The Road to 40 Day 91/365: “Made It” Moments

We got a chance to catch up with our friends who are moving back to the Philippines for the forseeable future.

It was our last day in the PH, as we are heading back to SG on Saturday. During our stay here, we had to get a room upgrade so that we could have a separate room for when Che needs to work from home.

However, since we’re heading back, it doesn’t make sense to pay for a bigger room. We spent the day packing stuff, both for going home and for moving to a different room.

We requested for the shift before lunch, and we were just waiting for their call while we were in our room. The call came at around 5pm. Apparently. There were a lot of people checking in on this day.

Our new room had a better view than our last one, and it’s still spacious despite being a studio unit.

Apart from moving out of the room, another agenda we had for the day was to meet up with Steph and Ivan.

Steph is one of our closest college friends. She’s my batchmate and our political party’s chairman in our graduating year. We grew a lot as kids before trying to find our own ways in the real world separately.

While we had our own professional journeys, we always tried to catch up whenever we can. In 2017, we had to leave our house in SG after having Vino. As fate would have it, Steph was about to move to SG and was looking for a place to stay.

Just before the pandemic, she met Ivan and it eventually blossomed into a beautiful relationship that is now a wonderful marriage.

Ivan is just an awesome fellow who is always interesting to learn about everytime we meet. It’s like he has several personalities waiting to be introduced to the world, each one awesome in their own way.

He enjoys Steph’s quirks and adorable bitchiness – traits we all love about her as well. Ivan is very articulate and has well thought out opinions on a variety of topics, which I think why he and Steph go so well together. Vino loves him as well, and is always excited to meet with him.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to be with them for a couple of life events. We were in Vietnam during their wedding ceremony in SG, and we were in the PH for their SG farewell party last month. So at least we could catch them in their early days here in the PH and just before we went back to SG.

We had dinner at Souv, where we might have over-ordered a bit after getting worked up by what we saw on the menu.

Over the course of dinner, we talked about how life has been going. Ivan has been enjoying his time in the BGC bubble so far. It’s not quite Singapore, but the convenience of everything, the variety of food, and the significantly lower cost of goods are quite fun for him.

For Steph, she’ll be doing her SG role in Makati and would be in the office twice a week.

We had a chat about it before, and I told her how proud I was of her to be in a position to negotiate the deal she has. A decade ago, we couldn’t even get ourselves to take a day off from work. Now, she will be working from home for three days in a week, living in the BGC bubble.

I’m happy to see my friends thrive and lead the lives that they do today. It’s a blessing to be surrounded by good-natured people who are rewarded for their hard work.

We walked around after dinner and Vino insisted to see where they are staying right now. After a bit more talk, we walked back to our place and prepared to rest up.

Che is heading to Bacolod, while we are going back to SG. She decided to shift a couple of her plans on this night, which will keep her in Manila for at least this week, but will have more time in SG the week after.

She had to convince Vino that it’s for the best, and he was ok with it. I’ve always told him that our role is always to support his mom in any way that we can. Though he looked sad that Che wouldn’t be able to bring him to class on his first day of school, we’re happy that he’s ok with it.

It’s a reality we have to deal with for now, but at least he is constantly reminded by the “why” of all this. 

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