Michelle Lim

I attended Michelle Lim's fashion show and thank God I was in the front row 'cause I forgot my glasses. Well, anyway, the collection was okay. There were a lot of monotone dresses. I wish she incorporated two to three colors in a dress or even two to three tones of the same color in a dress. But anyway, had fun still. Here are my fave clothes from her collection.

I'm seeing a lot of ballerina and one-shoulder dresses this season. It's not my cup of tea but I want to try and incorporate those trends in my style. 

Kate Moss' Summer Collection

Coming to you in Topshop stores on May 25. 

I'm really in love with the dress. I wonder if it would also be available in the philippines. It's looks indian/tribal/morrocan ispired, don't you think so? I'm loving the bright colors. A piece of Kate Moss' summer collection for Topshop is a definite must-have for summer.

Wedding Party Look

Saw this picture. Took it ages ago. Is this look appropriate for a wedding reception? 

Dress: Penelope Cruz for Mango

Red Belt: Mango

Coctail ring & Chunky bracelet: Girl Shoppe

Gladiator Heels: Trunk Show

Through the eyes of E-math

You usually had me by your side; depended on my intelligence and facts. You couldn’t endure the day without browsing my pages, eager to learn the lessons in me. You are the responsible ones, always doing the right things and getting the jobs done. Today, however, you choose to ignore me, opting to perform playful antics. I can hear your piercing laughters. You’re having fun at last and I’m glad to hear that.

As time went by, the games you play became a drug, you find that you cannot bring an end to it, and you want to share it with others. One by one, you each forgot about me. My pages became yellow with age—faded texts and torn pages; not because you continually leaf through my pages but because you toss me to the corners of the room so as not to get in the way of your amusement. You have forgotten me.

I couldn’t read your thoughts as you received your grades. Your hands fingered my covers gently as if remembering the times we have shared filling your mind with wonderful information. A lone tear escapes your eye and drops silently on my cover. I want to comfort you, to coax you to open your mind once again to me and to the lessons I have in me. But I know you cannot hear me, it is up to you to make a choice.

You vaguely realize that your hand is moving to open me. You are captivated, ensnared by what you envision gleaming in the hidden depths before you. I see your curiosity and it pleases me. I see your intention and I’m filled with hope.

You open me, fingers tracing the passages and as I expect, the contents start sinking through your mind. You never pulled back ever since. I feel victorious. You have finally learned and I have finally served my purpose.

Look #8574637

Headband: Thrift Store 50PHP (1 dollar)

Silver necklace: People are people 350PHP (7 dollars)

Grey Sweater Dress: Vintage Harajuku  (around 20 dollars)

Black knee-high socks: Ikebukuro (Forgot the store and the price)

Black Heels: Charles and Keith 1700PHP (around 35-40 dollars)

Meeting my lovely friends in High Street. What do you guys think? I absolutely adore my blue satin headband. I think it kind-a adds spark to the whole outfit, 'cause the colors are a little bit dull. Bluish-grey and black. 

I just watched "Spectacular". A movie by nickolodeon. You should watch it. It's pretty good (probably 'cause there's a cute rock boy and you know how I love rockboys). Not oscar-worthy but great if you want a movie with catchy songs and cliché romantic storyline.

I don't understand, enlighten me please.

There are a lot of things I don't understand. Here are some of them.

1. I don't understand why filipinos love John Lloyd Cruz. He's not hot or even cute and he's so old.
2. I don'r understand how filipinos stand our movies. They're crap. We'll except the comedians' movies, now those are funny.
3. I don't understand why filipino tv news are so exaggerated.
4. I don't understand why we say we're going come on time but we're always 2 hours late.
5. I don't understand why english people put "u" in colour or why amercians don't put "u" in color. Make up your minds so I don't have to wonder.
6. I don't understand why people wonder which came first, the chicken or the egg? Just be happy we have both.
7. I don't understand why students procrastinate.
8. I don't understand how people can be rich by just acting or singing.
9. I don't understand why I felt the need to write this.
10. I don't understand why people say "it's not you, it's me" when breaking up. Just admit that it is because of "you, not me".

More to come, I guess. :))

Want to be skinny?

You better eat like filipinos. When you walk in the mall here in the Philippines, you see skinny people or probably curvy ones but you rarely see really "chubby" filipinos. I'm not dicriminating against "chubby" people because I'm also discriminated as a skinny person (they all think I'm anorexic which by the way is not true). 

However, it's a real suprise that most filipinos are skinny because filipinos have at least 8 meals a day. This statement coming from a british journalist (Matthew Sutherland) who was stationed in the Philippines for 6 years.

Read his article. 

Matter of Taste

By Matthew Sutherland

I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider myself in most respects well assimilated. However, there is one key step on the road to full assimilation, which I have yet to take, and that's to eat BALUT.

The day any of you sees me eating balut, please call immigration and ask them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there will be no turning back. BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a fertilized duck egg. It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of newspaper, much like English fish and chips, by street vendors usually after dark, presumably so you can't see how gross it is.

It's meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything more likely to dispel sexual desire than crunching on a partially formed baby duck swimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the egg comes in varying stages of development, but basically it is not considered macho to eat one without fully discernable feathers, beak, and claws. Some say these crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile, pungent liquid that surrounds the aforementioned feathery fetus...excuse me; I have to go and throw up now. I'll be back in a minute.

Food dominates the life of the Filipino. People here just love to eat.

They eat at least eight times a day. These eight official meals are called, in order: breakfast, snacks, lunch, merienda, merienda ceyna, dinner, bedtime snacks and no-one-saw-me-take-that-cookie-from-the- fridge-so-it-doesn't-count.

The short gaps in between these mealtimes are spent eating Sky Flakes Crackers from the open packet that sits on every desktop. You're never far from food in the Philippines. If you doubt this, next time you're driving  home from work, try this game. See how long you can drive without seeing food and I don't mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of food. I mean a man on the sidewalk frying fish balls, or a man walking through the traffic selling nuts or candy. I bet it's less than one minute.

Here are some other things I've noticed about food in the Philippines:

Firstly, a meal is not a meal without rice - even breakfast. In the UK, I could go a whole year without eating rice. Second, it's impossible to drink without eating. A bottle of San Miguel just isn't the same without gambas or beef tapa. Third, no one ventures more than two paces from their house without baon (food in small container) and a container

of something cold to drink. You might as well ask a Filipino to leave home without his pants on. And lastly, where I come from, you eat with a knife and fork. Here, you eat with a spoon and fork. You try eating rice swimming in fish sauce with a knife.

One really nice thing about Filipino food culture is that people always ask you to SHARE their food. In my office, if you catch anyone attacking their "baon", they will always go, "Sir! KAIN TAYO!" ("Let's eat!"). This confused me, until I realized that they didn't actually expect me to sit down and start munching on their boneless bangus. In fact, the polite response is something like, "No thanks, I just ate." But the principle is sound - if you have food on your plate, you are expected to share it, however hungry you are, with those who may be even hungrier. I think that's great!

In fact, this is frequently even taken one step further. Many Filipinos use "Have you eaten yet?" ("KUMAIN KA NA?") irrespective of time of day or location and/or "Where are you going?" ("SAAN KA PUPUNTA?) as a general greeting, they will just respond as "Just right there."  ("DIYAN LANG.") And they don't tell you where they are going.

Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull compared to other Asian cuisines. Actually lots of it is very good: Spicy dishes like Bicol Express (strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked with coconut milk; anything KINILAW; and anything ADOBO. And it's hard to beat the sheer wanton, cholesterolic frenzy of a good old-fashioned LECHON de leche (roast pig) feast. Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50 pounds of animal fat on a stick, and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm... you can actually feel your arteries constricting with each successive mouthful.

I also share one key Pinoy trait ---a sweet tooth. I am thus the only foreigner I know who does not complain about sweet bread, sweet burgers, sweet spaghetti, sweet banana ketchup, and so on. I am a man who likes to put jam on his pizza. Try it!

It's the weird food you want to avoid. In addition to duck fetus in the half-shell, items to avoid in the Philippines include pig's blood soup (DINUGUAN); bull's testicle soup, the strangely-named "SOUP NUMBER FIVE" (I dread to think what numbers one through four are); and the ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and it's equally stinky sister, PATIS. Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items that they will even risk arrest or deportation trying to smuggle them into countries like Australia and the USA, which wisely ban the importation of items you can smell from more than 100 paces.

Then there's the small matter of the purple ice cream. I have never been able to get my brain around eating purple food; the ubiquitous UBE leaves me cold.

And lastly on the subject of weird food, beware: that KALDERETANG KAMBING (goat) could well be KALDERETANG ASO (dog)...

The Filipino, of course, has a well-developed sense of food. Here's a typical Pinoy food joke: "I'm on a seafood diet. "What's a seafood diet?" "When I see food, I eat it!"

Filipinos also eat strange bits of animals --- the feet, the head,  the guts, etc., usually barbecued on a stick. These have been given witty names, like "ADIDAS" (chicken's feet); "KURBATA" (either just chicken's neck, or "neck and thigh" as in "neck-tie"); "WALKMAN" (pigs ears); "PAL" (chicken wings); "HELMET" (chicken head); "IUD" (chicken intestines), and BETAMAX" (video-cassette-like blocks of animal blood). Yum, yum. Bon appetit.

"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches"-- (Proverbs 22:1)

WHEN I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of the first cultural differences to strike me was names. The subject has provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since. The first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that everyone here has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom, we have nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we tend, I am glad to say, to lose them.

The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as overbearingly cutesy for anyone over about five. Fifty-five-year-olds colleague put it. Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy would be beaten to death at school by pre-adolescent bullies, and never make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls with names like Babes, Lovely, Precious, Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech ech. Here, however, no one bats an eyelid.

Then I noticed how many people have what I have come to call "door-bell names".

These are nicknames that sound like -well, doorbells. There are millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of the more common. They can be, and frequently are, used in even more door-bell-like combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on. Even our newly appointed chief of police has a doorbell name Ping. None of these doorbell names exist where I come from, and hence sound unusually amusing to my untutored foreign ear.

Someone once told me that one of the Bings, when asked why he was called Bing, replied, "because my brother is called Bong". Faultless logic. Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where I come from "dong" is a slang word for well; perhaps "talong" is the best Tagalog equivalent.

Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or Ning-Ning. The secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one: Leck-Leck. Such names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared" symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a while.

Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming their children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with the same letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy.

More imaginative parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of assonance or rhyme, as in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names get worse the more kids there are-best to be born early or you could end up being a Baboy).

Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts (Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip). The main advantage of such combinations is that they look great painted across your trunk if you're a cab driver.

That's another thing I'd never seen before coming to Manila -- taxis with the driver's kids' names on the trunk.

Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the phenomenon of the "composite" name. This includes names like Jejomar (for Jesus, Joseph and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda (for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not). That's a bit like me being called something like "Engscowani" (for England, Scotland, Wales and

Northern Ireland). Between you and me, I'm glad I'm not.

And how could I forget to mention the fabulous concept of the randomly inserted letter 'h'. Quite what this device is supposed to achieve, I have not yet figured out, but I think it is designed to give a touch of class to an otherwise only averagely weird name. It results in creations like Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how about Jhun-Jhun (Jhun2)?

How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with names like John Smith. How wonderful to come to a country where imagination and exoticism rule the world of names.

Even the towns here have weird names; my favorite is the unbelievably named town of Sexmoan (ironically close to Olongapo and Angeles). Where else in the world could that really be true?

Where else in the world could the head of the Church really be called Cardinal Sin?

Where else but the Philippines!

I'm sorry this entry probably didn't answer the questions running through your heads, but I hope you were entertained. I know I was. This is a great article. Sums up some of the filipino cultures and traditions. We're always so positive, probably why we're always smiling. 

Hippie, meetie

That's probably the worst post title I have ever typed. Starbucks, meeting with my yearbook committee. Tried on a lot of outfits before coming up with this one. I'm such a hippie. I hope I wore my peace sign necklace. :))

I wish I had my long hair back. Why can't you grow faster? I vow never to cut my hair again for 5 years.