Things we did in highschool
My friend, J, recently published an article on her blog about, probably, one of our greatest passions in life – books. J and I have been friends since first day of first year highschool at the Philippine Science High School where we spent 4 geeky years of our adolescent lives. We read almost the same books and together enjoyed and splurged on the biannual booksales at National Bookstore, . Every first week of the month, we’d each go for a trip to Goodwill Bookstore in SM North Edsa to purchase the latest book of the Sweet Valley Series. We witnessed the price of a
Sweet Valley book climbed up incrementally from P30 something to P59.00. Through different influences later on, she digressed to read sci fi (Star Trek, Star Wars, Isaac Asimov) while I preferred trashy romance novels (Judith McNaught, Amy Tan, etc). We both acquired a large collection of books over the years. During early college, we both scrounged to complete each of our Erich Segal collection. I was satisfied with the newer reprints of his book, but she would buy the older, hardbound versions from various booksales. Until now, she would buy nicer reprints of books by Dan Brown as coffee table books while the only coffee table book I bought for myself was that of defunct HBO cable TV series, Sex and the City. Books were our first common interest. Shopping was the other.
Quezon Avenue
I think our first real shopping started in third year high school. We frequented kamiseta then and spent a fraction of our stipends each on a blouse. Prior to clothes shopping, our trips to the mall, mainly SM North Edsa (as it was the nearest and farthest commute we can go), during the first 2 years of HS consisted of sprees at Blue Magic and Papemelroti. Our shopping proficiencies were brushed up most especially during summer vacations. Together with R and sometimes with E, we eventually learned to commute to SM Megamall and Shangri-La. We’d usually meet up at Jollibee Philcoa in the morning, take a bus to our destination and be home before the sun went down. Aside from National Bookstore, Goodwill Bookstore and kamiseta, our other “favorite” stores then were Traditions, Personalized It!, Odyssey, Gift Gate and Marcella (where we bought our matching birett). We discovered the tiangges in Greenhills together and rode the bus as far as Glorietta in
Makati . We rarely shop together now. J does it now with her fiancé at
Singapore while I prefer to shop alone at various tiangges and bazaars here in
Manila .
Long before we started to waste our time away at coffee places such as Starbucks,
Seattle ’s Best, etc, J, R and I would frequently hang out at Red Ribbon ordering 1 slice of cake each and chatting the afternoon away. We’d stay there for 2 hours or so, sometimes after a day of walking around the mall or after and in-between classes, taking the smallest bites to our slices of cake. Sometimes we have other friends over (R2, R3 and R4) and we just enjoy the lazy pace of the afternoon, each other’s company and kwento and the sugar-rush.
