Easter Holiday
Trip Start
Apr 13, 2011
1
9
18
Trip End
May 04, 2011
Where I stayed
Marycel's Apartment
Palo, Eastern Visayas, Philippines
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Since we were rushed through our shopping trip on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday featured some improvised meals (and that worked just fine...fortunately, we're both creative cooks). Saturday was a big shopping day -- we first went to a printer to get our wedding invitations printed and then stopped by a tchotke shop to order some souvenirs for the guests. Next was to the mall for some shoes and papers and ribbons to assemble the invitations, which we made on Sunday night. And that was probably not one of our better ideas.
In a country of really cheap labor, there's really no reason we should have put ourselves through the ordeal. It took us about 6 hours to assemble about 70 invitations -- it would have been so worth it to pay some kids a few pesos for each one completed. By the time we finished, I was thinking a better invite would have been Photoshopping our faces onto the Pacquiao/Mosley poster that is plastered ubiquitously over town.
Earlier on Sunday, however, Marycel's family and some friends stopped by. We had also gone grocery shopping Saturday in anticipation of a Easter picnic at MacArthur Park. The family arrived just as we were heading out to the mall for a few other necessities; after seeing the size of the horde, we had to pick up more food. After we returned, 4 pedicabs transported our group 2 km down the road to the park. It rained en route, but stopped once we got there and the afternoon was rain-free (strong storms hit that night). We lit some coals and Marycel's mother proceeded to grill the chicken, hot dogs, and fish we had brought. Among them was some chicken wings we grilled then tossed in a Buffalo wing sauce I concocted from some drawn butter, hot sauce, vinegar, and a bit of honey. Marycel's 15 year old brother was the only one who thought they went great with a beer.
Sadly, my camera is not smarter than I am and happily went through the motion of taking pictures in spite the fact I took out the CF card when working on a previous blog entry and neglected to replace it. The pictures I would have taken would have shown dense crowds all also thinking a holiday BBQ was just the ticket.
