for the love of blogging

I am so obsessed with blogs lately.

Here are my current favorites:

http://designsponge.blogspot.com/
http://chuvaness.livejournal.com/

I check on these two like a stalker. I just love how other creative, imaginative people think.

I currently have 3 other blogs myself- which of course is nearly impossible to maintain - but blog-god knows, I am trying. I am working on a project that I am really praying, wishing, hoping, and dreaming to take off real soon. I am praying for more energy, sustained passion, and constant inspiration. For all of the above, I will think of Paris - my all time inspiring place in the world. I so love to speak French someday.

Coffee HangOvers

I love mornings, especially when I don't have to work and it rains. It is quite sunny today, being summer and all. 10 am feels like noon and feels too late for anything. Anyway, the best thing about mornings is the coffee of course - although I drink the thing all day like water. I was surfing the net the other day looking for Japanese coffee cartoons but only saw above. I will search for more. I am also experimenting with the Paint program in my computer which according to my children are so "hecka" easy! I think I am Paint-challenged.

Remember those Folger's Coffee commercials? The best thing of waking up, is folgers in your cup... I love that jingle - so inspiring, motivating, and happy-inducing. I don't know but I sing it to myself when I need a small picker-upper.

I bought a french press weeks ago. Coffee drinkers elsewhere than US make their coffee with this. Mine is pink because it is the one on sale. Makes mean, strong coffee, just the way I like it. Feels very cosmopolitan, really.

I have been growing strong anti-Starbucks feelings lately. I wish we have local coffee makers here. Locals here translate to Petes and It's a Grind - yuck! I went to the latter the other week and ordered cafe americano - and it tastes like coffee with hot water which is what it was. But really, can I have coffee with integrity please? Sigh, I long for the real, grounded and subversive feel of Seattle Coffee scene....

Day Two for Us, Week After for Most

Our second day in Seattle looked more like a Frommer's List of Top Ten Sights to See if You Only Have an Hour to Burn. It was crazy. We started the day with a visit at the very modern Chapel of St. Ignatius inside Seattle University. The building looked more like a modern art museum than a Catholic chapel. It was boxy, airy and filled with natural light. Inside, the usual religious icons were represented by almost abstract and definitely modern works of art - gawk worthy was the Blessed Sacrament Chapel inside with walls covered with gilded beeswax and inscribed with prayers and a sculpture called Gratia Plena that appeared like an overflowed bowl and Virgin Mary at the same time. The choir was practicing when we visited. Everything was serene until Niko yelled "are we done here?" that echoed through the chapel. Good acoustics, bad Niko.

We went back to the Seattle Center to check out the Needle during the day - it was not as dramatic. Kind of old and dinghy. The much-talked about Music Experience Project building was kind of cool in all of its contorted and curvy glory - very showy if you ask me. Built by Frank Gehry and he made sure people knew that. We came back to the center in the afternoon to eat our dinner at the park across from the International Fountain which was quite spectacular but smelled too much of chlorine to truly enjoy. There were a lot of homeless people sprawling on the benches as well spewing invectives at strollers. Kind of sad.

We stumbled upon a whimsical Vietnamese cafe on Broadway for lunch. It was a local hang-out - our criteria for the places we wanted to eat in. For a street food vibe, a mural depicting Saigon street scene was painted on the wall. And yes, the food was good too - we had steaming pho and grilled pork sandwich. This was before we drove around for 10 minutes looking for Jimi Hendrix sculpture. We were imagining it to be grand and cloistered in a grand square somewhere - but alas, it was right next to a bus stop infront of Walgreens right on the sidewalk. Mel took his and Niko's picture right next to it anyway- having spent so much time looking for it.


Then we went to the famed Pike Place Market. I was ready for a very touristy experience and a kitschy aftertaste afterwards. But I was pleasantly surprised by its very unique character. It was crawling with tourists alright but there were so many locals too. The market has its own charming and seductive vibe - I ended up falling in love with everything in it and about it. We ended up coming back 3 more times after the first time. Alaia fell in love with a Russian bakery called Piroshky, Piroshky and its filled pastries. We all fell in love with the tiny, fluffy, warm donuts at the Dirty Dozens. We got to see the Flying Fish spectacle and even that was not tiresome. We relished the crowded alleys, the quirky stores including a book shop dedicated to the Leftist mind and a Lefty store. We even found the original Starbucks with its original topless maiden logo. Did not get coffee there though since I vowed not to drink anything but local which were yummier.


We also went to the vibrant and colorful Fremont District to check out what Sunday Market which turned out to be really fab. There were a lot of artists and craftspeople selling their wares. I scored an agate pendant which I made into a necklace and a couple of plaster shelves. Alaia got a $3 pair of pants and a string of yellow plastic beads (she is in her 80's phase right now). We walked around and checked out the troll underneath the bridge. There was an improv-style Shakesperean play when we went so we only lingered for a moment to take a picture. We also found Lenin (of all things) in the middle of a square where gelato and tacos were also sold.

At the Pioneer Square in downtown, we checked out the really old buildings and the biggest book store ever - the Elliott Bay Bookstore. I got a book there about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary - a tale of intrique, murder and insanity - yum!




At the Volunteer Park - the largest park in Seattle designed by the same guy responsible for New York's Central Park, we checked out the Black Sun sculpture by Isamu Noguchi (as in Noguchi lamps); climbed the medieval looking and feeling Water Tower - all 116 steps of it; visited the Botanical garden (although the kids abandoned us at this point); and almost made it to Bruce Lee's gravesite if not for sheer exhaustion.

We did not get back to the hotel until past 10 that night and we collectively crushed into our beds like fallen bodies. We needed a real vacation after that....

Seattle Day One

At the Wharf - peppy bunch even after the lonnnnng ride!

Alaia and Mel mugging it up at Seattle.

Most people will crash after a 12 hour drive - especially if it is almost 7pm in the evening. But not us - nope, sireeee! Barely did our feet touch our hotel carpet and off we went to our first must-go-see in my list! Which was long.

1. Went down to the wharf and checked out the harbor.

2. Had the obligatory fish and chips wharf fare.

3. Scored free ice cream from a fellow Pinoy shopboy.

4. Photographed by a homeless man on the wharf.

5. Checked out the restaurant made famous in the movie "Sleepless in Seattle" where Tom Hanks contemplated entering the dating scene once more.

6. Induged Niko's game cravings at the old arcade.

7. Walked up the Harbor Steps to downtown - what a climb!

Niko and I at the park over the Freeway in the middle of downtown!

Mel and I at the Steps.

Downtown Seattle.

8. Saw bunch of this kind of porky everywhere - here is an Italian one at the steps.

9. Niko at the junction.

10. The never-ceasing Hammering Man made of iron and steel fronting the Seattle Art Museum.

11. Here is the famous Space Needle at night. We did not intend to see this first night but it was just so everywhere so went up close and personal. We are glad we did because it lost half of its charm during the day. And no we did not climb it - we wanted to see it.

We caught the sunset just in time back at the Wharf.

And this was just the first day.

Slept in Seattle

And so we went. Will talk more about the trip later. Have to go to bed - it is now morning.

Sleepless for Seattle

In about 3 days, our road trip to Seattle will begin. True to my usual obsessive ways, I have been reading up on Seattle as if I am about to conquer it - which truly, I will. Someone had said that "a traveler without knowledge is a traveler without wings" and I believe that. I cannot wait to see the Space Needle up close and personal and to plunge deep into the depths of the Pike Place Market.

Sometimes I move furnitures around in the middle of the night just so I'd feel like I accomplished something that day. And I don't mean just moving chairs from one corner to another. I mean actually displacing things like beds, full-size sofas, big-ass TV's, wall bookcases to a completely different part of the house - an extreme make-over so to speak - at two hours before the next morning. Crazy, but fulfilling. Anyway, I have been in such a slump since graduation. My theory is that moving forward from here on now would be impossible until I can clean up my closet which looks terrorized to say the least since the beginning of this year. I had been looking for a white North Face T-shirt since March and I was afraid that it had been lying dead underneath all those piles in my closet waiting for me to rescue it! Well, it took me about a week, but I was finally able to start the cleaning process. See the story unfold here:

To give away - bye, bye Spanish Belts.

Two boxes of "not-feeling" it clothes - not good, not good.
I loved these only last year.
Lonely, empty hangers.
These are the only ones left.
Of course now that my closet is practically empty, all I can think of is to buy new clothes.