Philippines Trip Day 1 (7/12)

This is the land of pork and rice. Before I came to the Philippines, I already realised Filipinos cant do without rice in their meals, we are cooking rice at home everyday and they consume it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You can imagine how hard it is for me to stay with my no carbs diet, I feel worried for K's health and weight when I see him eating that amount of rice everyday. We have less of the pork at home, and we usually cook more chicken instead. The first two meals I had over here was sisig and liempo, and it goes without saying that we had them with rice. I must say, those are really good. I always have sisig at Gerry's Grille in SG, and the ones over here are even better. Sisig is a dish cooked with all parts of the pig head (tongue, ear etc) sauteed with onion and garlic on a hot plate. It was past midnight when we went out to hunt for dinner and balut (another exotic dish which I havent get to try yet), therefore I tried to taste just a few mouthful of that.

A trip to the Philippines is really a test of self control for me in terms of diet, sigh. I kept reminding myself to eat in small portions and just a few mouthful to try the taste of the different food. However, I already have the feeling that I'll put on A LOT of weight after the first day.

After a good night's rest, we're ready to set off. We actually planned to go out really early as K had planned a long list of things to do. Deep in my heart, I was almost sure we would sleep in, and that was exactly what happened. We only went out after 1pm.

 The first stop was the dental clinic, I havent been to the dentist for years and I was doubtful that I would want to get my teeth checked in a foreign land. However, the dental clinic proved to be clean and I went ahead with the scaling and polishing, it cost only SGD $15 and that is at least 4 or 5 times cheaper than in SG. I have a fear of visiting the dentist ever since my primary school years and the high cost of dentistry treatment is a real put off too. If we had more time, I would have gotten my fillings done as well, it would be sooooo much cheaper than to do it at home. I made a mental note to visit the dentist as soon as I'm back as the dentist explained that both my front teeth need fillings to be done. Sigh..

One of the places we went after that was a traditional cake shop. K missed the taste of cakes in his homeland and bought a 9inch cake just to finish off on his own. He also got me some traditional cookies and snacks, I must say that they taste really good.

The ones on the left are my favourite, they are known as Boat Tarts as they're shaped like a boat. It's a half pastry, half sweet tart and its really tasty. The white ones on the right are like candy wrapped in rice paper and they are Turrones de Casoy, it sound really Spanish to me.

We took the public bus to Angeles (another city near here) and I had the experience of taking both the air-con and non air-con bus, the difference is obviously in the price. The air-con bus is like the private bus serving us back in SG, the non air-con one is not too bad too as the air is cool and I get a whiff of what I call the 'forest smell' (just the normal non-industrial area smell that I love). I must admit I was really reluctant when we board the non air-con old bus when heading home, but it was already 1am and I slept most of the way back. That evening, we went to a really nice restaurant owned by one of his many friends in Angeles and the ambiance there really nice. The food in this Zulu restuarant is really good and of course seems really really cheap to me.

This is the Sinful cake that K had been telling me about since the early days of our friendship. I was doubtful then that I would ever get to try it, but I'm really glad that I finally did. The texture of the cake is really good, I think we might be able to find similar ones in SG but it will be much more expensive. As the name suggest, every mouthful feels sinful to me and I think it goes without saying that there's loads of calories there.