Sunday (101710)

There's something about Sunday lunches with my father that can fill me with some Imeldific Marcostalgia.

Since my old man still lives in the old compound in San Miguel, near Malacanang, we usually end up choosing eating places within the perimeter of Downtown Manila. Today, as suggested by Pops, we went to the Gloria Maris in the CCP Complex. There was supposedly a promo-price on sea mantis and clams. We had exactly those plus noodles.

Margaret happily cam-ho's for me while Malou and Pops go in ahead to order.

Today's lunch conversation was highlighted by Pops telling us that the restaurant we were in used to be a seafood restaurant that was quite the pride of Imelda Marcos. It supposedly offered up to twenty mouth-watering ways to cook crabs. A look around the fine wood-based interiors certainly suggests that the Imeldific one had her say and her way in putting the place together. Too bad, i was too embarrassed and hungry to take photographs. On the way to driving Pops back home, a spin around the CCP Complex, followed by a drive down the once-picturesque Roxas Boulevard, and i was awashed with a wave of nostalgia for simpler times as a child growing up in Manila, and the memory that Manila used to be a first-class city, albeit under a dictatorship.

It's almost deliciously ironic for Imelda that when the Marcoses were scurried out of Malacanang, new Manila postcards probably stopped being produced. At least the good ones.

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And while i was getting a haircut from Jojo at Gruppo later that afternoon, there was a really fat dike with a chubby girlfriend in the chair next to mine who was leafing through an iPad while being pampered.

Before seeing her/him, i was half-considering to whip out my mega-sized laptop to write this piece. Now all of a sudden, the thought of typing or surfing on a notebook besides Her Dike-ness on an iPad seems embarrassingly prehistoric.

So i tap away on my humble, non-flashy Nokia e71 for this. Except for the iPod, I still do not see myself submitting to Steve Jobs and his array of technological Apples that i still consider lemons.

'catch you later.