Dampa, Greenhills, & MegaMall Shabu Shabu!

Another long weekend thanks to the Day of Valor!  I could get used to all these holidays!  Thursday night I tagged along with the training team (Karen, Alissa, Steve, Teo, Max, Xandra) to dinner at Dampa Seaside.  This was my second trip to the wet market for dinner, and it was stellar!  Basically, you pick a resto, they send a waiter with you to the nearby seafood market where you buy what you want for dinner (we got clams, snails, crabs, shrimp, and tuna), then you go back to the resto and (for a fee, of course) they cook your haul!

(why do crabs take so much work to eat?!)

(snails were much easier to coax out of their shells with a toothpick!)

(mmm…shrimpy shrimps!…and snails!  pretty AND tasty!)

So we ended up with crabs and shrimp in garlic & butter, grilled tuna, ginger clam soup, and snails in coconut milk.  YUM!!!!  Everything was delicious!

Friday I tagged along again to drop a wad o’ cash at Greenhills…bought a lot of pearls this time (some freshwater pearls, but also some salt water pearls…hence the wad o’ cash!).  Xandra (one of the Manila trainers) knew someone with a pearl business, so we got good prices on everything!

I wasn’t the only one buying pearls, though!  After all the pearls in Greenhills were bought up (OK, not really, but it felt like it!) we headed to another mall, the Mega Mall.  Mega Mall is located just off EDSA at the EDSA shrine, where the People Power Revolution took place way back in 1986.  This mall used to be the largest in the Philippines, but, as you can imagine, that didn’t last, and bigger and fancier malls have since been built.  However, it is a nice mall, as they go — very middle class feeling.  And there is an amazing shabu shabu resto in the atrium, Tong Yang!  I say amazing not because the food is that stellar (it was good, but I think the shabu shabu place I went to in Malate w/ Allie & Rico & Jing & Frances & Jessica was tastier)…but it was a huuuuuuuuge buffet, so you could pick all manner of seafood, beef, pork, veggies, etc., then bring it back to your table and dump it in the hotpot to boil.  There was also a cast iron grill, so if you’d rather grill your meat/seafood, that was doable, too.  I had tanigue, blue marlin, corn, squidballs, cabbage, and I’m sure there was other stuff!  I tried some of Xandra’s oysters in kalamansi, which were quite good (wasn’t sure if I liked the texture, but once I stopped chewing they were awesome!  Loved the briny flavor.)  It was very good food (and excellent company!), but soooo much food!  And of course, we had to avail of the build-your-own-halo-halo bar…so we topped the meal off with freezing cold goodness!

We headed back to the apartments after lunch to rest (and digest!) before we all reconvened for a Minnepino feast of tatertot hotdish (or, tatertotdish, depending on who you ask!), adobo and rice, quinoa-apple-veggie salad, and apple crisp with vanilla ice cream.  Good times, more food (eek!…soooo much food!).

Saturday I was going to head to Chinatown to explore, but work up with a wicked migraine, so I spent the rest of the weekend getting rid of that…eesh.  Must have been the heat (or all the sugar from the day before?)…who knows.  In any case, Chinatown will be rescheduled!

~ by shannon on 11 April 2010.