Delirious!

I've always wanted to see the band Delirious in concert and last night I got to! When we heard back in January they would be coming to Manila we knew we had to go. We bought our tickets a couple weeks ago, and we were prepared to skip or Tuesday evening class to go, but it ended up being cancelled, so with a clear conscience we set out to take the light rail down to the Araneta Coliseum. Incidentally, the Araneta Coliseum is where the famous boxing match, "The Thrilla in Manila" took place and there's a mall across from the center named Ali Mall after Muhammed Ali. We stopped at DQ for a blizzard snack and went inside to enjoy the show. It was a fantastic concert. We had a fabulous time, and we're lucky we got to see Delirious as this concert was a part of The Farewell Tour, so it was now or never I guess.


View from our seats, you can see we had a good view of the stage.

The only picture we have of the two of us there. That's the problem with going to things with just each other. The level of picture quality goes down!

The show! We also got some cool video that we will enjoy for a long time to come!

Birthday and Polo

Yesterday was Uche's birthday, so we started the day with chocolate croissants, coffe and fruit. We had plans for most of the day, so we didn't get to celebrate his birthday as much as I would've liked for him. Our friend Ate Evelyn had invited us to a polo match at the Manila Polo Club and our church had it's 15th anniversary celebration in the evening.


We really enjoyed our time at the polo club. It's quite an exclusive place and you can only enter if a member invites you. Our friend's doctor is a member, so we got to enjoy the benefits without the pricetag! I had never seen a polo match before, so it was fun to watch and seems like it's pretty exciting. The horses were quite amazing, and it was fun just to watch them run. They had waitors constantly bringing drinks, so Uche and I started with mango shakes, and I then moved on Coke Zeros. After the match they had a cocktail hour with lots of food. They had roasted on a spit a whole cow, plus they had three small whole roasted pigs (it's called lechon here in PI), lots of chickens, huge platters of salmon, mini cupcakes and lots of other food. My favorite part was CHEESE!! Cheese is not common here, and it's way too expensive to buy in the grocery stores, so I wanted to go wild. Unfortunately, the cheese table was popular, so I didn't get to eat my fill, but I managed a couple bites of blue cheese, brie, and gouda. I could've taken the whole trays and finished them, but I don't think the other people there would've appreciated that. I don't have any pictures of the cocktail hours, as I was too busy enjoying cheese and free soda, just trust me when I say it was amazing.

Afterwards, we headed over to our church for the anniversary celebration. It was fun seeing some old friends, and celebrating with our church family here. We got home late and fell into bed exhausted, but happy to have had such a fun day!

The polo club is located pretty much in the middle of the city, and it feels like an oasis amidst the craziness. We sat in the front row, so we had a pretty good view of the action.

This is our friend, Ate Evelyn. There were lots of people there, and it was a very international. I enjoyed just watching all the people there. It was a pretty exlusive crowd, safe to say we were one of the few seminary students there!

Uche and I trying to look like we do this every weekend! See the waitor behind Uche's shoulder, we probably motioned him over right after this picture for another drink.

Our pastor speaking at the church anniversary.

Manila Malls

Earlier this evening I was at Trinoma mall. Usually we avoid malls on weekends here because it's wall to wall people and we just can't take constantly running into people, and trying to manuver around people, and the crowds of people all around. Can you guess there's lots of people that go malling here, yes they do use the word malling as a verb?? The first time we went into a mall on a weekend when we arrived last November, we vowed never again. You see, when we lived here before we spent our weekend at the malls, like every weekend. They were air conditioned and they had movie theaters, food and grocery stores, all one needed in life. But something happened in the years since we've returned. More people seem to be at the malls. But I braved the crowds today for a couple reasons, one Uche was going to be gone all afternoon and evening and I would be too bored at home by myself, and two, tomorrow is Uche's birthday, so I needed to buy a few things. So, I built up my courage and found an empty table at a coffee shop (not an easy task), wrote a six page paper, had an iced tea, then went and bought something Uche was eyeing the other day. I survived a Saturday afternoon/evening in the mall.

This picture was taken on Valentine's Day at Trinoma Mall. They were doing a concert in the center so a large part of the massive crowd was focused on that. But it pretty much sums up a typical crowd at Trinoma. It's a huge mall that I've yet to explore completely.

Beach weekend

This past weekend Uche and I headed out of town to an island just south of Luzon (where Manila is located). We weren't there long, but we enjoyed every minute. We spent our time relaxing on the beach, swimming, eating, reading (for fun, not school work!), and sleeping. We took a ton of pictures, some of which I'll post below. It was great to get out of Manila and enjoy the beach. Since we live in the middle of the city we forget we live on an island, and because there are over 7,000 islands in the Philippines it wouldn't be right to spend all our time on only one of them!

Outings

I've been lazy about posting pictures from a couple outings so here they are now. We had a family day with our school at a local park. It was a fun day to hang out with our classmates and enjoy some fun activities. Our favorite thing there was a fabulous swimming pool, but we have no pictures of that because we were enjoying the pool too much.

The second outing was a silent retreat for our spiritual formation class. We had to be silent for six hours and we worked through different prayer exercises. We did it at a retreat center in Manila. The grounds were very nice and peaceful; a good setting for a silent retreat. We were amazed there was such a beautiful and peaceful place as this in the middle of crazy Manila.

The Ajeros enjoying family day.

We enjoyed a little time rowing around the little lake with some friends.

These ducks were following us around. You can see our classmates also out on the lake which resulted in a little bumper boats and a few races.

Working hard to take us around the lake.

Cool tree from the retreat center. It was huge. You can see a person on a bench to the right of the tree.

Below is the bench I spent my morning. It was really nice.