitting out my single-use ticket (just like those in paris) and wouldn't allow me to go through. i tried each and every one of the eight turnstiles to no avail. finally, a passerby pointed to a large red button that said "help", on a wider turnstile for the handicapped. so i pushed, and wondered what kind of deus ex machina would come to release me from the bowels of the metro.

the trumpet of the gods was tinny and electronic, and it played that annoying tune that garbage trucks in manila blast. i'm sorry, i know it's originally a classical piano piece, but i really don't know what else to call it. it goes tininininininininiiii.... tinini... tinini... (repeat). i apologize for the jologs reference!

so, how helpful, right? i tried it again. and again, the tinny garbage truck ditty. i paused, waiting for something more instructive. then, a voice from a speaker below the help button crackled to life. "push it! push it!" it barked impatiently.

i actually bent down to the speaker to talk back back, a response undoubtedly caused by years of ordering from mcdonald's drive-through. "push what?" i shouted.

silence. so i pushed the only thing in front of me, which was the handicapped turnstile. it gave way -- and i was through! sigh of relief. i actually had a split-second nightmarish vision of me being stuck in the metro station for hours. 

the man at the ticket counter, a cheery middle-aged korean man, looked almost as relieved as i felt. he took my ticket, grinning, and gave me a hearty wave goodbye as i skipped up the steps.

First glimpses

"the temperature is 13 degrees celsius..."

it wasn't the touchdown at incheon international airport, but the purser's announcement that woke me up with a jolt. thirteen degrees?!?!?! i was totally not prepared! marlon and i stared at each other -- we both wore cotton tops and jeans. good luck to us!

as we lined up at passport clearance, i surveyed the outfits of arriving koreans to see how we would fare with the weather. girl in sandals, long t-shirt, leggings and cardigan: okay, i think we'll be fine. girl in floaty, sheer slip dress: hell, more than fine. woman in jogging pants, ski cap and puffy hooded parka: we're f*cked. talked about mixed signals!

this is my guerrilla shot of the airport. marlon grumbled: "the more i travel, the more i see that the philippines is the only country that doesn't have an airport that looks like this."

not true, i countered: thank god for india.

we arrived at 7:30 a.m., and got to seoul just in time for the morning gridlock.

korea is known as the land of the morning calm. i have a sneaking suspicion that "calm" may have been a diplomatic euphemism for "gray". check out the view from our hotel room.

thank goodness, it's not smog -- it really is just early morning mist. the air is extremely clear, and after the sauna that singapore has been the past couple of weeks, beautifully refreshing. the 13-degree temperature hasn't turned out to be so bad and is really great to walk around in, although i have a bit of a morning cold. 

looking at these pictures, i realize the first glimpses i had of seoul were not too inspiring -- kinda drab, actually. fortunately, they were replaced pretty quickly, and i think i'm beginning to like this city. 

First impressions

koreans are blessed -- high cheekbones, glowing skin, good strong physiques. kainez. ang daming guwapo at maganda. i actually literally stepped back in surprise when i saw the skin of the guy who delivered my room service lunch; he must have migrated to seoul from lothlorien.

the density of coffee shops per square mile is astounding.

i saw more goyard bags go by in fifteen minutes in myeong-dong than i ever have in my lifetime. maganda pala sila sa personal. gusto ko na sila.

old ladies are majorly turned out, just like old ladies in paris. their favorite accessory: visors. this completely puzzled me until marlon returned from his skincare field work and provided the missing piece. the visors are for skincare purposes -- that's how they keep that phenomenal skin glowing well into old age. that's what i call dedication.

people are extremely helpful.

men wear actual suits to work. really well-cut suits to boot. again, just like paris.

kukur seems to be the metropolitan fashion statement -- as in kukurtinahin. the shops are hung full of lacy, sheer, shapeless dresses and very large shirts in muted colors. i think i'll stick to shoes and bags on this trip.

the city is great for walking.

traffic is bad, and rush hour is worst at about 10:30 p.m. that means people go home from work at roughly 9 p.m. 

there are very few tourists, which is nice.

that's it for now. good night, i'm exhausted.

Terminal tales

quite a few firsts last night. first time in the shiny new changi terminal three. and i mean shiny. 

the outside reminds me of frankfurt, the entrance to the toilet reminds me of paris-cdg, and the eating area reminds me of dubai, where pia fell off her chair randomly at mcdonald's.

terminal three had those odd wormhole-ish airconditioning vents that must have been leftovers from the giant noses/penises that hold up the roof over clarke quay. yes, i said giant noses/penises. you must see to believe.

it was my first time to present travel documents other than my passport -- in this case, my singapore identification card, or IC.

terminal three is quite the mammoth. marlon and i were all set to caper happily around the airport like a bunch of tourists, and maybe catch a free movie, until we saw a sign that told us we would need at least 14 minutes to get to our gate. i wonder if they tested the walk with people of varying slowness.

the terminal also had a surfeit of really cute chairs, like these swan chair-esque thingies.

these remind me of my melissa sapatilha flats.

they had a ferrari store... yeah i know, me taking a picture of a ferrari store is totally out of character. i blame it on the late hour.

but most importantly, they had a guylian belgian chocolate cafe!

whoopee!

i bought a box to eat on the plane. 

these two lovely seashells came free of charge, courtesy of the pinay counter girls at the cafe. go pinoy! 

it brought back great memories of all the pinoy employees at the duty free shops in the dubai international airport, who practically thrust free chocolates at some of us in the glee club. 

ah, touring memories. there were a lot of them at the airport last night -- seeing a gaggle of teenagers dressed alike in sports shirts and jeans. travel attire, anyone? and while changing singapore dollars to korean won, i remembered gerard, who being a math teacher would come up with quick and easy conversion formulas for every country we stopped in on tour. it would always be something totally brainless, like multiply by five and drop three zeroes or something. in the pre-euro days, he did it for everything from slovenian tolar to belgian francs to italian lire! fun fun fun. 

and now after six hours, four belgian chocolates, two meals, a one-hour cab ride and 155,200 korean won, i'm in my hotel room in seoul.

Fixin' to go

this is what my sunday evening at home looks like:

me with my feet in a basin of hot water that marlon was kind enough to set out for me. i never knew the soles of your feet could hurt. it started with an ache on the bottom of my heels and spread out during the longest mass i've ever attended (almost 2 hours at novena church). after a little over two months of lessons, i've come to identify flamenco with hurts you never knew you could have -- pain shooting down the insides of your forearms, the length and front of your thighs, the soles of your feet, the sides of your ribs. fortunately that's not all i associate it with, which is what keeps me coming back for more. i associate it, surprisingly enough, with choral singing.

(that reminds me, i have yet to blog about flamenco. i promise, my beloved las otras, i will! bagbagabagbagabag! all i can say about it for now is that if i had a flamenco stage name, today it would have to be La Bloatana. damn this time of the month.)

marlon and i frantically trying to polish off the perishables in the ref before we catch our 11:50 pm flight to seoul. we don't want to come back after a week to any nasty surprises. the leftovers this evening are great -- cold couscous salad and chicken drumsticks with barbeque sauce made from scratch. this was the menu for yesterday's lunch, when we had shrenik and shivaani over. the barbeque chicken is something of a showstopper and seems to be our default dish for guests; i made it when we had david and phyllis, our first-ever guests for dinner, a few months ago.

me with extra strength zit cream caked on the whopper that's taken up residence on my cheek.

marlon putting toiletries into my pink suitcase.

utter peace and quiet.

it's a nice way to leave home.

I know, dahlink, I know

i watched indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull yesterday with marlon, shrenik and shivaani. i gasped when cate blanchett first appeared onscreen. 

and for the first time, it wasn't because she was so fabulous -- it was because she was edna mode!

other than that, the movie was not bad at all -- after i spent the first fifteen minutes of running time searching harrison ford's face for signs of botox. i appreciated all the classic indy trademarks -- campy villain, gruesome creatures, overplayed deaths, puzzle-solving, escape attempts with attempts at humor, massive destruction, grand myth (in this case rather bizarre and cross-bred with another george lucas franchise).

i'm kind of glad the fedora stays with ford for now. i love shia labeouf, but he isn't quite the swashbuckling adventurer type to pass the torch to. remember the young indiana jones chronicles on tv? that guy was so much hotter; too bad he was about a decade too early for the sequel.

"...And world peace."

maybe i've been watching too much gossip girl, but i just feel like i came from an interview for the position of usher to the dartmouth representative. scratch that, i feel like i just came from a panel interview for yale cross-pollinated with a miss universe question-and-answer portion. and this is the mental equivalent of me wondering whether i should have said something about world peace.

there were times when i wondered whether i should be saying what i was saying, but then i told myself long ago that i'm through being a people-pleasing chameleon just to be hired -- it's all about finding the right fit. i may have shot myself in the foot with one of my answers, but i'm pretty confident i didn't pull a janina san miguel. 

speaking of answers, it's the first time i've heard an employer describe themselves as "task oriented" versus "results oriented." iiiiinteresting. i wonder what the difference is. i kind of like "results oriented" more; people can just get so caught up in processes sometimes.

i became aware of two things about myself during this particular interview. one is, i have an internal smile barometer: i use people's smiles during a conversation as a gauge of success. if i can make you smile, i've "got" you. (yeah i know -- define "got", right?) by this token, most people find me amiable and charming. however, i've discovered that not all battles are won by charm (as any girl who tries to twinkle, wheedle and pout at an mmda officer on the take will discover). 

the downside: getting people to smile or warm up to me is like missing the forest for the trees. i can be seen as being flip or fluffy, which more often than not leads to tanking with people who are slow to warm up, painfully serious or just naturally poker-faced. lately i've gotten quicker at catching myself reverting to this barometer, which makes it easier to ignore. does anyone else have any going-well "indicators" like this?

second is, i've seen just how much i've come to see my extensive freelance experience as an asset. so i was rather surprised -- and a little thrown off, i'll admit -- when one of my panel interviewers seemed to regard my having held down a freelance job for over a year concurrent to my day job with suspicion. maybe i'm reading too much into a tone or expression or a simple "why?" or maybe they've just never encountered anyone like me before. who knows? but that's how views (and people are). one of my strengths might be someone else's red flag. c'est la vie.

okay, no more agonizing! because you know, that only leads to agony! and no more thinking, too -- because it only leads to more thoughts. from now on, any thoughts i'm going to have about this employer shall be related to how i can cook up some kick-ass story ideas for them by wednesday... or earlier. 

*cue megalomanic laughter* lulunurin ko sila! it's time for some good old pakitang-gilas!

oh, and world peace.

Catching up with gossip

i've elected to get with the program, literally, and start watching gossip girl. the deciding factor: how easy it is to download movies via limewire with my new macbook pro. if you knew how long it used to take me with lulu, you would tear your hair out. i nearly did, a couple of times.

nineteen minutes into the first episode, this is what i have to say:

1. the girls are really, really pretty.
   
2. where is it written that the boys have to be as pretty as the girls... and wear as much, if not more makeup?
   
3. i wish we could have dressed up our private school uniforms that way... with gorgeous tweed coats, shortened hems, stockings and jewel-colored patent pumps. rarrr.
4. it's betty and veronica all over again. and i've always been on team veronica.

When little boys grow up...

... they become husbands. 

this afternoon, i finally saw why little boys are hard-wired to do all the gross stuff they do in childhood: dig up worms from the soil, catch and fondle bugs and beetles, torture creepy crawlies, play in the mud, and make mommy eat their "mud pies". 

it's so they can grow up into men who will clean out the refrigerator when you find a hideously barf-inducing compost pit, potato plantation and onion garden growing in the chiller. while we girls do what we've had a lifetime of practice doing: shudder, hold our noses, and say "eeew." 

little girly shriek optional.  

Reina Terminatriz

linda hamilton as sarah connor in terminator 2: judgment day = THINSPIRATION


wouldn't this post's title make a great addition to the modern-day santacruzan? i nominate bluearden, with his in-depth knowledge of miss universe parade of nations costumes, to design her gown.

i'm glad the first two terminator movies came out on cable recently -- marlon and i got to watch them sequentially, as they were meant to be seen. i'm pretty sure the producers of the franchise didn't intend T2 to be seen 80 times before the first movie, which is pretty much how i did it.

i'm also glad that over a decade after my tweenage fog of infatuation with edward furlong has dissipated, T2 remains a pretty damn excellent movie, deserving of its long-held place as one of my favorite movies of all time. i have a newfound appreciation for robert patrick, who was truly brilliant as the T1000, fusing relentless machine and creepy villain with such skill.

yes, edward furlong is the sole reason i saw T2 80 times. actually i'm not sure if that's a good enough estimate. try everyday after school for at least three months. i slow-moed all of his closeups in T2 on the family vhs, wrote fan fiction based entirely on his appearance in aerosmith's living on the edge video, bought every issue of teen beat/bop/big bopper/tiger beat with him on the cover, kept up with his career and lovelife for almost seven years after T2 was released, sat through horror dudfests like pet sematary 2 and brainscan. hello, i even bought the truly atrocious excuse for an album that he recorded in japan -- and listened to it daily.

that is the kind of tweenage devotion, inherent in all tweens to this day, which will stuff american idol in the bag for david archuleta.

marlon asked me: "whatever happened to this kid?" i turned to him and realized that he was unaware that he had married the biggest edward furlong freak in southeast asia. "do you really want to know?" i asked gravely. the short answer: pumanget siya.

i now realize what T2 had over the first movie: that big epic feel (reinforced by that gorgeous orchestral theme). ah, the beginnings of bigness, the spores that would eventually reach their mutated peak in the titanic, which we know was all about the bigness (and little else).

i went online and found a treasure trove of T2 trivia on IMDB -- read it! you'll realize just what an awesome movie it was, if you don't already love it.

hasta la vista, baby!

A slight hiccup

looks like that nice sunshiny afternoon of writing by the pool will have to be put on hold for the meantime. my lovely new refurbished macbook pro was apparently delivered with a battery that won't charge. boo. thankfully, my research on refurbished macs warned me that this could happen.

i made a call to the applecare hotline, which not only gave me a human immediately (don't you just hate those never-ending recordings?) but speedily referred me to the i-shop in cathay cineleisure on orchard road. this hiccup with the battery notwithstanding, i am still super impressed with apple service.

and after a quick visit, they tell me i'm going to get the battery back (or replaced) in five to seven working days. sigh. i guess lulu and i are going to have to muddle along just a wee bit longer than i thought.

Hello there little lady

for the second time in as many days, i say: well, that was quick. less than 24 hours after checkout, my new baby showed up on my doorstep.


amidst my hushed reverence and tempered euphoria, matanong ko lang: when did my sony ericsson phone cam become this crappy? this looks more like a newspaper print from the mid-1800's than an image of the pinnacle of modern personal computing.

now if you'll excuse me, i believe a bit of getting-to-know-you is in order.

Thank you for your order

well, that was quick.

i stopped complaining and after a quick conversation with my husband, got over various compunctions (not least of all cost-related) and did something about it.

what finally did it: it wasn't even the concept of "i am a professional, i need a tool that works" (marlon's two cents). what finally got me was the possibility of writing as a fun, portable, inspiring and pleasurable process once more. not the technology-induced struggle/drama that would inevitably pop up before, during and after writing, like it's been lately.

i merely had to think of being able to write by the poolside on a nice day (even by lovely riverside cafes like maya does) and my knees went weak. just to enjoy writing again, i would surmount the special brand of guilt that comes along with getting something you really, really want. and surmount it i did!

the more complex underlying choice finally made with a smile, in the end it all just boiled down to two options: wait a month till the PC show at suntec and hope for a good deal on a mac -- or that a PC show will even have macs -- or click the checkout button on the apple online store for a refurbished macbook.

i think you can figure it out.

i'm still a bit giddy, but i can't wait for my new baby to arrive at my doorstep. and when she does, i think i'll welcome her with a nice sunshiny afternoon by the pool.

Lulu the lachrymosely laggard laptop

lulu and i started off so fabulously three years ago, but lately things between us have not been going well at all.

our relationship began to deteriorate last year when she started showing little quirks and slowing down big time. the quirks were just quirks then, slowdowns still survivable by running a bit of anti-spyware, and i could still feel sentimental about considering a replacement for her. "what? but... but... it's lulu..." i would say, lip quivering, whenever marlon would bring up laptop shopping after i reported my newest computer complaint.

then when 2008 hit, her battery life dropped to a record low of fifteen or twenty minutes, and she started to refuse to hook up to wifi unless she was plugged into a socket. ang arte diba. this was also the year where i began having to force-quit on an almost weekly basis. it would take me anywhere from three to ten minutes to start microsoft word, up to fifteen for photoshop.

i struggled with lulu laying out and printing my cv and portfolio for interviews, which would take me entire afternoons or even the whole day. i timed myself once -- sending out one application by email, a process that consisted of opening word and recasting a cover letter, tweaking a cv and a couple of pages of sample writing, then opening firefox and sending my little e-packet out via gmail, would take me thirty to forty-five minutes. now imagine this done at least fifty times for each application i've sent out.

for the first time, i considered replacing her when an acer trade-in promo came up last month. i decided to live with lulu a little while longer and wait for the IT trade fairs that usually roll around at year-end to get myself a macbook. i just consoled myself by coming up with a lulu-inspired name for the incumbent (i considered lolita, i.e. a little lulu, but eventually settled on something else).

just last thursday, i suddenly lost all my firefox bookmarks. like magic. they just disappeared -- along with them over dozen job postings filed into "to apply" and "follow up", not to mention all my various resources and hobby-related bookmarks. what was the point of a bookmark function, i thought, if i had to write everything down next time "just to be sure"? oh and did i mention that this was the second time in the span of one month that this happened to me?

and today i waited an hour and a half for lulu to restart.

so now i am browsing refurbished macbooks on the apple online store and feeling downright miserable because i feel like marlon and i can't afford this right now. we have a credit card to zero out in june and shared goals and all that crap.

sooooo... that ends my rant. any feedback on refurbished macs?

Small victories

finally whittling down the conjugal grocery bill from over a hundred, almost two hundred dollars a week (for two people! no wonder we were so fat!) to $80 and below. the secret: going on the south beach diet eliminates so many frivolous and often expensive purchases like cookie mixes, couscous, chocolate, various pasta ingredients.

calling my mom up on day and hearing her laugh. we hooted over the ridiculous prices of today's "it" bags together; she had an especially big laugh over the prices of celestina bags. while window shopping in greenbelt 5, she saw a yellow croc handbag that looked exactly like a Php200 purse she got me from an ukay-ukay. the celestina price tag: Php169,000. the sales attendant generously offered her a discount, bringing the total to "only" Php139,000. oh, how my mom laughed.

after hearing a friend say the words "retail therapy", realizing that i didn't need it.

putting together a great interview outfit in only two tries.

feeling pride in the portfolio of print work i put together. i was saying to myself for the past five or six months, "i don't have much of a print portfolio." when i really put my back into creating one, i found i was wrong.

going to an interview on friday; feeling that i had been given a thoroughly fair chance to represent myself and my work... and that i had grabbed it.

realizing that while i used to thrive on long work hours in my old job, i no longer feel the compulsion to play that trump card in order to get hired. working my old hours in a new life doesn't seem to quite fit. it misses the point of me getting married and moving here.

going home after the interview and evaluating how well the job and the company was suited for me without a tinge of desperation.

finally giving up my resistance to singapore and realizing that i could really have the time of my life here. maybe i already am.

considering that there may be no such thing as a small victory.

Gearing up for battle

after just a few months of living in singapore, i think i know why everyone goes stark raving bonkers during the great singapore sale. it's because everything here is so goddamn expensive. if you were surrounded by hundred-dollar price tags all year round and suddenly things were going for $19.90 (the $0.90 seems to be a singapore retail trademark)... wouldn't you rush out and buy stuff too?

i wonder... does everybody really go stark raving bonkers? or could it just be all hype? every article i've read on the upcoming g.s.s. uses some kind of battle metaphor or other to denote complete and total pandemonium, with "seasoned shoppers" even flying in from other countries to join the fray. the g.s.s. website even has a section on special offers and coupons that will only be "unveiled" on the sale's opening day "due to the sensitive nature of this content". ooooooh-kayyyy.

to assuage my curiosity (and to possibly score a marked-down pair or two of pants), i have decided to venture out on may 23, friday, the first day of the g.s.s. and if i really will have to fight off the supposedly significant number of singaporeans who have been hungrily waiting to pounce. the only piece of sale advice i'm arming myself with: don't go on a weekend. it'll be quite perfect, since i'll be leaving for seoul that weekend anyway.

the places i plan to hit: orchard road to check out high-schooler meccas far east plaza and the heeren, as well as wardrobe staples at wisma atria; a peek into the mac store on wheelock place, also on orchard (i'm itching to replace lulu, who turns three this june); and bugis junction, for super-discounted accessories at my new favorite bijoux place, diva (where the counter girl, margie, is pinay). might squeeze in a trip to sim lim square and see if they have better deals on a macbook over there.

Seoul sensation

since i can no longer take the sleepless nights (try sleeping at 5am for three straight days) and i've never been to the land of jewel in the palace, kimchi and 10 million skincare fanatics, i am tagging along on marlon's business trip to seoul, south korea!


and, i'm going for absolutely free! i booked the ticket using marlon's krisflyer miles. yay.

so far all i know about seoul is all i'm looking forward to: the palaces where they shoot koreanovelas, giganto-mall coex, and beautiful store, a little vintage shop read about on lonely planet where the prices are (if my calculations are correct) almost at pinoy ukay-ukay levels -- truly, thinspiration for the month of may. i hope i also get there in time to catch at least a few cherry blossoms.

any suggestions?

---
photo from lonely planet

Said the queen:

click to enlarge.

this is my first collage in ages, featuring words of wisdom from lola hilda of the mahotella queens . how's that for marital advice?

in the piece: words cut out from local magazines, african print patterns from a recent issue of elle (a major look for spring-summer 08), a year-old pencil sketch, gift cards from a book of textile-pattered gift wrap, artist's plaster, gold gravel from one of marlon's ideation seminars, discounted ombre/rainbow paper that nobody was buying from a bras basah complex art store.

oh, and really crappy school glue that made my artwork kulubot. :P

i contemplated inking the sketch, but i didn't want to lose the spontaneous quality of all the extra pencil strokes.