Old friends, old memories

Just last week, i met up with some college buddies whom i haven't seen in quite a while. Chach was in town for a few weeks; she's been studying medicine in the US for about a year. We were meeting up with another friend, Shauna with whom I have been incommunicado since she changed her digits (again). My old roommate Anton rounded out our foursome, himself just arriving from a month long vacation in the US as well.

We all met up at the Museum Cafe right beside the Ayala Museum. Chach and Shauna had a few drinks before we went to look for a place to eat. The original plan was to eat in Chicken Bacolod, to reminisce the old Katipunan days, but I told them that it was already closed by the time we decided to move. So we ended up eating in Recipies in Greenbelt 3. After dinner, my friends wanted to see my new place in Makati, so I brought them to my condo and chilled for a while there. Since we all wanted to have a drink, we started looking for a place to go. Chach suggested Sa Guijo, a hole-in-the-wall rock joint in the lesser-known-albeit-more-dangerous part of Makati. And so we went. The place was OK, it was just like a small two storey house that was converted into a bar on the first floor, and a hobby shop on the second. The bands that night were good, but not particularly awesome.

After a few beers and tequila roses, Anton and I brought the girls home. They both lived in Katipunan. Anton and I used to live there for 3 and a half years while we were going to Ateneo, and it felt a little more than nostalgic being there after so long. Shauna also lived in the same building we stayed in, the ever famous monument of college sex, drugs, alcohol and rock n' roll: One Burgundy Plaza. My whole college life can be summed up to what I call the "Burgz" experience. I'll get into that next time. But I have to admit, standing in front of Burgundy at 2 in the morning brought back a lot of memories. Damn, I think I still have separation issues with that place.

If I may regress, Chach is actually the girlfriend of my good buddy Jay-R, but we usually refer to him as JRBhoy, JRBohoy, J-Dawg, Dominic "The Dominator" Ochoa or JayR "Design 4 Love" Torio. They've been together for some time now, and after graduating from Ateneo they both moved back to Dallas, Texas.

Anyway, I met Jay in highschool, but we only hungout in college. We were both teammates in the Ateneo Baseball Team, and we were neighbors in Burgz as well. I even stayed in his place for a few months while I floated when I moved units in the building. I was actually the one who found him a roommate, my highschool classmate Mihk. They lived in Unit 16-O. I stayed in 12-H for the 1st year and a half, then transferred to 10-D for the last two years.

Anton was my roommate all through out my stay at Burgz. We actually lived just a house away from each other back and Alabang, we were classmates in Southridge since Prep, and we have been good friends even when we were still in diapers (I have pictures of that). This guy is literally my brother from another mother. Eversince we moved out of Burgz, I hardly saw Anton anymore. He had to take an extra year of school while I worked, so we never really had a chance to hangout. So our gimmik last Thursday was one of the few times we actually went out again after college.

On the other hand, the way we met Shauna was curiously funny. She studied in Miriam, but we were in the same batch. When we started living in Burgz around November of 2000, we always used to see this platinum blonde haired girl in a Miriam uniform walking along Katipunan. We were more than pleasantly surprised to find out that she was actually living one floor below us at that time (we were in 12-H, she was in 11-Q). It was during the Edsa II days (that's another story) that my other roommate Stef decided to just go to her place and invite her to drink with us. And to our surpise, she agreed! Maybe it was the fact that she was Fil-Brit and that she had just moved here from Malaysia that made her more open to invitations like that because honestly, I think there's less than a 1 out of 10 chance that someone born and bred here would actually agree to that. Hell, most of the women I know lack any spontenaity. Anyway, she started to hang out with us eversince then. At one point, she used to come by my place everyday after school for about a sem. Anton was on LOA then for the whole semester since he went to Japan. So Shauna replaced him for a while as the 4th roommie of 12-H.

Anyway, being with some of the people that I identify with the best and worst times of my college life, I started to reminisce the good old "Burgz" days. Burgz isn't just a place, a building, or even just a name. Rather, it is an ideology. It is the agreggate of the spirits of the Keng, the Boogerz, the Rock and the Roll, the Drunken Master, the Pukefest, the doobie days, the Blue Ven nights, the Michael Learns to Rock, the TC7, the uncleaned rice cooker when white rice turned to red, the Depression Days, the Mustang nights, the Takuza 2000, the God of Gamblers, the gambling nights, the Godfather, the Scarface, the K.O moment, the Hungry Hippo, the Siomai double rice, the Dannylicious, the Edsa II, the 12H and 11Q drink, the Moo-man, the Wedding Singer, the clogged toilet, the NT, the LBNSU, the MPNC, the PNC, the PPNC, the DKNY, the CBLMF, the PPA...etc. There are just too many soucres of inspiration to mention. But taken as a whole, Burgz is a lifestyle where you walk the walk and talk the talk.

In my next few post, i'm going to set in stone the many yet equally important defining moments during the Burgz days. To be continued.