Sunday, July 11, 2010

Picnicking in La Mesa Eco-Park

Aya, the daugher of my friends Iona and JP, turned 2 early last week. The celebration was held earlier this afternoon in La Mesa Eco-Park. Iona and JP invited a few of their friends to join them for a picnic in the park. I know I went to La Mesa Dam as a kid but I don't have any clear memory of that, and I haven't been there since.

I made a mistake getting the picnic venue though. I went into the La Mesa Dam entrance which is about 15 to 20 minutes away from the Eco-Park entrance so I was pretty late getting to the party. I also didn't pay attention to the invitation details that indicated the picnic was supposed to be potluck but luckily the other folks brought a lot of food. The trending topic of the afternoon was the chicken-pork adobo terrine that Rambie brought. Apart from being really good, it also got people into a discussion of what exactly a terrine was - some of us like myself had heard of the term but didn't know exactly what it was until this afternoon, others had never heard the word before lol (a terrine is a French forcemeat loaf that is served at room temperature; similar to a pâté, a terrine uses more coarsely chopped ingredients).

To complete the birthday party, Iona and JP also brought a big chocolate birthday cake complete with a #2-shaped candle that Aya blew out after we sang 'Happy birthday'. We still stayed for about an hour after to share more stories and catch up. Joyce was also there, and while she had already shared a lot of stories with me the night before (I had dinner with her, Janice, and Sep in Sango!), we hung out for only about an hour so there were a lot more stories to share. Iona also mentioned this really nice cafe in Masinag that she suggested we try some time soon.

The downside to what was a really fun afternoon was the fact that JP had to fix a flat tire in the rain. The jack in their car didn't work very well but thankfully I had a really good one in my car. It took a while to replace the flat with the spare - during which time JP and I talked about how much we hated flat tires LOL - but at least everything got sorted out.

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