RC at Manam!

Today was the day I would finally hang out with the RC!

I started my day early and, thankfully, I didn't oversleep. I woke up on time and talked to a few friends, mainly Baguettes. Meryll had asked us for our Locket usernames so we could add each other and I redownloaded Locket again, even though I kind of said goodbye to it. When I checked, it seemed that someone had unfriended me there. It kind of ticked me off a bit because I was still their friend last time, but whatever. Since we weren't friends anymore here, and they actively made a choice to remove me, I just removed them from my Steam Family Library.

After that was done, I continued my morning and then left to book a ride to Fully Booked, Bonifacio High Street to meet the other RC people. Today was finally the day I'd meet the RC again and I would be the de-facto "host" of today's events. I'd primarily be arranging where people meet, eat, and everything so it was a little nerve-wracking. But, after freshening up and booking a ride, I eventually got to Fully Booked at around the correct meetup time, which was at 11 a.m.

I tried to find Jared since he was already there and I found him sitting on one of the benches with the picnic table. We talked for a while about US politics and I mainly asked him how he was doing and why he was back here in the Philippines. We mostly talk about tech and he told me how he bought a Windows Phone in the US because of me. Because I paraded a Windows Phone around in high school and even showed off my Windows 8 laptop which he remembered had a fingerprint sensor (an uncommon thing in laptops around 2013). It honestly came as a complete shock because I thought everyone had forgotten that part of me, being a "Windows ambassador" and all, but it's cool that he still remembered. I eventually showed him the iPhone 16 Pro Max I recently bought and I checked out his Samsung S24 Ultra and Galaxy Buds, which were a model above mine since he had the 3 Pro and I had the 2 Pro. We waited until Tiffany arrived and she eventually messaged me that she was already inside Fully Booked. We headed in to meet her and I couldn't believe that it was her at first since she had blonde hair, but it was Tiffany! We greet each other and so does Jared, and I eventually ask Tiffany and Jared to take a photo together. Tiffany was just looking for some blind boxes because she might buy one, but she ultimately didn't decide to buy anything and marked herself as safe from buying blind boxes again.

Surprisingly, Reilly pops out of nowhere and kind of jumpscares me. I take a photo of Jared, Tiffany, and Reilly together and Reilly tells us that he was here early because he didn't want to be late due to traffic, considering how congested the roads are these days. I then take a pic of the 3 of them and we browse the other parts of Fully Booked. Reilly then pays for the books he bought. While we were talking, JK jumpscares us by popping out of nowhere and then to the right of me. We talk and I note how he has a cool Spongebob wallpaper on his iPhone. Reilly rejoins us after buying his books and he's surprised to meet JK again since it's been a long time. We mostly catch up as a group and head to the 2nd floor to explore Fully Booked a little more. They talk about anime and a bunch of other things, JK also shows me this clip of a cool anime he watched, titled Blue Eyed Samurai. I make a note of it and we continue exploring the other parts. Eventually, I messaged the group chat and saw that William and Sydney were on their way to Manam Netpark, so we had to leave Fully Booked and make our way there. We mostly just talked amongst ourselves while walking, I took a few photos of them while on the way. Tiffany also told us that her Samsung Galaxy Flip broke a few days ago and she got a new S24 just yesterday. We kept walking and actually passed by Sydney, who is William's girlfriend, and we got to Manam Netpark. I was kind of worried because I hadn't actually reserved and it was right around lunchtime so it would be expected that we would take a while to get seated. We got put down as the 13th or 15th customer on the waitlist, which was fine because we still had a lot of us waiting.

William and Sydney eventually meet up with us, making us 7: Tiffany, Reilly, Jared, JK, William, Sydney, and I. Lactaoen joins us eventually, then Jaymz, then Reynald and his girlfriend Bea, making us 11. Finally, Sean was the last to join us, making us 12 who will be dining at Manam. I actually couldn't believe how I pulled 12 people to gather in one place—all of us having wildly different shifts and availabilities. It's actually pretty impressive as an extrovert. I actually didn't properly count us and I initially told the waitress that we were 9, then I bumped us to 14 for whatever reason. But everyone was all here and gathered now. Reynald and Bea gave me a gift upon meeting me, which was a really nice gesture.

Everyone was so eager to talk to one another and catch up because it's been years since the last time they met, some even meeting for the first time since their senior high school graduation. It was really nice to see everyone together as a cohesive group. I talked to some of them for a bit, but I was mostly concerned with our placement in the queue. It was mainly my job and, even though I didn't socialize with the others that much this early, it was fine as long as I have taken care of everything for them. I ordered for us and chose good dishes while not minding the price. I expected the damage to be around 8,000 to 10,000 Pesos for this get-together, which was painful but it's fine. I believe I'm spending it on good friends. Everyone really took the time to socialize with each other while waiting, but we eventually had our table ready at around 1 p.m. I did ask the waitress to take a photo of our group and we got seated after that.

I wasn't sure where to sit, but it was somewhere that was supposed to be in the middle, as JK said since I was the one paying. But since no one was sitting to the left of me, Bea and Rey asked to switch seats with me and I'd be sat at the end of the long table. It was fine, so I sat at the end with Jaymz and then Jared to my left, also William to my first right and then Sydney, followed by Sean afterward.

Once the food arrives, we all eat together and chat with one another. Everyone's essentially in their own circles, but I can see others are the end of the other side of the table having a good chat. The ambiance of Manam was also good enough for us to talk to one another. I'm mostly cut off from the "main group" because we had 2 extra seats that were kind of separating us 4—William, Sydney, Jaymz, and I from the rest of the table. Food was also hard to pass, but we had 4 dishes (palabok, pork kawali, Bicol express, bangus belly) and 2 full bowls of rice. After eating, some ordered drinks like buko pandan + sago and then iced tea. I didn't really get anything but we somehow had 1 extra glass of buko pandan which I just drank. It's funny because I had put the straw upside-down which Jaymz and William made fun of me for it. I also opened Bea and Reynald's gift to me and it was a Cinnamoroll blind box! It was so cute and I immediately loved it. I took a few photos of the gift and of the other people on the table from my POV. Weirdly enough, I ordered Manam's famous sisig and another bowl of rice, but everyone else was already full by then. No one really ate the sisig and I was the only one who had a few more bites of that before having it for take-out. I eventually asked for the bill and it was around 6,000 Pesos, which was surprisingly """cheap""" for me. Considering the factors, especially that we're 12 people, it didn't seem expensive and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief.

After eating, everyone wondered where else to go and I essentially came up with the Timezone bowling idea on the spot, but Sydney suggested that we visit a museum nearby, either the Mind Museum or the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, both of which were along BGC High Street and we had all passed by. We tried booking for the Mind Museum and Sydney organized the logistics of that, which was a nice gesture. Sean also called in his girlfriend Denise to join us. We then left Manam and I was going with Sean and Tiffany to the newly-opened Starbucks along High Street. Others joined us on our trip, even though they weren't getting coffee. They eventually splintered from us, though, and Reilly, Tiffany, and I just went inside the Starbucks to order. We got our drink and Sean also had Denise come and tag along with us. We sat at a bench with a picnic table nearby, but then I saw that the Kuube installation from yesterday was empty, so I asked everyone to move there instead.

I showed them how the Kuube bench worked and that it had Bluetooth speakers. I think JK and Tiffany were impressed and, after playing Taylor Swift's "Our Song" I gave the Bluetooth connection to Tiffany so she could play songs from her phone. She played some Reddit stories and eventually, some music, and then JK took over the Bluetooth connection and played a few songs. I also borrowed Tiffany's power bank during this time to charge my phone. We mostly waited by the Kuube bench while waiting for Sydney's museum booking to go through. But we had already booked too late and the Mind Museum wasn't accepting any more bookings for the day. We just settled for the Metropolitan Museum and headed there after we got our reservations. Jared and JK would be left out of the trip, so it was just us 11: Reynald, Bea, Sean, Denise, Sydney, William, Reilly, Tiffany, Jaymz, Lactaoen, and I.

We really enjoyed our spontaneous ""field trip"" if we could call it that. We passed through a Korean knotting part called Maedeup and we wore some traditional Korean attire, which we wore and took pictures with. I also took photos of the others and sent it immediately to our group chat. After that, there was this Banksy installation which we went to next. I took more photos of the others, primarily Jaymz since he needed to post FB/IG Stories as we were going through the exhibit. I took a really good photo of him inside a British telephone booth which he really liked and thanked me for. We passed by the other parts of the exhibit and eventually saw this "freedom wall" at the near end. I wrote the hurt I was still feeling, a "FUCK YOU —" followed by that person's name, and posted it on my IG Story for my close friends. I had Meryll reply to that, then Max, then Rachel and it was nice to express some of the anger I was still keeping from this morning. It was honestly a nice photo, too. The other RC members wrote other things on the wall, and Reynald wrote our names at the top of the wall. After that, we had our last few installations upstairs. The majority of them were just paintings by Filipino artists and we didn't really fool around that much and just took simple pics. I took a funny photo of Sean and Jaymz and they tagged one of our friends who wasn't able to join us. We hung around the gift shop after that and took photos of Reilly and Tiffany having a conversation just by themselves. After that, we all gathered up to go downstairs and we visited the final art installation, which was ironically the first art installation that we visited. We were also able to take this big group picture of the 11 of us! It was a really nice stop in our day and, by the time we got out, it was already the evening. I also gave Tiffany her power bank back.

We had to go to Market! Market for our final activity as a group: Timezone and bowling. I had spent around 2,500 Pesos loading my Timezone card, which totaled around 3,800 in Timezone credits due to promos. While we were walking on the way there, Reilly pulled me over to talk about a few things. I listened to him, gave him some advice, and then headed upstairs with Jaymz and left him to accompany Tiff while she was going to buy cases for her new phone. I met up with others at the bowling alley part and we played some bowling!

Initially, it was us 4—Me, Jaymz, Reynald, and Bea—who would be bowling on one lane and William with Lactaoen bowling on the lane to the right. The others were sat on the chairs around the bowling alley behind us. We kept playing bowling and I really just enjoyed the whole thing. Once William's lane was done, I invited the other guys to play on that lane, so it then became the lane of Sean, JK, Jared, and William. Once our lane was done, I didn't want anyone else to hog it and no one else wanted to bowl so I just swiped for myself and was the lone player for that lane. Reilly arrived worrying about his overthinking and mostly just sad in the seat worrying. I also saw how competitive the other lane of 4 guys was getting. Tiffany then joins us with a new case on her phone. She asked for my Timezone card and I let her borrow it so she could play a few games. The others also borrowed my card to play basketball or other games by themselves, like Sydney, Reynald, and Lactaoen. I just walked around and kept a watch on how many credits I still had. By the end of the boys' bowling lane, no one wanted to play bowling anymore and they seemed to have a fun time mocking each other and joking about William's bowling skills, but it was mostly Sean accusing him of cheating because he played well. In the end, William scored 113, Sean 94, Jared 55, and JK with 48.

We had nowhere else to go afterward but some of us decided to have dinner in Market! Market! instead, mostly because it was Syndey's idea and no one else contested it. Sean and Denise splintered away from us and enjoyed their evening afterward. While we were on our way out, the guys played basketball one more time and they played this "extreme" version where the height of the ring was high and far away. The girls took photos amongst themselves and I used my remaining load for that. I actually had to load 500 Pesos more because we lacked the funds to print out another set of copies, but I wasn't able to reload in time before the timer expired. I still had some leftover load on my card. The other guys had moved on to this punching bag game. I wanted to give it a try so I did my hardest punch, I even moved my body and put all of my weight into that punch, and I ended up beating the other guys with a score of 3,300 or something. Tiffany was seriously shocked at how hard I punched and William was also impressed, he saw that I put my entire body's weight into that. But since William was a more experienced boxer, he even had a punching bag at home, he eventually beat my record at 3,600 or something. It was still really nice to know that I could land a powerful punch if I wanted to.

Then we used the elevator to go downstairs to KFC and made our order. We had trouble seating since there were still 9 of us remaining, but we eventually got seated. Reilly and I took everyone's order. Reilly added 1,000 to the order and I withdrew 2,000 in cash and the bill for tonight's dinner for all of us was around 1,700 Pesos. Overall, the amount of money I spent was equal or around to the amount of damage I had expected today would be. While waiting for our food, JK was running out of battery and only had a Lightning to USB C cable. Since no one else had a power bank ready, I had a wild idea to plug JK's iPhone 14 into my iPhone 16. Jared couldn't let JK's phone charge because he was already at 29% charge. I just had a feeling that it would charge, and apparently, I was right! JK honestly couldn't believe it and I honestly couldn't believe it, too. It worked, though, which was nice because he needed the extra charge to get home.

After eating, we all stood up, walked downstairs, and parted ways with each other. Jaymz went first, then William and Sydney, then Rey and Bea, leaving me, Reilly, and Tiffany. Reilly then had his driver pick him up and it was just me and Tiffany. We talked a bit about some stuff, mostly about their area and how they would tag along with their sister for a Grab ride. I eventually had my own Grab ride booked and I was on the way home. The driver was mainly talkative during the whole trip home, but I learned a lot about him and his new Toyota Avanza. We mostly talked about his car but in the end, he eventually thought that I was a passenger given to him by Grab because he was going to go home. My home's route was in the same direction as his home so he was thankful for that and he was thankful when he dropped me off. I gave him a tip and he also thanked me for that.

I got home safe and I was pretty tired from everything. It was a really special day. Throughout it all, my friends wanted to actually repay me for all the money I spent. William, Reilly, and Tiffany even wanted to ask how much their expense was so they could send some money back, but I didn't want to collect some money back. It's a really nice feeling considering how much I've been taken advantage of these past few years. To experience people who just take and take, but give almost nothing back. It only assured me that I was spending time with the right people and that was all that mattered to me.