Sunday, May 20, 2007 A yard party By Stella Estremera Goin' Places
IT WAS d-day... and I didn't have any friend to drag out. Hikbi! But after browsing down my cellphone directory, one name stuck out... Mikai. The problem is where...
Deng, who couldn't join me suggested a place somewhere in Matina. Another friend suggested some other place that I already went to. And so I decided to try out the place right next to Deng's house: that inuman at the corner of Araullo and Tionko Streets.
Mikai and I agreed to meet up there since she's coming from Lanang and I was coming from SM.
I arrived first and settled down on a monobloc table in the yard. The place: Guitara 8610 Grill and Resto-Bar at Tionko corner Araullo (the street right before you reach Torres a.k.a. City High when traversing Tionko).
There were several other tables occupied by groups four and up in number while I sat there alone... it felt like I have been invited to a party where the only one I knew was the one who invited me and that person was busy in the kitchen. That's the ambiance of the place, as well, it's like you're walking into someone's yard to party, the lad back birthday parties of old, that is. No parlor games, just everyone seated, eating, drinking.
Mikai was taking so long to arrive and so I decided to order a bottle of beer to keep me company. But I realized that I didn't have any candy to go with my beer and by yosi (sorry, it's a combination I simply can't do without), and so I stared at the beer wishing Mikai to arrive, fast.
Maybe I should just go out and buy candy, there should be a sari-sari store along Tionko, you might say. But I had a problem with loose change even before I arrived. Knowing that the money in my wallet was a P1000 bill, I scrounged around the house to look for change for my taxi fare. I knew the fare will be something like P53, and so I gathered P60 so that I can have some change for candies.
Waiting in the dark for a taxi, I flagged down one only to realize it was an air-conditioned one. My super loose change will not be able to bring me that far on an air-conditioned taxi. I told him I can't afford a taxi. The driver was willing to haggle. I said I just have enough for a non-aircon taxi ride. He said he's on his way home, and he'll give me a discount, how much is my usual fare? I said P53. He said, he'll settle for P60. Just to end the fuss, I agreed and gave him P60 in five-peso, one-peso, and 25-centavo coins when we finally reached my destination (meter read P80-plus...). It was minutes after the taxi left and I have already settled down at Guitara 8610 when I remembered why I gathered more than the regular fare... my candies.
With no candy, I had to wait for Mikai to bail me out.
She finally did and I went outside to buy my fix. One handful of White Rabbit. Yipiii!
After that... the appreciation of the place.
We drank our first beer... ice cold as had become the trend in this part of the world. Like ice cold... my glass looked like a glass of "iskrambol" after I poured my beer in it.
It was only after sipping some beer when I asked for the menu. It has a long list of pica-pica and food that's typical Pinoy, barbecue, pork chops, crispy pata... party food.
I opted for pica-pica, and tried the most unusual entry -- tofu sticks, and crispy tenga. We settled back anew and drank our "iskrambol", and waited...
Mikai and I are slow drinkers. My regular pace, one bottle per hour... My beer was already down on its last gulps and yet our pulutan was nowhere in sight. The waitress was too far away...
We finally caught the eye of the waitress and ordered our second bottle, following up on our pulutan orders as well.
"Malapit na po," she said. The pulutan came right after our second beer was served... Hmmm... One thing I can say, though, their waitress was a very nice young lady who served with a smile. If not for her, I would have been ranting about why it took so long to cook that darn tofu! By the way, the tofu isn't a stick. It's just tokwa cut lengthwise, but not a stick; you can't even hold it up like one. The crisy tenga, on the other hand, is designed for macho drinkers. Go figure.
But we did consume them both, our drinking spree peppered with kwentuhan about buhay-buhay including the vagaries of being a woman and a diver. Haybuhay!
We ended our day just before midnight. It's time to go home to be able to face another day.
The verdict? It's a tambayan. And yes, it helps that the music isn't loud, as it usually is in regular inumans, and so makes the place conducive for tambay and kwento. But I still couldn't figure out why it took so long to cook tokwa.
