Time flies so fast when you’re having fun. I can’t believe I’ve been working here for a month already! It’s already been a month since my batchmates and I first met and became friends. So we greet each other a happy monthsary.
Joan, our baby, is also graduating on Saturday, so we celebrate this event along with our friendship monthsary by having the ultimate dinner … seafood festival at Dampa! Woohoo!
Dampa is a place where you can buy seafood fresh from the market and bring them to one of several restaurants where you can have them cooked as you desire. It’s a popular place for seafood lovers. For the occasion, Padoms borrows a van to accommodate us all and drives us over to Parañaque.
Tics accompanies us girls to the market where we buy everybody’s favorite huge squid (no longer pronounced as the high pitched squid), shrimps, crabs, fish, green mangoes, bagoong, and seedless watermelon. We bring them over to Shylin and instruct the cook to cook this menu:
-Grilled squid
-Calamares
-Sinigang na hipon
-Buttered shrimp
-Inihaw na isda
-Crabs with oyster sauce
-Ensaladang mangga (with tomatoes, onions & bagoong)
-Chilled watermelon slices
While waiting for the food to cook, we eat some kilawin, my favorite dish of all time! (For the uninformed, kilawin is raw fish slices marinated in vinegar with minced ginger, chili & onions.) A few minutes later, the food starts coming. They are the best cooked seafood I have ever tasted! Especially the squid! A moan of ecstasy even escapes my lips when I first bite into one. At the end of the meal we are so full, my stomach feels like that of a pregnant woman’s. We all agree that was the most scrumptious seafood meal we have ever had.
After Joan pays for the feast, Doms drive us out of there. We start playing the song game, the usual one where group one starts a song and group two has to continue with the last word. I think the boys win. But who cares? It’s just fun just belting out weird songs with everybody.
Everybody definitely agrees with Tics that all our group outings end up as so much fun! Janice says she’s so happy with us, because we could do so many things when we’re together. And we vow to do something new next time. So tentatively, for our next monthsary-slash-Diane’s birthday: Tavern, here we come! ü