Meal with a view

It's been a while since my last Tagaytay trip.

Thanks to an ocular meeting a week ago, was finally able to have lunch with this view again.

Tagaytay never grows old.

Club Wed

Sometime last year, Mark, Kris and I were in Nakano - IH2 in particular - talking about Kris' recent engagement and her wedding plans.

And yesterday, all the months of preparation led to Narra Hill in Tagaytay for the wedding day. It was one of the most heartfelt and genuine weddings I've been to.

It was a fitting culmination to a journey that started in Japan more than a year ago.

Greens and blue

In Tagaytay with Mark for a wedding this weekend, and this place never ceases to refresh and recharge me.

It must be the cool, crisp air, or the richness of the greenery, or it might even be the blue skies.

Or it may be all 3!

Yup, Tagaytay always does it for me.

Fun in the dark

"Total Black Out" is something that Mark and I discovered during our weekend trip to Tagaytay. It's a game show with a very novel concept - 4 people are supposed to do scary tasks in a pitch black room, and the last person standing who does them all successfully wins $5,000.00. To win, they need to use their other 4 senses: touch, smell, taste and hearing.

No one - not even the contestants - know how well they did and how they fared against their competition. The only way they find out is when they jump on a trap door. The one who did the worst falls into the chute.

The challenges range from scary to creepy to hilarious. The episode we watched featured a challenge where the contestants are supposed to guess an object just by smelling it. And here's a Pinoy guy trying to identify the smell "sweaty armpits." He identified it as "a dead animal." Harhar.

I'm surprised that I was in the dark about this show for all this time. It's definitely worth watching, if only for the laughs.

Follow the shepherd

While we didn't really have an itinerary for this Tagaytay weekend trip, we had a list of things we wanted to do:

1. Eat bangus at LZM

2. Buy tarts at Rowena's

3. Drop by Good Shepherd for their Lengua de Gato

Numbers 1 and 2 were easy to do. We had LZM for dinner - a hearty dinner at that, and there was a Rowena's store in front of the hotel. So, the only thing we needed to do was drop by Good Shepherd.

It came as a surprise to us that Good Shepherd actually moved already. I remember that their shop used to be located near the area leading to People's Park in the Sky. But we found out that it's now located along the Sta. Rosa road, and is right smack along the highway. How convenient!

While they've changed locations, the look and feel of the place is just as I remembered it. They still had the Good Shepherd statue at the front of their store.

The area where you place your orders is as organized as always. There weren't a lot of people when we arrived, but the crowds started to swell in a matter of 15 minutes.

The new Good Shepherd store was much more spacious. It had these ramps that went up and down which makes for good exercise.

And the parking spaces now are much wider, which was the usual problem of the old store. Not only was it spacious, it was also easier to maneuver.

On this trip, we discovered that aside from the Lengua de Gato, Oatmeal Raisin Chews, Buko Tarts and Ube, Good Shepherd also had great food offerings.

Their fried lumpiang ubod is so, so good! It had the right crunch, a generous amount of filling, and the most divine sauce I've had in a while. (Yes, divine is an apt word to describe something that comes from Good Shepherd.)

We also tried the turon with ube and langka, and yes, it was a hands-down winner! I devoured a pack of these goodies in minutes! It went well with their buko-lychee juice and guyabano shake which Mark and I ordered.

By the end of our 30-minute stopover, we were completely full! Not only that, our seats were almost full of Tagaytay goodies as well.

The weekend was simply so wonderful that it deserves a follow-up really, really soon.