Ibyang
Ibyang

The Married Life

31st Monthsary Breakfast at Cascade Cafe

Since the Husband started work last year, it was very seldom that we have breakfast dates as we both like arriving to work early so we can also go home early.

Last week, I attended training for two days in the City which fortunately coincided with our 31st monthsary on Thursday (20 August). So we grabbed the chance to have a breakfast date as a way of celebrating our special day of the month.

I initially thought we would just have coffee at Starbucks but the Husband took me to Cascade Cafe which is just located in the train station where he gets on and off. Nothing really spectacular about the Cafe, the only special thing about it is that it has this faux waterfalls.

I find it relaxing just hearing the sound of free-flowing water even if I know I’m in the CBD. I think I found another place where I can have my “Me” time.

Now, for the food….the Husband had a latte.

While I had a glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice. I love it!!! The price of the OJ, on the other, made me cringe–it was AUD$5.80. Really expensive but worth it. If ever you visit Sydney, you should never leave without having a taste of our freshly-squeezed OJ.

Main event. We shared a plate of their Big Breakfast. It had 1 big sausage (sliced in half), mushrooms, bacon, 2 eggs, big tomatoes, 2 toasts and chips.

With that serving, even if we already shared, it was difficult to finish it all off and we were both so full afterwards.

Cascade Cafe is located at 15-16 Town Hall Square, Sydney.

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My Top 3s This Weekend

3 Things My Girlfriends and I did on Friday night:

  1. Visited the Swarovski store
  2. Coffee at Starbucks (I had hot chocolate and a vanilla cupcake courtesy of Hilda)
  3. Dinner at Pepper Lunch

Lovely time with my girlfriends Hilda, Ara and Chloe. It’s been awhile since we’ve had dinner and as always, it was nice to catch up and plan of more get-togethers in the future.

3 Rewards I Gave Myself:

  1. A haircut
  2. A pair of black jeans
  3. A cute little red bag

I broke my own rule on Saturday when Husband and I went to the shops. Before going in, we both agree that we will only window shop–no buying. But I found these pair of black jeans at 70% off and this cute bag at 50%.

3 Afternoon Snacks My Husband and I Indulged In:

  1. Turon
  2. Karioca
  3. Corn…as in Nilagang Mais

We bought Turon and Karioca at the Filo store priced at AUD$1.50/piece (mahal!!! so forget about converting to Peso hehe) and ate them on Saturday afternoon. We bought raw corn and cooked them for our Sunday afternoon tea.

3 New Dishes I Cooked:

  1. Salmon Steak
  2. Honey Soy Chicken
  3. Buttered Prawns in Garlic

3 Networking Sites I will Regularly be Visible In:

  1. Multiply
  2. Plurk
  3. Twitter

Multiply will always be home and Plurk is a fun environment, then I finally learned to love the simplicity of Twitter. I’ve decided to only visit Facebook once in awhile as FB is becoming “too noisy” for me–so many applications and games I’m really not interested in. Stressful to the eye.

3 Silly Things My Husband and I Did:

  1. After we accomplished a certain goal we had for the past month on Saturday morning, we suddenly sang “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands..*clap clap*” like two foolish kids.
  2. We jumped on top of our bed on Saturday night like two kids on a slumber party.
  3. Danced inside the house to our favorite songs intermittently. Dunno why but dancing inside the house is becoming a habit—a very funny habit hehe.

3 Great Lessons Learned:

A recent happening in my life has once again revealed that life is indeed short. And so with this premise, I have learned that:

  1. As long as I write in good faith, nothing or no one should stop me from writing about things I do, love and care about or restrain myself from sharing my thoughts.
  2. As long as my conscience is clear, I don’t want to care about what other people think. If people will react negatively to what I do or write and they don’t have the guts to tell me upfront, then they can all go to hell.
  3. Life is all about having fun…so I’m going to have fun.

This is the beauty of hanging out with girlfriends. We get to talk of things and they give me advices that make sense, one of which is a validation that I’m doing some things right.

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Afternoon Delight at Starbucks

The plan was just to get caramel sundae at McDonald’s but what was supposed to be just less than a 5-minute drive turned out to be more than an hour joyride that lead us to Starbucks, three suburbs away from where we live.

This Starbucks branch has a drive-thru…

During winter, I always order their Signature Hot Chocolate. The Husband ordered for the both of us and surprised me by requesting the barista to add marshmallows on top 🙂 How sweet. He knows that I love marshmallows.

Then he added a dash of chocolate powder on top before handing it over to me. 🙂

I brought along baon for our afternoon snack–Hopia Combi (queso and ube). We were supposed to really eat these had we stayed home so I brought it with me.

Other than eat, we just hung out there for a bit, enjoyed our drinks and cam whored. We were both in the mood to practice taking shots using the 50mm lens. I haven’t been using it lately as I primarily used the 18-55mm lens (that one I broke) for blogging. So now, I need to brush up my skills on the 50mm since I think I will be using this more often. Thru the use of this lens, I realized na lalo kong napa-practice ang pagtanggal ng camera shakes ko and for me, that’s one of the most important things in order to achieve a good photograph. One may know the technicalities of photography but if you are prone to camera shakes, the photos you’ve captured could be useless. I’ve had so many photos that was put to waste just because it was blurry due to camera shakes. After two years of doing photography and a lot of pang-aasar from the Husband (my best and worst critic), thank goodness, I’m improving.

Anyway, we went home with more than a hundred photographs just by hanging out for 45 minutes at Starbucks. That is quite normal for us. Pag nasa cafe kami at kung nasa mood kami, sometimes wala kaming ginawa kungdi mag-pose at mag-picture. It’s like a game to us–one becomes a photographer and the other a model. Pinagtri-tripan namin ang isa’t-isa actually hehe. For example, if I’m the one holding the camera, I’d ask the Husband poses such as “galit”, “masaya”, “excited”, “natatakot”, “gigil”, “nginig”…until the requests become weirder or funnier (“kunwari nakakita mo ang ex-girlfriend mo!”)–pa-kwelahan ng utos at pose. And we’d end up laughing our hearts out when we review our photos. While reviewing the photos, pa-kwelahan naman ng captions hehe. Kababawan ever! 🙂

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Our Happy Christmas in July

In some areas of Australia, winter time is from June to August. And in those months, some parts of the country is blessed (to others it may seem as a curse hehe) with snow. So, it is only at this time of the year that people get to flock winter wonderlands to make snowmans, snow angels and ski to on snowy mountains. And when you say snowmans, it can only mean one thing–Christmas! Hence, some of us in the land down under greet each other “Merry Christmas in July!!” at this time of the year.

This winter season, instead of going to the Snowy Mountains like we did last year, the Husband and I decided to stay in snow-less Sydney and hibernate for most part of June–we just stayed home most weekends and rested after a hectic Autumn season.

This month, we finally went out and for the first time celebrated Christmas in July on 19 July 2009, a day before our 30th wedding monthsary.

We celebrated by having breakfast at the Aroma Festival at the Rocks…

and by watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at IMAX in Darling Harbour.

The Husband and I were very excited to watch this movie. We are a fan of this movie franchise!!! We’ve missed seeing an HP movie together coz when HP 4 and 5 came out in cinemas, he was still in Dubai then. So now that we are together, we decided to watch it in IMAX too because we both haven’t seen any films via IMAX here in Sydney.

We arrived in Darling Harbour at 11:15am and there was already a long queue towards the entrance of the cinema. When we bought the tickets a week prior to showing of the movie, the ticket person instructed us to be in IMAX at least an hour before show time in order to get good seats (no reserved seating kasi). Buti na lang din bumili na kami ng tickets beforehand because when we got there, sold out na lahat ng tickets for the whole day.

So we waited for like 40 minutes before we entered the cinema and true enough, it was jampacked.

Only the first 10 minutes of the film was in 3D, then the rest was in 2D. Nevertheless, we loved the film and to see it in a big screen was a bonus. It is the funniest and most romantic Harry Potter movie to-date. It made me look forward to the upcoming two HP movies.

After the film, we were both famished because we missed lunch (only had popcorn while we watched) so we decided to buy fish ‘n chips and hung out by the harbour while we ate our late lunch.

So there goes our Happy Christmas and pre-30th monthsary date this July.

In other news, feeling Christmas talaga ang aming July because of so many blessings this month:

(1) The 60th birthday of my dearest mommy which was celebrated with my in-laws and our friends.

(2) Birthday celebrations here in Aussieland: my aunt and cousin celebrated their special day.

(3) Parties with friends: Kolokoys Party on the first week of July and Wii Lunch Party with our other couple friends on the 2nd week where we discovered the amusing Wii Samba de Amigo game.

(4) Other than Harry Potter, we also watched Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen this month 🙂

(5) Christmas in July won’t be complete without gifts right? Here in also Australia, we have we what we call EOFYS or End of Financial Year Sale wherein stores nationwide mark down their prices in order to get rid of old/current stocks. Discount prices go up to 70%-80%. This is one of the best times to shop in Aussieland.

Two weeks ago, we found out that the Wii Fit is being sold for only AUD99.00. Since I’ve been wanting to own one for the longest time, but delaying it, hoping that maybe one day it will go on sale–well, it finally did 🙂 So voila, we now have our very own Wii Fit :).

We can always feel like Christmas in our hearts but setting a day or month to honor and celebrate Christmas in the middle of the year is such a wonderful experience too. Celebrating Christmas in July gave us that warm fuzzy feeling in the middle of winter season which surely gave us a lot of excitement even if we didn’t have to go somewhere far.

Now isn’t it wonderful to have two CHRIStmases in one year????

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Today is Marriage Sunday

After the communion in Sunday mass today, our parish priest announced that today is Marriage Sunday, a day of honoring Husbands and Wives married via the Sacrament of Matrimony. He called on a couple who is celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, offered a special prayer for them and blessed them.

I have always considered witnessing a couple say “I do” infront of God such a beautiful miracle, but seeing a couple who had been thru 25 years together and still look very happy is one extraordinary miracle.

When the mass was over, we had a moment to chitchat with our friend, Sister Clare, a nun who is also a part of the parish’s ministry whom we met during the World Youth Day in Sydney last year. For a short time, we were able to exchange stories of what’s happening in our respective lives and even acknowledged that it has been a year since WYD. How time flies.

Part of our update with Sister Clare was our story of “playing house, playing husband and wife for real” coz at the time we met, we told her we were looking for a place to stay. Since we touched on the subject of marriage, Sister Clare mentioned that she thought that since today is “Marriage Sunday”, the parish priest would ask all the married couples to stand up and be blessed. She reckon the parish priest changed his mind since there was also a baby that needed to be blessed (pre-christening rites).

Surprisingly, before we all said goodbye, Sister Clare held our (Chris and I’s) hands in her hands and said a short prayer for us. I didn’t realized it at first, but when she said “I hope God bless you more each day that you are together…”, I knew right there and then that she was blessing us due to today being Marriage Sunday. It was such an amazing moment. Chris and I walked out of the church feeling at peace and blessed more than ever. The prayer and blessing that Sister Clare gave us this morning is one surprise gift we will always treasure.

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