Down the Rabbit Hole

Royalty, nobility, the gentry, and... how quaint! Even the rabble. I haven't been excited about seeing a movie since Johnny Depp was cast as the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland ! I have always imagined Angelina Jolie as the perfect actor to portray one of the baddest witches in the Disney princesses' universe... and it became true! She was nothing but excellent in the movie. In fact, all the other characters (even Sleeping Beauty herself) paled in comparison with Maleficent. She was the star of this movie, after all. The movie is a retelling of the 1959 classic cartoon  Sleeping Beauty  but from Maleficent's point of view. It was an interesting take since I have never understood why King Stefan and the Queen didn't invite Maleficent to the christening of their daughter, Princess Aurora. The plot details of the live-action movie largely deviated from that of the cartoon; in the end, Maleficent was not the baddest after all. The evil stepmother in Snow White h...

To cap our Tagaytay road trip, Tita Ruby, Cindy, Crystal, and I made a stop at the city's newest Starbucks branch... my first time to visit with the sun still up in the sky. I had been here with my parents and my sister one night a few months ago and the parking lot had intimidated me because it was so steep! Anyway, lucky that I wasn't driving this time around. All I had to do was to enjoy the view while sipping  my customized drink order . This Starbucks branch really has one of the best views in the world. I couldn't agree more. :)

One sunny morning, Tita Ruby had lunch with Cindy, Crystal, and me at the famous Sonya's Garden in Tagaytay City. I was enchanted because I had felt like I was entering the tropical version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's secret garden, far from the hustle and bustle of this tourist city.  Admittedly, I've eaten at restaurants in Tagaytay City featuring better tasting food than Sonya's Garden. However, I think that the star wasn't really the food.  It was the garden .  Just imagine having an idyllic lunch amid waterfalls and fountains gurgling happily in the garden, birds chirping up in the foliage, and brightly colored flowers blooming against the greenery.  As if those were not enough, there were souvenir shops that feature collectors' items that are reminiscent of the days gone past (aka. furniture and decorations whose styles follow don't follow modern silhouettes). As we ended our exploration...

What's with the preoccupation of television shows and movies with men having commitment issues? First, there's the soap The Legal Wife, of which I've only seen one episode of (in hospital, while visiting my grandma). And then a movie called The Other Woman started showing in cinemas. Since it's girls' night out and the other options that night were Spiderman and Godzilla, we opted to watch The Other Woman. And that was one crazy movie to watch. Somehow, it reminded me of The First Wives Club (1996) because The Other Woman also has three women as protagonists and both movies feature one strong female character that served as the leader of the group as they took revenge on their husbands (or boyfriend, as in the case of The Other Woman). The thing is, that's where the similarities stop. See, in The First Wives Club, the protagonists were all accomplished women (college graduates, in fact) abandoned by their husbands for one reason or another. These women ...

My post-doctoral fellowship ended on May 16th . Instead of closing it with a quiet evening, I decided that I wanted to celebrate it since I treat it as a milestone. It's nice too that my fellow  kaladkarin friends were planning on a night out in Makati anyway so we just had to arrange the timing. :) First stop: Bonifacio High Street Who can resist window shopping on a Friday evening, right? Especially with store displays seemingly luring people in as they walked along High Street like the mannequins in Confessions of a Shopaholic. But a store did manage to entice us from the bee line to dinner: a sports shop! Man was looking for motivation to go running again (aka toys for the running Man) and Matty was looking for dive shoes. I browsed the rash guard collection but I wasn't in the mood (or in the right attire) to try one. Sara and Hedia checked out the selection of bicycles currently on display.  Second stop: Geisha  I absolutely love Japanese food. I'm not...

Well, not exactly. It's more of a thank you party dedicated to the members of the rice sensory evaluation panel who had eagerly and actively participated in rice tasting for the past two years and who had been instrumental in at least three research studies I was involved in as post-doc fellow.  And this time, there was no rice to be had! Many of the members of the panel are from GQNC. The ones who are from different departments were either en route to a conference the day this party was held or dropped by after this photo was taken. 

May 16th was my last weekday at the Grain Quality and Nutrition Center (as post-doctoral fellow). That week was such an emotionally difficult time for me because there were a lot of things to let go, to clean up, to pass on. As I was hauling my things into the car on my last day, I realized that the things I was bringing home from my entire stay in that lab could be thrown in into two 50-liter dry boxes, one 10-liter plastic bag, and a cloth shopping bag.  However, the camaraderie that I have developed with the people in GQNC and the personal growth I've gone through with them all those years... these are intangible and priceless. They will not fit into any container. While some good things have to end, I also recognize that it's time to move on to new adventures. But before those happened, a number of us from GQNC opted to take a few minutes of downtime in the afternoon to have group photos taken. The photo below happens to be my favorite shot because I was still incl...