The Road to 40 Day 90/365: Chill out Thursday

Thursday was kinda slow, but considering the traffic and Vino’s afternoon start to the days, it was pretty much expected.

Che went straight to work early on, while I waited for Vino to wake up before prepping some breakfast for him. As we’re winding down our stay here in th PH, there’s not a lot in the pantry anymore except for pancit canton and vienna sausages.

After breakfast, we burned a few hours on 99 Nights in the Forest. We reached 99 days in about 80 minutes, and we continued playing on. Around day 130, I got disconnected and Vino was expecting to be disconnected as well since we’re in the same network. He was already satisfied with what we’ve done, so he was fine with it if we were disconnected.

I got back into the game though, and we went on to play until day 239. There’s an achievement for reaching 250 days, and we were well stocked to reach it, and maybe even day 500. Alas, the wifi couldn’t let us play through and we got disconnected.

Vino got disappointed this time around, as I saw him almost breaking into tears.

He’s improved a bit in dealing with these things. I’ve always instilled in him the idea that it’s just a game, and he can just do it again. Whether it’s a sport or a video game, I keep telling him that losing is always part of it. I want him to have a competitive fire but sometimes, he’s a lot sadder than he should be.

Games become all aobut winning and no longer about having fun. If the “fun” element is gone, then games will be a source of stress instead of an outlet.

I think Vino expressing emotions after getting disconnected but ultimately composing himself is a good step towards accepting losses.

Our game lasted almost three hours, so our lunch was around 4pm already. We went down to the food court at the mall across the street. Vino got his ramen, I got my Ilocos Empanada and kikiam.

The empanada is nice, and considering past experience with food and eating it in the places they came from, I can only imagine how heavenly it would taste if I ate it in Ilocos, which I haven’t been to.

During this time, his football school asked if Vino would like to be the permanent goalkeeper of a different team, but continue his training with his old team. It was going to be in Division 1, so it would be a lot more competitive. Vino was hesitant and decided he wanted to stick with his guys. 

From our conversation, it felt like he was a bit intimidated by it being in Division 1, but I saw how giddy he was with the praise and consideration. I guess his decision is also influenced by the fact that he’s developing a sense of camaraderie with his guys and would want to win or lose together as a group – which I totally appreciate. 

We later went to the supermarket to get some fish and tomatoes for Che. Tomorrow will be our last day together for this trip, as we will go to SG on Saturday, while she goes to Bacolod. Elle and Kaloi gifted her with some salted eggs, and fried fish with salted eggs and tomatoes on the side and fish sauce as dipping sauce is her comfort food.

For dinner, I asked if she wanted to try the Korean restaurant she found on reels that was just nearby. They don’t accept reservations, but I thought maybe we should try our luck.

Our luck wasn’t that good this time around, so we had to find other options. We ended up trying BBQ Chicken, a Korean fried chicken spot nearby.

The tteokbokki platter looked fine, as it had chicken and some side dishes. Unfortunately, they didn’t have bone-in chicken, which was a bit of a disappointment already. Once we tried it, we couldn’t even save some for Vino because it was spicy. Even Che didn’t have a lot.

They also didn’t have makgeolli, which didn’t help endear us to the restaurant. We decided to wrap up our leftovers and head back to the room.

We’re planning to move to a smaller room tomorrow, so we don’t really want a lot of things in the fridge already. Hence, I took it upon myself to finish the leftovers with a nightcap of the leftover soju I used for cooking.

We watched an episode of Good Boy before calling it a night, especially since Che slept on the sofa already. I told Vino to stop with the YouTube videos so he could sleep, and we turned on Happy Gilmore (the old one) as a background movie.

He was engaged though, and watched the whole movie before trying to sleep. It took him a few minutes, but he was eventually knocked out by sleep.

I feel like this would be the norm if we were living here in the PH already. Work is a priority, so we’d be staying around this area, which means we’d be far from a lot of our friends. Even if we stayed for a month, we still missed out on seeing some good friends in this trip.

Hopefully, we get to catch up with them in December when we come visit again. It will still be insanely traffic, but at least (fingers crossed) Che wouldn’t be as busy as she is right now, which could allow us to plan more activities together.

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