Take the Friendtest!
This is a 10-question test that I made myself. Try it out and see how you fare. You can create your own test and see how well your friends know you next! ENJOY!!! :)
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This is a 10-question test that I made myself. Try it out and see how you fare. You can create your own test and see how well your friends know you next! ENJOY!!! :)
Before we left for Monaco last January (where we celebrated our 2nd year wedding anniversary), we got a tiny guidebook to help us along. Thing is, most of the books here are in Italian. Once we got home, we wondered why they would celebrate Oktoberfest in France. Then we realized that Monaco in Italian meant Munich! And I thought to myself, when will we ever get to use this??? And I didn't think the opportunity would present itself only six months later. We really are given little clues from above. :)
Or "Life is beautiful" as translated for me by Bernd, one of our good friends here in Ivrea. It seems surreal that we will be off to Munich in a month's time, and we will call that our 3rd new home, at least for two months. I picked up our tickets a while ago which were luckily on promo that's why we had to pay immediately. (Otherwise they would come out to 420.00 euros a head!) We are going to be staying in a pensione (which includes daily breakfast) but has an added feature that I dread the most- shared bathrooms! SHUDDER! I hope it won't be too memorable... Noel says I have to learn how to be creative with the sink which comes with each room. :(
Nonetheless, we are extremly blessed that Noel got this internship in Munich with designafairs. This is what's allowing us to experience Germany, which neither of us has ever been to. While looking for a place to stay there, I emailed a lot of these relocation companies referred to Noel by his company. One of the responses was so funny, I had to post it here:
Dear Via Perlas,
thank you for your request,
but the address you are
interested to rent is our
office building.
It is not possible to rent our
office!!
Please fill in the enclosed form
and return this back to our office.
Than we will be able to send you
offers.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen/ With best regards
Andreas Hatzistamatis
Farm life is what we often feel like here in Ivrea. Stores and restaurants close early and unexpectedly. Today, Saturday, we expected our staple pizzeria across the street to be open at lunch time. But low and behold, it was closed!
This is the reality of life here. Our choices are very limited. We go to the same old caffeteria during lunch on weekdays, go to the same pizzeria for dinner. Shops open at 10, close at 1, open at 3 then close at 7:30pm. There is only one street in town that has some semblance of shopping, the grocery is a bus ride to the next town. No cinemas that play english and no other form of entertainment. We need to go take a 1 1/2 hour train ride to the next city to have some decent city life, but still the only other alternative to italian food is chinese.
So we go back to our hole in Talponia and eat left over pasta for lunch. Oh I wish I had a car!
Noel and I reached for our mammoth Nature's Plus Vitamin C plastic bottle simultaneously. "Did I take one already?" Noel asked, since I had just popped one. This is his favorite Vitamin C, the only one I don't need to coax him to take. Like making a child take their medicine. "Chewable?" He always asks me, even if he knows they are. We need to get a refill soon- they taste really good!
Just HAD to post this. MABUHAY ANG PILIPINAS!!! :)
Pinay wins it big in London
By Alfred Yuson
The Philippine Star 05/16/2004
Patricia Evangelista, a 19-year-old, Mass Communications sophomore of
University of the Philippines (UP)-Diliman, did the country proud Friday
night by besting 59 other student contestants from 37 countries in the 2004
International Public Speaking competition conducted by the English Speaking
Union (ESU) in London.
She triumphed over a field of exactly 60 speakers from all over the
English-speaking world, including the United States, United Kingdom and
Australia, reported Maranan.
The board of judges¹ decision was unanimous, according to contest chairman
Brian Hanharan of the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC).
BLONDE AND BLUE EYES
When I was little, I wanted what many Filipino children all over the
country wanted.
I wanted to be blond, blue-eyed, and white.
I thought-if I just wished hard enough and was good enough, I'd wake up on
Christmas morning with snow outside my window and freckles across my nose!
More than four centuries under western domination does that to you. I have
sixteen cousins. In a couple of years, there will just be five of us left
in the Philippines, the rest will have gone abroad in search of "greener
pastures." It's not just an anomaly; it's a trend; the Filipino diaspora.
Today, about eight million Filipinos are scattered around the world.
There are those who disapprove of Filipinos who choose to leave. I used to.
Maybe this is a natural reaction of someone who was left behind, smiling
for family pictures that get emptier with each succeeding year. Desertion,
I called it. My country is a land that has perpetually fought for the
freedom to be itself. Our heroes offered their lives in the struggle
against the Spanish, the Japanese, the Americans. To pack up and deny that
identity is tantamount to spitting on that sacrifice.
Or is it? I don't think so, not anymore. True, there is no denying this
phenomenon, aided by the fact that what was once the other side of the
world is now a twelve-hour plane ride away. But this is a borderless world,
where no individual can claim to be purely from where he is now. My mother
is of Chinese descent, my father is a quarter Spanish, and I call myself a
pure Filipino-a hybrid of sorts resulting from a combination of cultures.
Each square mile anywhere in the world is made up of people of different
ethnicities, with national identities and individual personalities. Because
of this, each square mile is already a microcosm of the world. In as much
as this blessed spot that is England is the world, so is my neighbourhood
back home.
Seen this way, the Filipino Diaspora, or any sort of dispersal of
populations, is not as ominous as so many claim. It must be understood. I
come from a Third World country, one that is still trying mightily to get
back on its feet after many years of dictatorship. But we shall make it,
given more time. Especially now, when we have thousands of eager young
minds who graduate from college every year.
They have skills. They need jobs. We cannot absorb them all. A borderless
world presents a bigger opportunity, yet one that is not so much
abandonment but an extension of identity. Even as we take, we give back.
We are the 40,000 skilled nurses who support the UK's National Health
Service. We are the quarter-of-a-million seafarers manning most of the
world's commercial ships. We are your software engineers in Ireland, your
construction workers in the Middle East, your doctors and caregivers in
North America, and, your musical artists in London's West End.
Nationalism isn't bound by time or place. People from other nations migrate
to create new nations, yet still remain essentially who they are. British
society is itself an example of a multi-cultural nation, a melting pot of
races, religions, arts and cultures. We are, indeed, in a borderless world!
Leaving sometimes isn't a matter of choice. It's coming back that is. The
Hobbits of the shire travelled all over Middle-Earth, but they chose to
come home, richer in every sense of the word. We call people like these
balikbayans or the 'returnees'-those who followed their dream, yet choose
to return and share their mature talents and good fortune.
In a few years, I may take advantage of whatever opportunities come my way.
But I will come home.
A borderless world doesn't preclude the idea of a home. I'm a Filipino, and
I'll always be one. It isn't about just geography; it isn't about boundaries. It's about giving back to the country that shaped me. And that's going to be more important to me than seeing snow outside my windows on a bright Christmas morning.
Mabuhay and Thank you.
Don't you sometimes get that feeling that you are doing so much that you feel like you're not doing anything? Well, that's how I feel now. I am in the middle of our 4 week workshop for our Spring term and I seem to be getting nowhere.
I have to come up with a concept for our "physical intranets" course but have not gotten around it since the class has been so loose and everyone decided to just do projects on their own. I feel helpless now since I chose a very technical topic: detecting Bluetooth and WiFi devices and then passing that value to a WiFi access point then displaying that information in a desktop software. Sheessh! and no one seems to be willing to help since everyone is busy with their own work.
On top of that, the internship search continues. I've sent out my application and portfolio out to several companies in the field of interaction design and happily I have gotten a good response from one company called designafairs (a german design company based in Munich which is partnered with Siemens mobile.) Now I have to do some paperwork... and hope visa isn't going to be a problem.
I've also managed to put up our barkada's website/blog similar to this. Please visit it at www.adakrab.com
One of the friendliest guards at Noel's school, Valerio, christened us with these nicknames. When he sees us come in lately, it's: "Ciao Manu, ciao Vito." It's very funny. For a while, I'm not sure who is who. :)
Noel was watching me grin as I dropped 2 postcards into the slot of the red mailbox right across where we live. He noticed how I get such a big kick when I hear the metal slot clunk back as I've dropped in the postcards. I always imagine the looks on the faces of the people when they receive them as I send many happy vibes along with the postcards. I even have a mental image of me tossing all the postcards from the mailbox in the air, swimming in them like what goes on during those crazy gameshows back home like Eat Bulaga. :) Is that postal or what? (Pun intended. Hee hee) Those are going out to you, Gretch and Johari!
Below are Dondi's (my cousin) words/dedication to Lola Turing taken from the previous entry's comments. I had to put it in front for those of you who missed it. Thank you Dondi, we share in your grief.
My Lola Vic had 10 grandchildren, 6 grandchildren-in-laws, and 12 great-grandchildren. As Lola Vic's eldest grandchild, I have been given the privilege to tell you how she was as a grandmother.
There is one word in the dictionary that describes her perfectly, and that word is doting.
I looked up the word doting in the dictionary, and I half-expected to find my Lola's picture beside the word. Instead, I found out that the word doting has 2 meanings, the first meaning is "to be feeble-minded, especially from old age" and that was definitely not what I had in mind.
The second meaning, which fits Lola to a "T" is "to lavish with excessive love". Truly, Lola lavished her loved ones with excessive love, as you can already tell from the stories of how she took care of her husband (Dr. Cesar T. Ongpin), and how she took care of her daughters (Lirio Ongpin-Mapa and Vicky Ongpin-Perlas).
How could we expect anything else from her as a grandmother? Every time we would see Lola, she would always say goodbye with these three words "I love you".
These past few years, Lola moved in to live with my parents. In the past few weeks, whenever I would take my children to swim in my mother's house, I would go up to Lola's room to say "Hi, Goodbye", and then she would say "Bye, I love you".
And last Friday, the last time I saw her alive in the hospital, I said, "Goodbye Lola, you'll be coming home soon, I'll see you tomorrow, ok?"
And she replied "I love you".
For her, these were not just words, but the ribbon ... the wrapping ... the bunting around the gifts that she had given us all throughout her life.
I remember one day, when I was in still in grade school, my classmates joined me at my Lola's house for lunch, and after the meal, Lola Vic served us atis for desert. And all my classmates were amazed because there were no seeds in the atis! Mind you, this was over 25 years ago when there were still no seedless varieties of atis.
So my classmates kept asking me, where did you get this seedless atis. And I gave them a strange look, and I said "Are you sure atis has seeds? Hello?!?"
I never even knew atis had seeds... and Lola was just laughing, because I discovered, to my chagrin, that all these years she had been serving me atis, she had lovingly removed all the seeds from the atis without even telling me!
I remember another meal, many years later, when I brought home my future wife, Cherry, who was still my girlfriend at that time. And afterwards, at the dinner table, after I had brought Cherry back to her home, the conversation eventually shifted to my "latest flame". I recall someone made a comment about Cherry's figure (masyadong payat) and about this and that, but Lola was quiet.
So I started to get worried, because with Lola, if she has nothing good to say about a person, she just keeps quiet. She purses her lips and looks away, or sometimes, she even looks up at the ceiling! But finally, she opened her mouth, with a statement that closed the conversation. She said, "Di bale na, sa lahat na niligawan ni Dondi, siya lang ang nakapag-patigil kay Dondi sa paninigarilyo!"
What wisdom! She did not look at Cherry to determine if Cherry was the right partner for me. Instead, she looked at me, and how my loving relationship with Cherry had made me grow.
Some months later, I finally announced to the family that I planned to propose to Cherry, and that I needed help to go shopping for an engagement ring. Lola stood up right away and went to her room. I thought she had gone to dress up, but when she finally came down, she took out this beautiful heart-shaped diamond which she had taken from her family heirlooms. Then she gave it to me saying, "Heto, ito ang ipagawa mo ng engagement ring".
Thank you Lola, thank you so much for all the "I love you"s that you always showered on us, your grandchildren and your great grandchildren.
I feel so horrible knowing that I will never again hear those three words from your mortal lips. But I know that one day, we will be together again, and until then LOLA, remember that I LOVE YOU too.
I got my first manicure on the train yesterday! My friend, Mirella, who takes the train everyday to go to school at the same time I do suddenly decided she was going to do my nails. She has the most comprehensive manicure set I have ever seen! Something like a doctor's satchel- with objects I didn't even know you could use on your hands.
So there we were on the 11 o'clock train bound for Torino sitting across from one another like high school girls. She, expertly filing my nails into very neat square edges and I, still in disbelief over my sudden mobile manicure. She probably took one look at my fingers and decided they were just screaming for a manicure. She was so pleased with herself that she decided to give me a make-over next. The perks of having a friend in beauty school, I think. :)
For Lola Turing who passed away today and for Tita Mary Ann who joined her creator last April 16.
We are sad that we are unable to be with our family back home in Manila for the passing of Lola Turing, Mom of Noel's Mom. We feel so helpless being so far away...
Lola was all sweetness. She loved kissing her children and grandchildren. She always wanted to be wherever the whole family was, even if it meant just quietly listening to all the conversation around her. She also often asked me: "Kelan kayo magkakababy?" ("When are you two going to have a baby?") and I would just smile. I am quite sorry now that she won't be around to meet them.
The very first time Noel introduced me to her was when we were still dating. She offered me ube ice cream. I think I started liking ube ice cream immediately after that. She was always telling me: "I love you." at the end of family lunches or dinners when we kissed her good-bye. We love you too, Lola. Please give Daddy Tony, Lolo Cesar, Lara and Tita Mary Ann a kiss and a great big hug from us.
When the cleaning ladies came in this afternoon, I told them of the yucky (schifoso) details of our unscrupulous neighbors (animal noises at 11pm and then again on or before 9am). I mentioned that I had already written our freakazoids next-door and even made a phone call asking if they needed any help. And if they didn't need any help, could they please stop the noises and let us sleep in peace???
The cleaners-turned-concerned-aunts proceeded to tell me where he was from, how he lives like a pig and how he is married but takes different women to his home. Which happens to be right beside us! All he cares about are money and sex! The head cleaner said to me emphatically.
She said not to worry, they would report him to administration. She even threatened not to clean his room the next time he didn't unlock the door for them. (Apparently this is his habit) He never even bothers to greet them hello when he sees them, to acknowledge the people who clean up after his mess. "Fai da solo!" ("Do it yourself!") She exclaimed, with her arm raised in the arm. Look who'll be swimming in his own dirty sheets now. Take that you sick person.
Never in my mind could I have thought that these words could sound so ominous. "The Cleaners Are Coming." Slow-mo of wheels of the cleaning carts rumbling their way into our unit. The minute Noel gave me the warning (oh yes, warning!) that the Talponia dorm's cleaning ladies were only 2 blocks away, I made a mad dash for the bathroom- replaying in my mind what had happened once when I wasn't completely prepared for our sanitary friends:
"Ohhhh! Mama Mia!" One of them screamed, putting her hands over her face. I knew my hair was a bit disheveled and was dripping on the carpet floor with only a towel on, but she made it sound like I was a bad horror movie reincarnated. (Or maybe she was upset over the carpet she would have to clean??!?) Don't get me wrong, they are very nice and warm, just very excitable and loud as well.
So I accomplised showering and getting dressed in under 5 minutes! A truly helter-skelter world record which had me a little dizzy- moving on Mach 1 speed like that. Who knew cleaning could be such a workout for the heart and nerves? But it's better than no help at all- I'm no Snow White.