Queso de Bola at Travel Cafe Philippines

I love cheese like I was a mouse in my past life. The odd thing is, any type of cheesecake is not one of my favorite desserts. Until I tasted the Queso De Bola cheesecake at Travel Cafe Philippines at Greenbelt 5. There is no doubt what that cheesecake was made of as the distinct salty, nutty flavor of Queso De Bola really stood out. It was a bit pricey by my standards at P180 for a 3-inch-diameter, 2-inch high dessert, but I wouldn't mind shelling out that much for such a special treat.

The way they serve coffee is special, too. It's served in a french press, with a mug, a small cup of fresh milk, organically grown sugar in a bag, and an hourglass, not to eat (of course!) but to serve as timer. The waiter instructs you to wait for the hourglass until the sand sifts through to its bottom part before you pour the coffee into your mug. I tried its regular brew, because the Coffee Alamid which was supposed to be the rarest coffee (according to the cafe's website, it comes only from the sweetest coffee cherries of the Philippine forests, carefully chosen and eaten by free-roaming civets. The beans are then fermented in the animal’s digestive system and excreted as whole beans. This process gives the beans their unique, supreme flavor.) was quite expensive. It would have been interesting to try the Coffee Alamid, but it lost me when I saw its price tag of P240 per cup. I will probably try it on the next pay day. That, and the Queso de Bola cheesecake.

Recapturing Lost Youth

If you were born in the same era as I was, that area in Mother Ignacia where you find Ten Years After and East St. Louis will probably instantaneously make you reminisce about the good old days when you didn't have enough in your pocket to have a night out with friends on a whim and so you patiently await the next pay day because you had no choice. You were probably in your early 20s, just started with your first job, or left the first one after one week because it just didn't fulfill your greater need to try to fix the problems of society at the time. The corner of East St. Louis and Ten Years After was the place you gravitate to when you and your friends wanted to hang out and have a couple of cold ones, because Manila was just too far and Makati was for the rich.

So Twenty-or-so Years After, my friends and I decided to visit that old haunt, surprised to learn that it's now called TYA, later on realizing the new name makes sense, seeing as we're coming back after all those years and we've been friends after all those years.

It's no surprise then that we hear the songs played along with the music videos of our youth (everything from the 80s, some I don't even recognize myself, but based on the hairstyle and the fashion statement of the singers on the videos, no doubt are from the 80s). We dance on our seats, trying to remember the moves and the grooves that go along with that kind of music. We look at the people around and asked ourselves disbelievingly: are we that old? They seemed to be enjoying the music like we were, but we can't be that old. Then we realized, the only people there under 25 were the bartenders and the waitresses.

But it still felt good to be around people who knew that 80s music is not the "classics" and that TYA is still worth going back to, even though Greenbelt, The Fort and Eastwood are considered cooler nowadays.