Tiendesitas – A Different Taste of Delicacies 0
One of the things that makes a vacation ‘GOOD’ is the fact that you have the opportunity to get along with different other cultures. This basically includes some wide choices of food. There may be a lot of restaurants offering different delicacies from other cultures, but the best restaurants are run by natives and the ingredients used are indigenous, original and authentic. Being a Filipino, I would definitely say that our own version of oriental cooking is a great competitor against all others. May it be main courses or just simple snacks.
My cousin has an American boyfriend, and he just arrived a few days ago. Now, she decided that we will bring him for lunch to a restaurant that offers purely Filipino food. I’ve asked my friends which restaurant would be best for this, and they said Tiendesitas offer good food. Our stay was just purposely made to fetch his boyfriend and go home to Iligan soon after we finish our business in Manila.
From our hotel, we took a taxi, with the traffic of course because it was 11:30am, the drive took 30 minutes to Tiendesitas. We arrived there and luckily, there was one more seat, and I figured it out that it was really meant for us. The place was full of buzzing, talking and the sound of spoon and forks hitting the plates.
But in spite of all the noises, it was the overwhelming smell of the food that is most distinguishable above all. We took our seats, and the waitress came to our table and led us to the very big buffet. Indeed, they have lots of Filipino-authentic dishes coming from different local cultures around the Philippines.
We asked Beau (the name of my cousin’s American boyfriend) if what dish would he like, but he didn’t know what to choose so he lent us the opportunity in choosing which we thought was best. I chose my favorite dish, Kare-kare which is a particularly sensitive dish made up of either beef, tripe, oxtail or the combination of the three, some spices and a lot of peanut butter.
It may sound weird to find a lot of peanut butter in this dish, but it is the highlight of Kare-Kare. Then I picked Ginataang Kuhol, basically, “ginataan” means a dish with coconut milk, and kuhol is a species of edible snails. Then, I added to the list, a serving of Papaitan. Papaitan is beef stomach cooked with bile and other delicate spices.
Rice has always been a partner of almost all Filipino dishes, so a platter of cooked rice is included. For drinks, I ordered Madre de Cacao, it’s a chocolate drink made from freshly ground dry cacao seeds. Finishing our meal was a suman (a traditionally flavored rice cake wrapped in a banana leaf) and Puto Balanghoy (steamed cassava cake with coconut custard on top). It was such a filling lunch, and Beau is such an eater to have munched the last pile of rice on the platter, he said that we should come back here every time we are in manila.
The Philippines had four nominees namely; the Chocolate Hills, Mayon Volcano, the Tubbataha Reef and the Puerto Princessa Subterranean River National Park. Today, the voting campaign is now in the third phase, and 3 were already eliminated, except the Puerto Princessa Subterranean River National Park. I have heard some hearsay about this attraction from a lot of people, and they said that it was such a magnificent place to witness. So a group of friends went with me to see the attraction firsthand. 
It took us just around one and ½ hours of land travel to get to the town of Sabang, where the natural landmark is located, I was enjoying what the tourist said to us on the trip, her name was Annie. The river is in fact, the longest navigable underground river in the world, reaching up to 8 kilometers. It is the only surviving Philippine nominee for the new7wonders of nature, which is on its third phase of voting as of now, there are species of monkeys and massive monitor lizards around the cave. 
Reaching the island from our city of Iligan will take 30 minutes of aerial travel from the nearby city of Cagayan de Oro to Cebu-Mactan international airport, a 5-6-hour drive to the Municipality of Maya in northern Cebu and a 30-45-minute boat ride from Maya to the island. The island is so beautiful, and it has regions too, where locals thrive in. Seeing the waters and the seabed beneath as we drifted closer to the sugar white shores, I said to Clint that choosing this island for their study is a good choice. It was already late in the afternoon when we arrived there, so after checking in, we had our dinner, prepared the necessary equipment for the snorkeling activity tomorrow and took some rest, hoping to wake up early to avoid the scorching hot sun by noon.
The next day, we were so fortunate that the skies were cloudy, and the sun didn’t show up that much. We snorkeled, and were able to capture harmless jellyfishes, sea cucumbers and some saltwater snails as the specimen for marine invertebrates. We were all set that morning at as we walked towards the resort, we saw some children about 12 years old bring a big bucket full of sea urchins. These urchins are edible, and the children are intending to sell it. I just wanted to try them, so I bought a couple, and they sliced it for us. It had a unique taste.