Coffee Empire

 Cross post from my thychronicles post. :)

Today, I met up with Hannah at Coffee Empire. I was supposed to blog about this place last week when I met up with Ruth, but I unfortunately left my digicam at home! So this time around, I made sure that I brought it with me.

The coffee bar.

Coffee Empire is a third wave coffee shop located at West Avenue corner Examiner street. It is beside Hap Chan, and near Cabalen. According to Google and its wikipedia page: a third wave coffee shop refers to the "current movement to produce high-quality coffee, and consider coffee as an artisanal foodstuff, like wine, rather than a commodity. This involves improvements at all stages of production, from improving coffee plant growing, harvesting, and processing, to stronger relationships between coffee growers, traders, and roasters, to higher quality and fresh roasting, to skilled brewing."

Hannah's Round 1 order

For round 1, we ordered the following: a cappuccino (130php) + oreo cheesecake (140php) for Hannah, and an iced mocha medium brew (150php) + pistachio cake (140php) for me. If you're having problems on ordering, the baristas are always accommodating and will gladly help on choosing the perfect brew for you.

My pistachio cake.

I wrote round 1 because that's what we usually do when we plan on staying at a cafe for around 2 - 4hours. As much as possible we'd like to do 2 rounds as courtesy to the cafes for staying that long. (At least its better than staying the whole day and ordering just one drink, in my opinion.) We also don't use the electrical outlets, as we just lug around our art materials and draw / chat the whole time we're together. Also, if there's an influx of customers in need of seats, we either offer our extra seats or leave the place itself so the next customers could sit. :)

Our table, blurred Hannah's face just because HAHA. She's drawing the header in this photo.

My tools. Inside that green Redondo tin can are my unipins. Translucent tool box with my markers.

I decided to bring Hannah here because this is the nearest coffee shop to my place. The coffee shop also brings in natural light with the use of huge windows, which is perfect for drawing. Lastly, the coffee here is good. Those reasons are good enough to come back here I guess?

Hannah drawing.

Another reason is that I've been bugging her on drawing our header for this blog. (She's drawing the header in one of the pictures, above my toolbox pic.) She was actually putting on the finishing touches earlier. As for me, I'm just drawing/coloring whatever I had that time, switching artworks due to indecisiveness HAHA. 

Me drawing / forcing Hannah to take my picture HAHAHA.

What I'm drawing above.

For round 2, we ordered the following: an iced mocha light brew (150php) for Hannah as she liked my previous order, and a cold brew (sumatra bean, I think - 160php) for me. 

After finishing some of our artworks, we finally decided to leave due to hunger. We went next door to Hap Chan for dinner. It's been a while since we last saw each other, I wish we could do this more often like we used to in the past ~ (And hopefully, together with the whole thychronicles team). But since that seems impossible, I guess every meeting with friends counts as something special? NAKS HAHAHA.♥

Manila Ocean Park

(mmm, seahorse)

We went to Manila Ocean Park the other day. Commuting there was actually an adventure itself. Went on 2 trains and a long walk in Rizal Park to Manila Ocean Park. The last time I went to MOP was 2 years ago. It was inspiring and I could see that they were really trying their best for the conservation of the marine life there. The signs regarding the fishes were readable and really...informative. Now? It seems that there are less fishes than 2 years ago, I wonder why? Some fishes which were shown on the signs were also not present in the said aquarium. I also noticed that some of the signs are not readable now.

(Shark napping?)

Besides, the only reason we went here was because of their summer promo! Which included the trip to antartica / penguin exhibit. I was really excited on seeing penguins for the first time! Penguin is my favorite animal ♥

PENGUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN.

We also took pictures with them for 400php♥. Expensive yes but really worth it for me to see them up close and feed them ♥. After the exhibit, we had dinner at Makan Makan. Interesting place! Not a lot of customers though, due to the interior design and ~feel~ of the place? Hmm. Beautiful view of Manila Bay + delicious food + violin/guitar ensemble + with Ram = worth walking from Rizal Park to M.O.P. ♥

Teh Tarik !

The interior design of Makan Makan. It was supposed to look like an asian street market of some sort.

Sorry for the awful writing and thank you for reading!

Birthday

My Chocolate toffee birthday cake from Kitchen of Cakes and Coffee.

(I bought this yesterday at their Tomas Morato branch with my dog after work. Yeah, I brought my dog at work. It's because they wanted to see him plus the fact that it was my last day there. I'm sure I will miss their company. Walking with Taba is fun, he understands my commands whenever we cross the street or walking at the right place. He's not scared of cars also, which is a plus. Also very friendly with people. Brought him inside KoCCo - thank you for letting him stay inside! He was well behaved, I'm so proud ♥ ).

Sooooooooooo. I sang `Happy birthday to me` around 10pm on April 4 because I wanted to eat my cake early, haha.

Spent the day with mama and a friend at Ace Water Spa. I really love swimming!

As for the doodles, will upload soon since I have a lot of time now.

Evanescence

My mum and I went to one of my favorite band's concert yesterday. We're so lucky that we got patron tickets! Jumping, screaming, and singing in front was so much fun. I was really sick at that time but it didn't matter ---it's Evanescence! My voice was all sore the day after though --but totally worth it. Best night ever!

Celebration

Ahh, this is hard to describe. I've been staring at the screen for a while now.

We went to Cubao and did some errands. There were Dairy Queen stalls EVERYWHERE. After the errands, we took a break at my favorite coffee/tea shop. We went to our reserved dinner place after. It was a really nice and cozy place. The setting was really romantic(sorry for cheesiness!), decorated with valentines decor and candlelit tables. The dinner was really good too, delicious 4-course meal with wine. It makes me embarrassed talking about this~ Ahh! I'm not really used to this stuff, and wine for dinner makes it really...formal? Hmm. It was really ~nice ~.