Sunday, January 04, 2004
festival of fools
As you may already know from reading my guys' blogs, we all went to a carnival last night to celebrate Dean's and Camille's birthdays. Marco had warned us that Star City was noisy, crowded, and vastly disappointing, but fortunately El proposed a viable alternative-- Quezon City's Pamaskong Pasiklab.
Some highlights of the evening were Carl's stunning display of marksmanship at the shooting booth (winning four whole bars of chocolate, which he generously shared), Andrew's dizzying twirling at the Aero Trim whirligig, and Dino Yu's ability to actually terrify ghosts at the Malikmata house of horrors. (One of them actually backed cautiously away from his threatening yowls!) I came this close to punching Andrew at Malikmata, because he had snuck ahead to hide behind a corner and grab my arm just before we exited! (In the dark, I thought it was a carny guy, and I don't take kindly to being grabbed by strangers.) Another funny incident at the horror house was that Camille's mom called her from the States just as we were all shrieking and clinging to one another, so Camille had to explain that she was not, in fact, in the midst of life-threatening circumstances (unlike Andrew, haha!).
We also enjoyed the octopus ride and the sideshows, particularly Galema, Queen of Snakes. (Andrew and I thought the snake on display next to the barker was a fake, until it moved its head and hissed at us! After that, we naturally had to see the show.) Camille and Jason (who had literally just stepped off the plane from Davao before rushing to join us) also enjoyed the Ferris Wheel, which everyone else deemed either too tame or too terrifying, depending on their taste for heights. Being a thrill junkie myself, I wanted to try out the glider harness thing, but there were too many similarly-nutso people in line ahead of me.
We all tried the ring toss booth (at which we all abysmally failed), as well as coin toss booth (at which nearly everyone won five pesos-- a four-peso profit from their one-peso joining fee, yay! Andrew also scored a couples of bowls and glasses.) We wanted to win Sagey a Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed toy, but it was ridiculously difficult to acquire, and Marco pointed out that we would probably spend less money just buying her something at the mall. So we food-tripped instead on scrumptious fifteen-peso sticks of barbecue, before reverting to our mild-mannered secret identities and retreating to the more mundane Chili's for coffee before bidding each other good night.