This is a 10-question test that I made myself. Try it out and see how you fare. You can create your own test and see how well your friends know you next! ENJOY!!! 
Before we left for Monaco last January (where we celebrated our 2nd year wedding anniversary), we got a tiny guidebook to help us along. Thing is, most of the books here are in Italian. Once we got home, we wondered why they would celebrate Oktoberfest in France. Then we realized that Monaco in Italian meant Munich! And I thought to myself, when will we ever get to use this??? And I didn’t think the opportunity would present itself only six months later. We really are given little clues from above.
Or “Life is beautiful” as translated for me by Bernd, one of our good friends here in Ivrea. It seems surreal that we will be off to Munich in a month’s time, and we will call that our 3rd new home, at least for two months. I picked up our tickets a while ago which were luckily on promo that’s why we had to pay immediately. (Otherwise they would come out to 420.00 euros a head!) We are going to be staying in a pensione (which includes daily breakfast) but has an added feature that I dread the most- shared bathrooms! SHUDDER! I hope it won’t be too memorable… Noel says I have to learn how to be creative with the sink which comes with each room. 
Nonetheless, we are extremly blessed that Noel got this internship in Munich with designafairs. This is what’s allowing us to experience Germany, which neither of us has ever been to. While looking for a place to stay there, I emailed a lot of these relocation companies referred to Noel by his company. One of the responses was so funny, I had to post it here:
Dear Via Perlas,
thank you for your request,
but the address you are
interested to rent is our
office building.
It is not possible to rent our
office!!
Please fill in the enclosed form
and return this back to our office.
Than we will be able to send you
offers.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen/ With best regards
Andreas Hatzistamatis
Farm life is what we often feel like here in Ivrea. Stores and restaurants close early and unexpectedly. Today, Saturday, we expected our staple pizzeria across the street to be open at lunch time. But low and behold, it was closed!
This is the reality of life here. Our choices are very limited. We go to the same old caffeteria during lunch on weekdays, go to the same pizzeria for dinner. Shops open at 10, close at 1, open at 3 then close at 7:30pm. There is only one street in town that has some semblance of shopping, the grocery is a bus ride to the next town. No cinemas that play english and no other form of entertainment. We need to go take a 1 1/2 hour train ride to the next city to have some decent city life, but still the only other alternative to italian food is chinese.
So we go back to our hole in Talponia and eat left over pasta for lunch. Oh I wish I had a car!
Noel and I reached for our mammoth Nature’s Plus Vitamin C plastic bottle simultaneously. “Did I take one already?” Noel asked, since I had just popped one. This is his favorite Vitamin C, the only one I don’t need to coax him to take. Like making a child take their medicine. “Chewable?” He always asks me, even if he knows they are. We need to get a refill soon- they taste really good!
Just HAD to post this. MABUHAY ANG PILIPINAS!!!
Pinay wins it big in London
By Alfred Yuson
The Philippine Star 05/16/2004
Patricia Evangelista, a 19-year-old, Mass Communications sophomore of
University of the Philippines (UP)-Diliman, did the country proud Friday
night by besting 59 other student contestants from 37 countries in the 2004
International Public Speaking competition conducted by the English Speaking
Union (ESU) in London.
She triumphed over a field of exactly 60 speakers from all over the
English-speaking world, including the United States, United Kingdom and
Australia, reported Maranan.
The board of judges
Don’t you sometimes get that feeling that you are doing so much that you feel like you’re not doing anything? Well, that’s how I feel now. I am in the middle of our 4 week workshop for our Spring term and I seem to be getting nowhere.
I have to come up with a concept for our “physical intranets” course but have not gotten around it since the class has been so loose and everyone decided to just do projects on their own. I feel helpless now since I chose a very technical topic: detecting Bluetooth and WiFi devices and then passing that value to a WiFi access point then displaying that information in a desktop software. Sheessh! and no one seems to be willing to help since everyone is busy with their own work.
On top of that, the internship search continues. I’ve sent out my application and portfolio out to several companies in the field of interaction design and happily I have gotten a good response from one company called designafairs (a german design company based in Munich which is partnered with Siemens mobile.) Now I have to do some paperwork… and hope visa isn’t going to be a problem.
I’ve also managed to put up our barkada’s website/blog similar to this. Please visit it at www.adakrab.com
One of the friendliest guards at Noel’s school, Valerio, christened us with these nicknames. When he sees us come in lately, it’s: “Ciao Manu, ciao Vito.” It’s very funny. For a while, I’m not sure who is who.
Noel was watching me grin as I dropped 2 postcards into the slot of the red mailbox right across where we live. He noticed how I get such a big kick when I hear the metal slot clunk back as I’ve dropped in the postcards. I always imagine the looks on the faces of the people when they receive them as I send many happy vibes along with the postcards. I even have a mental image of me tossing all the postcards from the mailbox in the air, swimming in them like what goes on during those crazy gameshows back home like Eat Bulaga. Is that postal or what? (Pun intended. Hee hee) Those are going out to you, Gretch and Johari!
Below are Dondi’s (my cousin) words/dedication to Lola Turing taken from the previous entry’s comments. I had to put it in front for those of you who missed it. Thank you Dondi, we share in your grief.
My Lola Vic had 10 grandchildren, 6 grandchildren-in-laws, and 12 great-grandchildren. As Lola Vic’s eldest grandchild, I have been given the privilege to tell you how she was as a grandmother.
There is one word in the dictionary that describes her perfectly, and that word is doting.
I looked up the word doting in the dictionary, and I half-expected to find my Lola’s picture beside the word. Instead, I found out that the word doting has 2 meanings, the first meaning is “to be feeble-minded, especially from old age” and that was definitely not what I had in mind.
The second meaning, which fits Lola to a “T” is “to lavish with excessive love”. Truly, Lola lavished her loved ones with excessive love, as you can already tell from the stories of how she took care of her husband (Dr. Cesar T. Ongpin), and how she took care of her daughters (Lirio Ongpin-Mapa and Vicky Ongpin-Perlas).
How could we expect anything else from her as a grandmother? Every time we would see Lola, she would always say goodbye with these three words “I love you”.
These past few years, Lola moved in to live with my parents. In the past few weeks, whenever I would take my children to swim in my mother’s house, I would go up to Lola’s room to say “Hi, Goodbye”, and then she would say “Bye, I love you”.
And last Friday, the last time I saw her alive in the hospital, I said, “Goodbye Lola, you’ll be coming home soon, I’ll see you tomorrow, ok?”
And she replied “I love you”.
For her, these were not just words, but the ribbon … the wrapping … the bunting around the gifts that she had given us all throughout her life.
I remember one day, when I was in still in grade school, my classmates joined me at my Lola’s house for lunch, and after the meal, Lola Vic served us atis for desert. And all my classmates were amazed because there were no seeds in the atis! Mind you, this was over 25 years ago when there were still no seedless varieties of atis.
So my classmates kept asking me, where did you get this seedless atis. And I gave them a strange look, and I said “Are you sure atis has seeds? Hello?!?”
I never even knew atis had seeds… and Lola was just laughing, because I discovered, to my chagrin, that all these years she had been serving me atis, she had lovingly removed all the seeds from the atis without even telling me!
I remember another meal, many years later, when I brought home my future wife, Cherry, who was still my girlfriend at that time. And afterwards, at the dinner table, after I had brought Cherry back to her home, the conversation eventually shifted to my “latest flame”. I recall someone made a comment about Cherry’s figure (masyadong payat) and about this and that, but Lola was quiet.
So I started to get worried, because with Lola, if she has nothing good to say about a person, she just keeps quiet. She purses her lips and looks away, or sometimes, she even looks up at the ceiling! But finally, she opened her mouth, with a statement that closed the conversation. She said, “Di bale na, sa lahat na niligawan ni Dondi, siya lang ang nakapag-patigil kay Dondi sa paninigarilyo!”
What wisdom! She did not look at Cherry to determine if Cherry was the right partner for me. Instead, she looked at me, and how my loving relationship with Cherry had made me grow.
Some months later, I finally announced to the family that I planned to propose to Cherry, and that I needed help to go shopping for an engagement ring. Lola stood up right away and went to her room. I thought she had gone to dress up, but when she finally came down, she took out this beautiful heart-shaped diamond which she had taken from her family heirlooms. Then she gave it to me saying, “Heto, ito ang ipagawa mo ng engagement ring”.
Thank you Lola, thank you so much for all the “I love you”s that you always showered on us, your grandchildren and your great grandchildren.
I feel so horrible knowing that I will never again hear those three words from your mortal lips. But I know that one day, we will be together again, and until then LOLA, remember that I LOVE YOU too.