This stress eating better stop soon or else I’ll become so big that even my dog won’t recognize me anymore.

During my mini food binges at Ayala Mall (a short walk away from where I work), a couple of personal food favorites have emerged. I’m like my Mom that when I fall in love with a certain dish in a certain restaurant, I keep coming back for more.

Sometimes, I would set out intending to explore other restos. But my cravings would eventually rope me back to my favorites.

So far, here are my top chows in Cebu (so far):

1. Teriyaki Boy Chicken, Teriyaki Boy
Teriyaki Boy – Ayala Cebu Terraces
2nd Level, The Terraces, Ayala Center Cebu, Mindanao Ave., Cebu, 6000
Phone:(032) 231 2792

I thought Rai Rai Ken’s Teriyaki Chicken was the best I’ve tasted until I tried Teriyaki Boy’s. Goodness. The chicken is tender and coated with a rich, smoky sauce that is just to die for. And their rice… it’s soft and chewy with a bit of flavor in it. I can’t quite pin the taste down but it’s yummy.

Just be prepared, though, because they only give chopsticks to customers. I’ve asked for a spoon and fork but the waiter said they don’t have any available. I was forced to learn how to use the chopsticks on my own right away.

2. Tuna Belly, Chikaan
Address: Salinas Dr, Cebu City
Phone:(032) 233 0358

Chikaan was the nearest restaurant to the condo where I used to stay in Salinas Drive. This is the only dish I’ve eaten in Chikaan and I’m hooked. The tuna was grilled to perfection, a little charred on the edges yet lusciously juicy inside. Paired with their garlic rice, it’s a combo made in seventh heaven.

3. Garlic Chicken BBQ, Jonie’s Sizzlers & Roast
SM City Cebu

The sauce on their Garlic Chicken BBQ is downright sinful. It’s so delicious the taste lingers days after you’ve eaten it. Plus they give you an extra container of the sauce! So you can pour it on the chicken to your heart’s delight.

4. Bangus Meal, Red Ribbon
Level 1, Ayala Mall Cebu

Bangus + garlic. My two favorites. Don’t even compare this to Jollibee’s Garlic Bangus, which has a too strong burnt garlic aftertaste. Red Ribbon’s reminds me of the Bangus meal I used to eat a lot of at Sweet Choices, a quaint, boutique cafe that’s now closed, unfortunately, in Dumaguete City. RR’s bangus dish has just the right amount of toasted garlic on it,and the bangus belly slices are fried crispy on the outside but tender inside.

I know Cebu has a lot more foodgasmic feasts to offer that I have yet to try (like Zubuchon for lechon) but I have to rein the cravings in if I don’t want to bloat like a balloon.

Natashya showed how she can single-handedly cover a news event with only her iPhone, a tripod, laptop, and a wifi connection. She just needs to film a presscon or an interview using her iPhone. Then hook up her iPhone to her laptop, connect to the net, upload the video and then type out a brief story. Within minutes, she’s posted her news video on the Rappler website with Rappler’s social media team rabidly tweeting the heck out of it.

Basically, Natashya’s broken the news online while reporters from the traditional media outlets, particularly the TV crews with their humungous cameras, are still on their way back to the studio to edit their footages and their reporters readying their scripts for stand-uppers or VOs (voice overs).

Digital media coverage means lesser warm bodies needed for coverage, and faster dissemination of news to the audience.

That got me thinking hard. A hundred bulbs were lighting up like crazy in my head.

Since we at Philippine Information Agency are already multi-media reporters, sort of (not by choice but by circumstance) a digital media coverage like what Rappler’s reporters are doing should come naturally for us, right?

So I pulled some heavy strings and asked the chief of PTV Visayas, Alex Rey Pal, to show us the ropes in producing digital cutspots – or brief news videos – that we can post online. Turns out, Sir Alex is the McGyver Pinoy version. He taught us not only the basics in digital news video production (from taking footages to scriptwriting to doing the VOs), but also how to DIY it in view of limited resources.

A couple of rubber bands and binder clips. Who knew how far it can get you?

We already have a tripod at work, along with boxes of binder clips and rubber bands. Now, we only need an iPhone! (Sir Alex uses an iPhone for his cutspots that he sends to PTV for airing.) No fancy videocams needed.

Sir Alex taught us what we needed to know to make this work, like how to take the film shots properly since the same rules apply whether it’s digital or not. Like continuity of direction, being conscious of The Axis, angles, framing/composition, etc.

Since we don’t have an iPhone yet, we are using instead my personal iPad, which works perfectly fine as well.

From the iPad, I transfer the video files to my personal (again) MacBook via the Photo Transfer App. Then Ver, our resident AV tech wizard, edits the videos on iMovie. The reporter then writes up the script, a copy of which is given to Ver to guide him in his editing. Afterwards, using the earphone w/ a built-in mic, the reporter and Ver coops up in a closed room where they can do the voice over.

Then Ver scrubs, polishes, stitches the videos and audio together (all the magic happens in iMovie) until it becomes shiny enough to be posted online.

To date, we’ve released 7 episodes under our special project we dubbed iCebu. You can check them out on our YouTube channel here.

I can’t end this post without wishing out loud: we need an iPhone and a Macbook at the office. The ones we’re using are my own personal gadgets.  You see, I’ve been using my personal Mac at work for a long time now. I don’t have an official computer at work. So we mostly have to put off working on the cutspots if I need to use the Macbook to finish office reports.

You might be wondering why it has to be an iPhone and a Macbook, considering their price. Well, that’s because we’ve discovered the seamless integration between these two Apple products. No more file conversions needed. And editing movies on iMovie is like slicing butter with a hot knife. It’s so darn easy and fast. We can all thank Steve Jobs for that!

It’s been around 4 months that I’ve started working here, yet I still have to fully settle. To call it culture shock underestimates what I’ve been through, and still going through actually. It’s still an adjustment phase for me, one that I feel will stretch for quite some time.

The adjustment involves dealing with a different way of doing things, or a certain way of not doing things. More people, more challenging personalities, more (impossible, ahem) tasks, more sleepless nights. The stress level has been so high I feel like my feet has yet to touch ground.

To thicken the plot, the tables have been turned and I’m  now a manager. (I got that promotion I was talking about in my blog post here) You know how bosses are always portrayed as the monsters in TV and movies, like in Horrible Bosses? Being a new boss, I don’t want to come across as pushy and mean, but I also don’t want my staff to see me as weak and insipid. (Although if I looked like Jennifer Aniston, I’d probably get away with it!) It’s a tricky balancing act that I haven’t fully grasped yet. My mentality is still that of a worker bee, not the queen bee.

To be put in an environment like this far from your support group of family and friends is agonizing. Although some co-workers have been quite understanding and sympathetic, it’s really not enough. I find myself counting down to Friday, desperate for the haven of home in Dumaguete despite the 5-hour travel back and forth. Friday can’t come fast enough. I now dread Sundays, the day I have to travel back to Cebu.

I know it’s only been four months, but looking back I can already tick off several harrowing mini-storms that I’ve survived for my baptism of fire. Plus, there’s the upcoming 48-hour coverage for the Philippine elections. I shudder just thinking about it.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve faced many fears already: fear of hosting, of delegating tasks to other people, of making executive decisions, the list can go on. But things are looking better now, actually. My Dad was right: the first time is always the hardest.

(Photo: That’s me on the left co-hosting a Kapihan forum.)

I wish there was a honeymoon period for me. What I got instead is a babe-in-the-woods, sink or swim experience. There was no mentoring period, the switch from staff to boss was quite abrupt. There was no time for me to test out the new cap and find a comfortable fit. But this is how dogs learn how to swim, right? Just throw them into the water, and they’ll eventually learn how to paddle.

Like I said, sink or swim. Right now, I’m somewhere in between.

My father turned 78 years old on April 3.

I was in Cebu on his birthday, so we had a belated, intimate birthday party the weekend I came home. It was a party of three. Like I said, intimate.  He just wanted to find out what frozen yogurt tastes like, and why I’m so fond of it. Our little party took place on one of those circular benches inside Robinson’s Place. We scooped up chocolate syrup-drizzled yogurt with the tiny plastic spoons from tiny styrofoam cups. Dad enjoyed every spoon-licking second of it.

I can’t believe he’ll be hitting 80 soon. Fingers crossed that “soon” will not come too fast. My parents growing old is something that I can’t wrap my head around for now. It’s not a fact. I want it to be pure fiction.

I know. I’m in denial stage.

I sometimes wonder what would happen if I die. Nobody else knows my passwords. How would my blog readers know that I’ve bitten the dust?

Well, good news – I’m still alive. The reason for the long, deep silence here is that my life has taken some pretty sharp blind curves lately.

I got that promotion that I’ve been talking about in this post. Since then, topsy-turvy is how I would best describe my life has become. Good thing the KL trip happened way before things started going crazy.

Before you go all go gushing congratulatey on me, let me play the Devil’s advocate for a change. The promotion came with a big responsibility and not much of a raise. I work for the government, so that’s a given. Whatever increase in my salary goes to my new set of expenses – boarding house, food, transportation – since I’m now based in another city in another island-province.

In fact, if I go really OC on the nitty-gritty details, the new added expenses even sets me back a few hundred pesos compared to when I was still slaving away in Dumaguete City.

That’s why they call working in the government public service, I guess.

But because this was a step up in my career path, I chose to plod ahead and gave myself a pat on the back after I got promoted.

I’ll try to talk about my new responsibilities, the highs and lows of it all, in my next post. For now, this is just to let you know that I’m alive and well. So keep calm and nobody call the cops. You can also stop printing those MISSING flyers now.

That makes two out-of-the-country trips this year for me. Both for free. I must have done something right somewhere, sometime ago for God to be blessing me a lot this year.

My generous host for my KL trip, for purposes of privacy due to his work, will be known from hereon as James Bond. (I know for a fact that he will just love this. He’s a huge James Bond fan).

James Bond and I met and bonded when we wrote for our college paper not so many years ago *cough*. I always thought that he would make a great journalist, but he chose a field in the Sciences, instead. Journalism’s loss is now the gain of geothermal industry.

JB and his beautiful wife welcomed me into their plush crib located in the swanky commercial area of Kuala Lumpur. They live, conveniently, just a stone’s throw away from the Petronas Towers.

I have a lot to write about my three-day experience in Kuala Lumpur, but I’m going to reserve the nitty-gritty details for later posts. For now, I’ll focus on the highlights and the lowlights of it all.

Cebu Pacific: I love you and hate you

I flew Cebu Pacific all the way for my KL trip, from Dumaguete to  Manila to KL and back again. I like Cebu Pacific because they make traveling on a budget possible. There’s always an airfare promo around the corner. Plus they hold games onboard with three winners to walk away with CebPac goodies. Free stuff! Who doesn’t love free stuff?

CebPac FTs during one of their onboard games

But with low fares and seat sales like theirs, there’s always a catch somewhere. With CebPac, it’s passengers’ convenience. Their flights are always delayed (at least in my experience) and on my Manila-KL and Manila-Dgte flights, they kept switching our boarding gates. At one point, the exasperated passengers gave a collective groan after the ground crew announced again another board gate switch.

KL’s Hop-On, Hop-Off Bus

On my first 2 days at KL, I was determined to flit around on my own. James Bond was busy at work saving the world while his wife, aside from looking after their three energetic munchkins, had to attend to previous commitments. A journalist friend of mine in KL whom I was planning to meet, Bai, was sent on an unexpected overseas assignment at the last minute.

So after consulting with JB and his wife, I chose to take the Hop On Hop Off Bus. If you haven’t been on one before, I’m telling you – it’s pretty amazing! You don’t need a tour guide anymore, nor do you need a taxi to go around KL. The HOHO (why does that sound a bit awkward?) bus will take you to more than 20 tourist spots in KL. Let me walk you a bit through how I did it:

From JB’s condo building, I took a taxi to Jalan Bukit Bintang, which is one of the 4 ticket counters for HOHO in KL. This is also stop No. 6 in the HOHO bus route. I asked the taxi driver to drop me off at the HOHO ticket counter, which he did. (I assume most drivers are familiar about the HOHO). You’ll easily recognize it from the mini-booth’s hot pink color. I forgot how much the ticket cost me, but their website says it’s around RM44 for the 24-hour ticket. There’s also a ticket good for two days.

The HOHO Ticket in its signature hot pink color

There were about 10 tourists already waiting for the bus in the area. While waiting, I read the brochure that was handed to me along with my ticket from the guy in the booth. This is how it works: there are more than 40 HOHO buses – double-deckers- that ply the designated routes. The brochure lists down the tourist attractions and their corresponding bus stop number/order. Since my ticket is only for 24 hours, I have to choose which tourist spots I’d like to “hop-off” and visit.

(Note: You can download a PDF copy of the brochures and the roadmap from their website.)

In my case, I chose for my first stop after Bukit Bintang, Petaling Street or Chinatown, which is Stop No. 8. Since Bukit Bintang is Stop No. 6, I didn’t drop off in the areas on Stop No. 7. When the on-board commentary announced that the bus has arrived at Petaling Street, I hopped off and spent about an hour and a half at Chinatown (I took my breakfast there). The first thing I did after going out of the bus was to take note of the bus stop, because that’s where you have to go to wait for the next HOHO bus to hop on to. Every 30 minutes, a HOHO bus will drop by the bus stops for tourists to hop on to. Although it will be a different bus each time (they have a fleet of around 40 HOHO buses that go around everyday!), but still recognizable from the splashes of fuchsia pink and the huge “Hop On Hop Off” words scrawled at the side.

I totally dig the HOHO concept. It offers tourists a convenient way to experience what KL has to offer – from the Bird Park to Petronas Towers. Tourists in KL need not worry about where to go and how to go there.

I just thought of a cool slogan for the HOHO bus: “Visiting KL? HOHO is the way to go!”

Cheesy, I know.

Have an iPad? Go paperless.

JB, who is more of a geek than I am, suggested that I just save my e-ticket on my iPad and present it to the ticketing counters when checking in. I listened to him because the guy’s flown to several countries in the region already. But a part of me, the segurista part, still wanted to be sure, so I printed out a single copy.

Of course, JB was right. You can totally just go paperless, and show the flight crew a digital copy on your tablet. I’m guessing this works for the smartphone, too.

I love Malaysian food

I love spicy. I love flavors that have a kick in it. So I’m already predisposed to fall in love with Malay food. But I’ll blog about more about this later.

In fact, I’ll blog about the three-day trip later in a series of bite-sized posts, with dashes of pictures here and there. Stay tuned.

Now, thanks to the new iPad, I’ve been sucked into the Instagram-licious madness. I love the filters and I love the instant sharing capability. I’m also digging how the photos and the app’s UI look so glossy and gorgeous on the Retina screen! The pictures just jump out at you. This Retina thing is simply amazing.

This is how the Instagram app looks on the iPad:

Instagram on iPad

You can also toggle between the iPad screen size (above) or the iPhone screen size (below) via the 1x or 2x button on the lower right.

But of course, why settle with the phone-sized screen when you can fill the iPad screen with Retina gorgeousness!

Since I started playing around Instagram, I’ve been trying to get my Insta photos to show up on my WP blog via a sidebar widget/app. However, that’s not possible as there’s no available Instagram widget for WordPress… yet.

I tried the workaround via ink361.com  and it was fine at first, the photos appeared like they would look like on a Flickr feed. But a few days later, the photos screwed up; they somehow became so huge that you can only see a horizontal slice of the photos.

Then I read at WP’s support site that embedding the photos in a blog post is actually easy as a pie. So I guess I’ll have to settle for embeds for now, until someone out there makes an Instagram app for WP blogs.

In case you’re wondering how to get hold of your Instagram photos’ URL, just log in to Gramfeed using your Instagram log-in details. You will then see a gallery of your Instagram photos. Click on a photo, and on the upper right side, click on “Instagram Page”. You will be directed to your photo on the Instagram website with the URL in your browser’s address bar. Voila!

I post a lot of cat and food photos on my Instagram, so if you’re a cat owner/lover, feel free to follow me. You can find me there as chellelandia.

This event was an interview for a promotion. I’ve been holding the same position in my job for more than 5 years now and I feel that it’s time for a step up career-wise. Things are a bit complicated in our agency right now when it comes organizational structure, but I’m at a point in my life where I’m willing to move to Cebu if that’s what it takes for me to get this promotion.

The vacant position that I’m aiming for is open to current agency employees and outsiders. There were 2 of us vying for it. I know the other person and I know that she’s just as capable when it comes to writing and handling information programs, so I knew I had to step up my game during the interview and trade tests.

The interview went as I expected but the trade test… it was, in short, a mental hemorrhage. If I could, I would have nosebled all over the exam papers. I started the exam at 1:30 and finished it almost 5:00 p.m. For more than 3 hours, it was an exercise in mental torture as I squeezed my brain for answers. It was essay form and required me to write communication plans, re-write news items for clarity (this was the easy part), draft suggestions to address communication problems and all that. The competitive streak in me refused to let go until I’ve crossed all t’s and dotted all my i’s. By the time I was done, I felt so drained, like my brains went through a juicer and squished to a pulp. This must be how it feels like to be a zombie!

The results will be out sometime end of this month. I hope that I’ll be hearing some good news before I leave for Malaysia. It would be nice to unwind and relax in Kuala Lumpur knowing that I have been promoted.

So right after that zombie-inducing exam, I immediately chowed down on some brain fuel: food. A big plate of my favorite Max’s Fried Chicken. Nobody does fried chicken like Max’s. It’s juicy, crispy on the outside, and just so good. I always try to make it a point to eat there whenever I find myself in Cebu.

I also ordered their Sinigang na Tiyan ng Bangus (milkfish belly, my favorite!).

The sinigang was served steaming hot. The tamarind-based soup had just the right amount of sour kick in it. It was also chock full of vegetables.

My appetite (sadly or happily?) is not the same as it was before. I couldn’t finish my plate of fried chicken. I used to be able to wipe it clean!

But despite that, I felt a fresh wave of energy and enthusiasm. I guess a full stomach can do that. The next day, I left Cebu and took a bus-and-boat trip back to Dumaguete. The sun was setting as we took the boat trip. It was a wonderful view.

With Max’s delicious chicken still lingering in my taste buds, I lifted my face to the slowly descending sun, and thought: “Whatever should happen, will happen.”

There I was, lying on my bed with my iPad propped up on my chest at 10:00 PM. I usually read a book at bedtime to help me sleep, but this book wasn’t helping at all. One page would leave me teary-eyed from laughing, and the next I’m tingling from the warm, fuzzy feeling as author Davy Rothbart describes his love affair with a female character in a movie.

This book is a collection of essays from Davy Rothbart – from the time he (and eventually his brothers) played a prank on their deaf Mom as kids, his amusing yet sad experiences falling in and out of love with women (he’s attracted to cute girls with “shades” of sadness in them), swallowing a gulp of his own medicine after plotting dirty revenge on a scammer, to his road-trip misadventures meeting a colorful hodge-podge of interesting characters.

Rothbart writes wonderfully: his descriptions are picturesque, his writing honest and earnest. You can’t help but be caught up with his humor and the craziness of his outrageous schemes. If I were a guy, I’d totally love to be his wingman the next time Rothbart goes on one of his road trips. It seems that he’s a magnet for quirky, odd, and interesting people.

The guy, however, needs to stop falling in love. He’s like obsessed with the falling, and not with love itself. He craves that bittersweet process from when a crush develops to the point where it blooms to love, and then stops short there. He’s just so dang idealistic! His tragic romantic pursuits are fun to read. There are times I find myself rooting for him. At other times, I want to grab him by the neck and whack his book on his head over and over again.

I can see myself reading this book for the 2nd, and probably 3rd, time later on. My favorite moment is when a deliriously drunk Rothbart accidentally swallowed a bottle of his own urine. (Yes, he had bottles of his own pee. All 99 of them!) This part of the book was just effing priceless.

Also, it’s brave of Rothbart to confess how he compares every woman he meets and falls in love with with a female character in a movie he saw when he was in his teens. Every potential girlfriend (that is if he hasn’t finally found himself a wife yet now) will read this book and forever question Rothbart’s feelings: is he truly in love with her, or is he still hung up on a fantasy, a fictional character who can never be flesh-and-blood?