Birthday - And Cereal!

This was an exciting week.  Mostly because it was my BIRTHDAY!

Most of the week was school as usual.  There was, however, Annual Recruitment Week.  Student organizations at DLSU are not like student organizations at home.  They don't get money from the school - though they do have to be registered with the school.  Most of the organizations seem to be very large, on the order of one to four hundred students.  (The school population is at 18,000 though.) And they have a lot of pomp and circumstance (membership cards and nearly 30% of the organization consisting of officers).  Also, organizations can only be joined during ARW.  Given this, the week is a big deal.  Each org has a booth and competes for cash prizes in mascots, booth decorations, advertising etc.  I think our own activities fair back at TU could benefit from some colorful decorations! :p

Wednesday also held two interesting experiences.  First was an encounter with "snow milk".  For lunch on Wednesday a few of us went to a place called "Cerealicious" for lunch.  I don't think anyone had been there before, but its in the mall where we normally eat lunch, we were on a tight schedule, and it wasn't full.  Apparently it originally served only cereal, but because of its location it added pasta to its menu to cater to the lunch crowd.  (Filipinos don't really do cold food.  I have yet to see a sandwich shop.) I had carbonara for lunch and then decided to try some cereal.

Note the white stuff on top is more solid.

The cafe is movie themed, so I had some blockbuster-named Special K creation with mangoes, honey, and granola. I picked a piece of mango off the top first, savoring the juicy freshness.  Then I used my Chinese soup spoon (as opposed to the normal spoon i got with my pasta...) to dig into my cereal.  Let me preface this with my skepticism about milk - all of the dairy in the Philippines is imported and I was a little worried that the milk in the cereal would be powdered and gross.  I was greeted not with chalky stickyness, but with a very cold, sweet, shock.  This is not milk! (Though I almost couldn't tell because it was so cold.)  It was "snow milk".  What I had originally thought was a brand of powdered milk was actually more like an ice cream concoction.  It was in fact delicious, but it just goes to show, even the most common things, could be made entirely foreign.  Cereal is apparently desert.

Wednesday afternoon I sat in on an Engineering class.  It was an elective on sustainable power.  I had gone on Monday, but the prof didn't show.  The class was interesting, though mostly things I covered in Energy Conversion this semester.  The big news was that I MADE A FRIEND!  :)  I spent nearly an hour after class chatting with one of the girls.  That was fun, she was very interesting.

Thursday was my birthday.  I'm 20!  Yay.  It's not that exciting actually.  We went to Papa John's for lunch.

Friday I mostly hung around the house, and Saturday I went WAKEBOARDING! But, you'll have to wait till next week to hear about that cause this post is too long already.