Meeting Up With Friends

I've started to meet up with people more often recently. First, my high school classmate Jeff was in Manila so many of our batchmates met up with him for dinner at Florabel in Estancia. It was really nice catching up with people I hadn't talked to face-to-face in years over good food. I ordered the Grilled Prawns and Salmon in Uni Lemon Butter Sauce served with Adlai Truffle Rice because I wanted something a bit light.

Grilled Prawns and Salmon in Uni Lemon Butter Sauce from Florabel

Dinner ended when Florabel closed and while most folks headed home, a few of us decided to look for some place that was still open because we didn't feel like heading home yet. We decided to have a few drinks at Tipsy Pig. We called it a night at around 130 to 2am, making this only the second time since the pandemic started that I stayed out until past midnight.

A week later, I met up with my friend Eliza for an al fresco lunch at Brotzeit in Shangri-La Mall. A lot had gone on in our respective lives since we last saw each other and we spent a few hours catching up. We probably could've talked even longer if not for a smoker who sat next to us and made it a bit (a lot) uncomfortable. I guess staying indoors at home for a couple of years means I'm not used to secondhand cigarette smoke anymore. That said, we were there long enough for me to have merienda haha. I got the Kaiserschmarren which is shredded rum raisin pancakes served with plum sauce. I realized this was the wrong item for me to order because it was quite heavy, which wasn't ideal since I was still a bit full from lunch.

Kaiserschmarren from Brotzeit

My plan after meeting up with Eliza was to do a few errands at the mall before heading home. As I was buying some banana bread, I heard someone call out my name. It was my friend and ex-colleague Gabbie. She was there planning to buy some meds from Mercury drugstore but the line was so long so I told her there was another Mercury on the 5th floor. I walked with her there - they didn't have the meds she was looking for - and we ended up just hanging out. She wanted to have am extremely late lunch but I was still so full so we got a table in Cibo where she had a proper meal while I just had coffee. It was past 8 when we parted ways. I hadn't intended to stay that late but the unexpected catch-up was a very pleasant surprise.

We also talked about trying to meet up with our other friend Marie and soon after that, we were all chatting over messenger, trying to find a common schedule. And just like that, a couple of weeks later, we all met up for an early dinner in Rockwell. Since we hadn't seen Marie in a while, we felt that meeting up earlier was ideal so we would have more time together. We had dinner in Nikkei before moving to UCC for drinks and dessert. (We were thinking of either Starbucks or UCC but we decided UCC was better because they served beer haha.) We stayed there until UCC closed.

It's really been a good last few weeks in terms of getting to meet up face-to-face with people. It looks like physical meetings with people is slowly but surely becoming part of the new normal (or next normal, whatever it's called).