A Taste of Germany: Brotzeit German Bier Bar & Restaurant

Here’s a cool restaurant for those looking for a different place to get inebriated. Brotzeit German Bier Bar & Restaurant in Shangri-La offers authentic Bavarian cuisine and excellent German beers on tap.

Continue reading “A Taste of Germany: Brotzeit German Bier Bar & Restaurant”

Collectible Items IRL (In Real Life) Travel

Updated February 2016

In the latest edition of video game Tomb Raider, Lara Croft can choose to deviate from the main quest and search for relics and GPS caches hidden off the beaten path. In Arkham Asylum, Batman can opt to track down the Riddler’s trophies while trying to foil the Joker’s plot.

Many video games, especially the role-playing/adventure types, usually have sidequests where the goal is to collect certain items. Usually these items are not really essential to finishing the overall game. Most of the time it’s just for bragging rights. Among the memorable collectible items in games I have played are those rare cards from the Triple Triad card mini-game in Final Fantasy VIII, the insanely hard to complete 100 stray beads from the game Okami, and memories and bottles in Alice: The Madness Returns.

Credit: The Last of Us meme

The latest game I played, The Last of Us, had me searching for Firefly pendants, training manuals and comic books while trying to fight off the infected and survive in a brutal post-apocalyptic world. Continue reading “Collectible Items IRL (In Real Life) Travel”

Food Trip: Sagada

In recent years, Sagada has gotten a reputation for having lots of great eating places. If you’ve been there, you can probably agree that the cool crisp mountain air and all that walking around surely works up an appetite. Thankfully, there are lots of great restaurants to try out. For those who like to plan where to eat in advance, here’s a list of some of the restaurants we sampled during our five-day trip there, with accessibility ratings and distance on foot from the town center (with the hospital as the starting point).

food trip sagada Continue reading “Food Trip: Sagada”

Achievements Unlocked in 2012

Ah, yes the year-ender post. Where do I begin, when I haven’t written about half of the trips I took this year? Let’s see, bullet points would be the easiest way. The year 2012 has been pretty good in terms of travel. I wasn’t able to go on some of the international trips I had planned this year, but in return I got a lot of local trips, some of which were totally unexpected. Here are the major blog/trip highlights and “achievements unlocked” this year:

  • Domain Upgrade: Upgraded WordPress blog to a self-hosted dot.com
  • Blog facelift: Got an awesome new blog banner designed by the pure genius known as The Creative Dork/The Travelling Dork aka Robx Bautista
  • Fan Likes: Gained more than 900 followers on Facebook (up from 300 the first year)
  • Page views: Exceeded 200,000 page views
  • Page Rank upgrade: Achieved a Google Page Rank of 3 since switching to a dot.com domain

99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall

After searching through photo archives of previous trips where I know I drank beers abroad, checking out several places that serve imported and craft beer in Manila, and raiding the alcohol section of a LOT of grocery stores, I finally completed my 99 Bottles of Beer on the (Facebook) Wall collection! I thought about seriously doing this sometime in October 2011 after thinking to myself “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” would make a cool post, and am happy to say that I have completed it as Oktoberfest 2012 is coming to an end.

  • MISSION: “99 Bottles of Beer”
  • GOAL: Try 99 different brands of beer from as many countries as possible
  • STATUS: 99 / 99 collected (as of 10.20.12)

Here are the beers in alphabetical order:
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Creative Coolers

I guess we can all agree that the heat in Manila has been really unbearable lately. With temperatures soaring, everyone’s thoughts turn to halo-halo, shakes, ice cream and cold drinks to cool down.

I was watching Kapuso Mo Jessica Soho last week to catch the segment on Outbreak Manila and saw their feature on summer coolers – which included Crocodile Egg ice cream from Davao and Tilapia ice cream from Nueva Ecija – two ice creams I have just added to my “must-try” weird food list. Here are a few other creative coolers which I’ve come across during recent trips. Beat the the heat with these weird finds:

SILI, PILI & MALUNGGAY ICE CREAM

Where found: First Colonial Grill, Legazpi, Albay Continue reading “Creative Coolers”

Achievements Unlocked in 2011

The year 2011 has been a great year for me in terms of travel and work. I have a lot to be thankful for this year and can say that I have successfully “leveled up” a few ranks. Instead of listing all the different trips I’ve taken as a year-end post, I’ve listed below a few of the worthwhile “trophies” and Achievements Unlocked:

  • First Step: Start a Travel Blog
  • Gain 300+ Fan Page Likes
  • Exceed 40,000 page views in less than a year
  • Acquire and learn to ride a motorcycle
  • Travel more than 1,000 km via motorcycle

Continue reading “Achievements Unlocked in 2011”

The Beer is on in Saigon

Though Vietnam is not really known for having the best beer in Asia, for some people, a vacation would not be a vacation without sampling the local brew. Think of it as part of enjoying the local culture.

Here’s a rough guide to some Vietnamese beers we tried, with ratings provided by Travel Up’s resident beer connoisseur Art Fuentes (who happens to be my husband and the reason our travel fund has to have an allocated “beer budget”). Continue reading “The Beer is on in Saigon”