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When I was in San Francisco, my Canon 4 megapixel digicam fell into a pool of saltwater–something that I’m still beating myself up for. Technology hates me, I swear. My first camera phone fell into the beach, my second camera phone got stolen, and recently I got a digital voice recorder that also works as an mp3 player and a flash disk. Less than a week later, the flash disk part stopped working. Rargh. The point is, I want a digicam. It’s highly unlikely that my parents will give me another one because this is the second digicam I’ve rendered unusable. But hey, that doesn’t mean that I don’t want one. The camwhore in me is still alive and well, and I sorely miss being my own attention-whore. But more than that, not having a camera prevents me from capturing the more interesting moments of my life–which have been very few lately since my life currently revolves around the whims of my professors.

Last night, my family celebrated my sister Marielle’s 18th birthday at a buffet dinner at a restaurant in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel called Paseo Uno. I invited Pat to come along; I knew he’d appreciate the food and besides, this would be a great opportunity for him to get to know my family and vice versa. Luckily, there weren’t any awkward meet-the-family moments because my family pretty much left the two of us alone (which is usually the case during family dinners; my cousins pretty much ignore me and my aunts and uncles think I’m too young to understand the “adult world”), and everyone was too busy eating to interrogate him or something. The only difficult part of the evening was that it took great effort not to kiss, hold Pat’s hand, or rest my head on his shoulder. I mean, doing those things is practically second nature to me but because my family is very conservative, we’d probably give my dad and my relative heart attacks if we displayed too much affection for each other. And if they all died, who’d pay for the food?

I wish I could describe in more descriptive words how incredibly wonderful that dinner was but my brain is really fried right now. The buffet dinner costs around 1,200 pesos per person but it is well worth the price because the quality of the food is excellent and the atmosphere of the restaurant makes you feel like a million bucks. The dessert table was the best. Not only were the cakes and crepes incredibly orgasmic, but they also had a chocolate fountain. A chocolate fucking fountain, where you can smother anything in wonderful, dark fudge. Towards the end, when we felt like we couldn’t take in any more food, Pat and I got a scoop of vanilla ice cream, put it under the fountain, and voila–the most delicious monster we have created. I was sorely tempted to put my sister’s tiramisu cake under the fountain as well, but by the time the cake arrived I was too lazy and wasted from delicious hotel food to get up.

This was taken during our first round of food. We look very happy since we’ve been starving ourselves all day for this dinner.

An hour and a half later, with our tummies distended. This was the picture’s third take; you can see that Pat’s all like, “Enough already!” Me, I just missed being my own attention-whore.

I wish I could’ve taken pictures of the hotel, the restaurant, and the chocolate fountain but my mom’s fancy camera-phone is too crappy a camera for that. But in any case, that dinner was the best I have had in recent days. In spite of the fact that I’ve eaten enough food in that one night to last me a week, the memory of that glorious buffet will never fail to make me salivate like a Pavlovian dog. I highly recommend Paseo Uno for anyone who loves to eat.

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