2020 Roundup

It was March 15 of this year when I posted on Instagram a photo of a near empty BGC with the caption, “That moment when you realize that it’s actually happening. 2020 wth!” I was exhausted, and it was a bittersweet moment of defeat for me. I had to drop all routine and give up on every pre-existing plan throughout the year in order to live. This year was a matter of survival, mentally, financially, and physically.

One of the most comforting words I read was from Pope Francis. A month into the lockdown he said, “Tonight before falling asleep think about when we will return to the street. When we hug again, when all the shopping together will seem like a party. Let’s think about when the coffees will return to the bar, the small talk, the photos close to each other. We think about when it will be all a memory but normalcy will seem an unexpected and beautiful gift. We will love everything that has so far seemed futile to us. Every second will be precious. Swims at the sea, the sun until late, sunsets, toasts, laughter. We will go back to laughing together. Strength and courage. See you soon!” 

Holding onto hope...holding onto that faithful day when all will be back to normal was something that kept most of us going. This was the year I had planned on pushing a lot of my pending dreams, particularly on travelling and making the most money I can in my life. Both of which was put on halt and took a detour.

My first trip in 2020 was in Siquijor. This was right after New Year.

I was barely able to take photos in Puerto Galera. Didn't swim either. I just ate.

My Top 2020 Whatevers

Heart Pumping: It was during a fire in one of the close-by communities where I lived. I was bored in my room when I heard fire truck after fire truck rushing pass our road. When I heard more than twelve trucks had passed, I went out and saw a huge brown smoke billowing up the sky. I went for a walk to the source of the smoke and got to the street where the trucks were parked, the red light on their sirens still turning. I managed to arrive close to a fire-out, but the firemen were still rushing, pulling their hoses towards the inner streets where the fire was. It was a cluster of shanty houses that were burning, and I could feel a slight heat in the breeze from the fire, the concrete road flowing with water that came from the fire hydrants. There were people lining the streets, residents carrying a few of their items to be saved from the fire, the rest were locals waiting for gossips. I went around the street, simply walking and absorbing the energy of the place because I missed the atmosphere of a crowded place right after months of quarantin. I stood for a bit at the intersection where the roads met, because the fire was right between the fork. Since I entered in one side of the fork, I decided to pass by the other side on my way back home. As I made my way to enter the narrow road the electric post exploded above me, sending sparks of fire to fall as close as two feet to where I stood. I heard the cracking sound of the electricity emit thousands of voltage in the air and I saw people screaming and the fireman yelling at us to get back. I covered my head and retreated running with a few other people that were also passing by that area. My feet were wet from having to trudge through the watered streets, and I didn’t have anything with me to identify who I was had it turned for the worst. A couple of meters away I turned back to see the electric post catch fire, an electric sound could be heard as sparks kept falling off the wires. I heard the firemen hastening to call the electric company to cut the power off the entire block as the pole that caught on fire was made of wood and was slightly leaning with bundles of black wires intertwined on top. I felt the world stopped at that moment, like one of those slow motion sequences from action movies. That shook me out of my boredom and I went home energized.

Unexpected: Need I say it? This whole Covid-19 fiasco.

Magical Moment: Seeing the rising of the Pink Moon last April 8 peek out of from behind the tree line that was right beyond the horizon at eye-level. The pink moon was the largest full moon of the year. I was with a friend from Romania, and she’s so much into nature and magical stuff. She loves the moon, so I invited her for a walk in to a spot where I’ve seen a lot of moonrises in the hopes to see it in its largest state. We left the condo a little early right around sunset, but didn’t see anything after standing at my spot for a long time. We decided to go to the supermarket to buy some groceries instead. It was dark by the time we walked home. Public transportation wasn’t allowed at that time yet so we took our time, leisurely walking home. We kept looking up in the sky to look for the moon, expecting to see it above our heads. When we reached a point in the road that was next to an open field, she asked me to stop and just stand there for a bit. We were chatting with plastic bags on our hands, and at one point I turned to the other side of the sky silently whispering to the universe to show us her moon. Suddenly I heard my friend scream, “It’s here! It’s here!” excitedly jumping up and down. I looked at her and saw her eyes lit in amazement. She was pointing towards the edge of the tree line. There a huge orange ball was starting to reveal itself. It was like seeing a sunrise, except that it was the moon slowly rising above the large grass field. We both stood there, elated and astounded at the beauty of the moon. I can only describe that moment as magical. 

Casa Mia at Puerto Galera where I had a very good meal with Paolo and Angela.

This was our pre-summer trip to Anawangin before the lockdown.

Most Stressful: I guess it was somewhere mid-year and I was getting exhausted with having to deal with the lockdown. It was roughly around this time when I found out that I was an empath because a friend was living with us during quarantine, and it was at this point when I felt this erratic negative energy overcome me. I felt her anxiety and distress just overpower my aura that no matter how hard I tried to overcome the negative energy I just fell deeper and deeper into a pit until I had to seclude myself for a couple of weeks to recover from that trauma. It was probably the most miserable energy I felt in a very long time. But I’m glad we were able to overcome that phase and we’ve recovered from that point on.

Most Annoying: Getting a South Korea Visa. Why??? Because I had to resubmit my application at least 5 times before the travel agency accepted our application form. And this was happening during a very inconvenient time because I was going from one place to another and I was after a deadline while our friend was waiting for us to mail our forms 800 kilometers away. And you know what? We did get our Visas approved…but we didn’t get to go because of the lockdown. We were supposed to leave last April until May. This is my second failed attempt to go to Korea. Grrr…

Scariest: It’s that moment right before I opened the results of my Rt-PCR Test. We were at our hotel room in quarantine as the government mandated that every LSI (Locally Stranded Individual) arriving in Bacolod must undergo swab testing and quarantine before being allowed to go out. I hated the swab test, it was a few seconds of discomfort. The nostril part was bearable, but the throat part took a lot of restraint not to throw up, but I was seriously gaging. Now it could’ve been a less anxious experience had I not been having a sore throat. The thing is, a few days prior to our trip I ate so much pastries from Bebe Rouge with the knowledge that it'll be months before I head back to Manila. You know that feeling you get when you know you had a little too much of a good thing? Well, it was that one instance of biting their strawberry cream puff when I felt that I’ve reached my limit and I was sure to have a tonsillitis by then. Which I did, immediately the day after. And so…I knew I got my sore throat from sweets, but I didn’t know how much of it would affect the testing result. And so the 48-hour wait for the result of the test was really bad for me, especially those few seconds right before opening my email to see if I was positive or negative of covid-19. Thankfully it turned out negative, and that felt like a load off my chest.

Andrew and Jo Anne's wedding. Our gift to them was the grazing table on the left.

Chicken Studio Bayan Branch. This was the branch I managed from Feb-Aug.

Worst: It’s that moment when it first dawned on me that the lockdown was actually happening and that I was expecting the worst kind of pandemic knowing that I won’t be with my parents should anything happen to them. My greatest fear then was that no one will be there with them should things turn for the worst. It was most horrible feeling of dread and helplessness at an unpredictable situation.

Frustrating: It’s having to close all of our stores and telling our employees that we can’t do anything more other than help them a bit with monetary effort and relief goods. As well as permanently closing two branches of Chicken Studio in a span of a few months because at how badly the pandemic hit us.

Funniest: It was trying to pull a prank on our friend Andrew to try and make him drink the horrible tasting but healthy King Herbal juice. My brother and I made him take a shot expecting a gaging expression after chugging it down, but he didn’t flinch and even said it was tasty. I saw how my brother stared at him with perplexity and disappointment as his plan backfired. Andrew then turned to his wife and convinced her of how tasty it was, and that she too should take a shot of the coveted miracle juice. With hesitation, but trusting him anyway, she took the shot and immediately her face was a mix of disgusted-disbelief-disappointment-distraught…it was an unpaintable expression of all things negative. We all started laughing, while Andrew revealed that he did everything he could to not pucker his face in order to double-cross his wife because he knew she doesn’t eat vegetables. She described the drink as like shoveling up all the leaves, grass and dirt on the street then blending those up into that juice drink. We all were crying from laughing too much at each other that it still makes me giggle trying to recall it. 

Un-luckiest Moment: It was a series of unfortunate events in a span of about two weeks. The first was my air conditioning unit stopping from getting cold because the Freon leaked empty and I was stuck with a warm electric fan every night that made for really sweaty evenings and uncomfortable sleep. The second was my room clock breaking after the battery exploded in it. The next day was when I got locked out of my laptop because after several attempts of typing an incorrect password I got locked out. It was only after activating it again with a different pin did I realize that several keys on my keyboard had stopped working…like ten of them. I had to type using either the desktop keys or by copy-pasting the letters and numbers. I refused to buy another laptop considering the situation, but thankfully a friend made the perfect suggestion of buying a keyboard instead, that I now use and easily solved my problem. The day after my laptop keyboard broke, I hit my hand on the doorframe while holding my cellphone, and that sent it flying in the room and cracking my phone’s LCD. It happened at a time when I decided not to spend…and I ended up needing to spend for circumstances beyond my control. 

Stupidest: It’s repeatedly making the same mistakes when buying and selling stocks…it’s not following my strategy and allowing fear to make the decision for me. I’ve made a couple of wrong moves trying to position in the market. Entering the wrong trade set me back months before being able to recover my losses...as well as letting go of a stock right before a breakout. Part of the learning curve I guess.

Regretful: Joining the stock market just a few months after the March market crash. The profit I could have gotten had I started in March would be more than six-fold.  

Dumaguete is a city I go to every year for the last four years.

Our ECQ Food Challenge

Some of the food made by my competition for our ECQ Food Challenge.

Coolest: Having a stranger let me ride the side of his motorcycle to drop me off where I was going. It was still during the ECQ (Enhanced Community Quarantine) when I had to walk a lot in order to buy supplies and groceries for our household since I was the one with the ID pass. I was walking on the side of the road because commuting was not allowed then, when a guard riding a motorcycle with a side cart stopped in front of me and asked me to hop on. I hesitated, but then gave in when he insisted. Since the side car was for supplies and not people, I had to stand on the side car, holding onto whatever I could hold on to and it just felt cool standing there with the wind on my face and an empty road. 

Heart Warming: It was on my first virtual exhibit for a fundraising drive for the jeepney drivers who were displaced by the lockdown called “Para Po Sa Inyo Ito Virtual Art Exhibit and Fundraising Driver” that I shared the post to bookmark as well as let the word out about the fundraising to my circle in case they might donate. What they did was that they shared my post in support hoping that they might tap a market that was willing to buy my paintings in order to help the cause. It was really nice find words of encouragement on what was supposed to be a small effort in order to support the local community during this pandemic.

Proudest Moment: Being able to participate in my first ever art exhibit, and being able to sell my paintings for the first time to raise money for a cause that I have been wanting to support.

Cutest: It was playing with my friend’s two-month old Pomeranian puppy name Pomelo. He could fit right on my hand and is adorably cute that I loved carrying him around like a baby.

Most Fun: Our ECQ Food Challenge Cook Off thing. ECQ Food Challenge

Wildest: It was our trip to Siquijor at the start of the year. It was so random because I went with my cousin and her family with the intention of going to Apo Island…so we made the trip to Dumaguete only to wake up the next day and see the water getting turbulent due to an impending storm. So instead of Apo Island we took the roro to Siquijor, and we had three hours to tour the island before heading back to the mainland. The quickest way to explore the island is just to drive around it after dipping in the cold waters of Cambugahay waterfalls. It was fun to have been able to go on that trip with my family plus my uncle who loved to tour us around and be spontaneous.

Most Challenging: Managing and running a 70-seater restaurant with twelve employees and at full capacity. Seriously, running a restaurant is not easy…it takes so much of you especially when peak hours last for more than four hours straight of nonstop customers. I was fueled by adrenaline for quite some time there. 

Some of the food I made for our ECQ Food Challenge

More food we did during the lockdown. It was strawberry season then.

Awe-Inspiring: It was seeing two of my close friends get married. I love them both to bits, and witnessing them end up together is precious.

OMG Moment: Overhearing a certain conversation I was not supposed to hear…or perhaps was meant to hear? 

Heartbreaking Moment: Our grandmother died on Christmas day this year, and on the evening of her death I hugged my mom just to comfort her, and it was the first time I saw her breakdown crying. When she fell into tears and said, "I had already prepared myself that she will on day rest, and I have accepted her death...but I still lost my mother." Those words broke my heart to a thousand pieces, and it felt like being stabbed to have to be the one strong for her this time...but the pain was too much to bear that I felt scarred long after it happened.

Incomprehensible: Having felt when my grandmother died. I left the house minutes before she passed away. I dropped by her room before going out to buy a few things, and I was at the mall when I was overcome with an overwhelming feeling of grief. I could not explain it, so I dropped by the chapel praying my constant prayer, "let Thy will be done." I rushed out the mall because I felt nauseous and anxious, it felt like a prelude to a panic attack. I went in the car and started to drive home, and as I was making my way back to the house I couldn't help but take a detour to just weep inside the car because of the overbearing emotion of melancholy that I couldn't contain. And after calming myself for I bit, I drove home and saw several cars parked in front of the house. My heart dropped. I opened the gate and was greeted by my uncle with a serious expression. I entered the house, went straight to my grandmother's room and saw several family members crying around her bed. Apparently she died roughly at the time when I suddenly felt distressed in the mall. I couldn't believe at how much stronger my empathic sense has gotten until this happened.  

Best Feeling: It was on the boat ride from Manila to Bacolod. I was at the deck of the boat with two of the guys closest to me, and it was just the three of us plus some girl at the other end of the railing. It was around 10:30pm and we were stargazing over a clear sky above us while clouds were looming far at the horizon. As we watched where the sea kissed the clouds, the moon in golden hue slowly rose, peaking out right in front of us like the sun. This was the second magical and perfect feeling of calm that I felt this year. After months of longing for home, this moment made us beam from ear to ear, a perfect prelude a new chapter of our lives. I stood there, leaning against the railing, feeling the calming presence of the two souls dearest to me, and having a sense of elation knowing that in a matter of hours I'll be home. For a long time we didn't say a word, our mouths gaping in silence at how wonderful that moment was.  

Some of the favorite things I cooked during quarantine.

Some of the things I did during quarantine. I made the photobooks happen that was part of my 2020 bucket list. I also made a new painting that I'm very happy with.

Some of the best things I ate this 2020

Best Discovery: How to make gogosi…now it’s my favorite kind of donut. Learning how to trade in the stock market, as well as copy trading. Utilizing the wonders of using molasses as an ingredient. Finding Bebe Rouge at Makati.

Favorite 2020 Drink: Peach flavored Soju with Yakult, Woolloomooloo Espresso Roast from Toby’s Estate, Malagos Spicy Hot Chocolate  

Favorite 2020 Food: Soft tofu jjigae that I cooked a lot since I watched Itaewon Class, Instant noodles…I must’ve eaten so many packs this year thanks to the pandemic that made me get tired of eating my own cooking

Best Thing I Ate: Burnt Basque Cheesecake from Perfect Pint, Cow Cow Kitchen Milk Pie, Pulpo from La Picara

Favorite 2020 Dessert: Sapin Sapin with Salted Egg Sauce from Planet Grapes,  Brunt Basque Cheesecake by Chele Gonzalez, Gogosi doused in wild honey or melted chocolate truffle

Favorite 2020 Restaurant: Garnet 403 and Casa Mia

My favorite piece at Pinto Art on the bottom left.

Random shots of what we went through to get home.

My brother's table for his birthday on the left, and my birthday preparation on the right.

Unforgettable Meal: The meal at Casa Mia in Puerto Galera that started at 5pm and ended at 1am.

 

Weirdest Thing I Ate: This year was far too limited to eat anything out of the ordinary. Probably the Romanian vegetable stew called varza that my Romanian friend cooked that had lemon, pepper, tomato, and cabbage and tasted like a less acidic sauerkraut but in a soup form.  

Favorite 2020 Hang Out: Our balcony and our kitchen

Favorite 2020 Songs: Love Like That by Snoh Aalegra, Didn’t I by One Republic, Mean It by Lauv & LANY, Underdog by Alicia Keys, The Mission Main Theme by Ennio Morricone, Rain by Faime, Pagtingin by Ben&Ben, Ocean by Martin Garrix

Favorite 2020 Movies: Friend Zone a Thai movie

 

Favorite 2020 People: Rex Mendoza whose video was the one that convinced me to take the plunge and invest in stocks during these uncertain times in order to ride the upward trend. Marvin Germo who basically made it easier for me to understand the concept of technical analysis, as well as those from Investa University. Philip Rosenthal, the host of Somebody Feed Phil...I just love him.

Will Be Most Missed in 2020: Our Chicken Studio Bayan branch since it was the branch that I was managing. Some of my laptop’s keyboard keys. I lost a lot of my keys one morning that I had to buy a keyboard that connects to my USB socket in order to type properly. 

Some of the things I made for my new business Garnet 403.

More random snippets during GCQ.

Achievement Unlocked this 2020:

1. Starting my solo food business Garnet 403

2. Learning how to make chorizo, and selling them

3. Home-cooking every single meal daily for two consecutive months

4. Painting a horse, and liking it

5. Finishing a series on Netflix: Itaewon Class and Dark Crystal

6. Learn how to trade in the stock market

7. Invest in the stock market

8. Join and sell my paintings at an art exhibit

9. Learn and accept that I'm an empath

2020 Realization: 

“Hope is not a strategy.” –Marvin Germo

Lesson Learned for 2020: 

“When you fall into water you don’t drown. You drown by staying submerged in water.” –Rex Mendoza

2020 Quotes: 

“Coffee doesn’t understand life’s complexities.” Some dude of the show Somebody Feed Phil 

First Time Places I Went to this 2020: Siquijor and Puerto Galera 

2021 Bucket List:

1. Every year, I’ll probably say this…I need to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

2. Get my life plans back on track

3. Save and invest to double or triple my assets by the end of 2021