exhaustingly satisfying… i want more!

We’re inundated with projects left and right, I haven’t had more than 4 hours’ worth of sleep at a time in more than a week, my allergies are acting up because of the stress, my eyes are turning red for no particular reason, I just received what arguably was my worst tongue-lashing at work yesterday which I haven’t really gotten over yet – all these are going on, and yet I just have to stop for a few minutes and write about the humongous food trip that was my Bacolod weekend.

One of my priorities was to go back to the Pala-Pala Restaurant in 18^th St., and come dinnertime I dragged Mika and Nini over there to partake of a delightful – and, admittedly, excessive – feast. There were three of us, and we ordered sinigang, calamares, sisig, and grilled tanigue (at least I think it was tanigue. Can’t remember. It was a heady time). The sinigang came in this humongous bowl one can practically swim in – and while I preferred the sinigang I had the first time I came there (different kind of fish maybe. Plus I didn’t do the ordering that time), it was still marvelous. My favorite was the grilled fish. And oh, we had gallons of the bottomless iced tea, served diligently by the ever-attentive waiters who kept filling up our glasses, until Nini finally said, in an almost tearful voice, “Tama na po,” to the waiter who asked us if we wanted some more.

 

Having had our fill of the dinner, we headed out to the next destination in the agenda: Calea, located just around the corner from the Pala-pala. We knew we were too full from the dinner, and realized we should have paced ourselves, but we just couldn’t miss going to the city’s most famous dessert place (thanks again for the directions, jules!). And oh. my. god. When we got to the place we spent like ten minutes just gushing over the display at the counter, going back and forth from the main counter to the refrigerator display, just exclaiming “wow!” “gosh!” “pretty!” and more of such inanities. You’d think we’ve never seen cakes in Manila. Of course we have. It was just, I don’t know, special. The giddines was just slightly marred when the waitress stopped us from taking photos of the counter display. My mouth, which was already opened and gaping from all the gushing, fell open a bit more as I was struck speechless for a moment. Bawal daw. Okay, then, what about when the cake’s already at my table? Surely we can take pictures then, right? I think I would have stood there and argued about my constitutionally guaranteed right to take pictures of my own cake till kingdom come, but thankfully I didn’t have to because the woman immediately said that we could take pictures at our table. We finally settled on these beauties:

 

chocolate cake

 

strawberry cheesecake.

 

banana parfait

 

all together now… oh my gosh.

 

broken glass cake. pretty!

It took us a looong time to plow through the cakes, since of course we were still struggling to digest all that seafood to make more room in our stomachs. I am ashamed to say I was not able to finish all of my chocolate cake, and that it pains my heart now to remember that small piece left on my plate. At the time, though, it was simply too much.

After that, I thought I was all ready to head back to the hotel and crash, but Mika’s Bacolod friend Sophie had other ideas. We went to Kuppa for a pot of some sort of strawberry green tea. Kuppa is a beautifully decorated coffee and tea shop – they actually have design sketches of the place framed and displayed all over. And all we could think about was, “Sana ganito bahay ko.”

 

feeling hacienderas at the sugarland hotel

For that matter, at one time or another we were also thinking, “Can we move to Bacolod?”