Nothing is more comforting than a steaming hot bowl of bulalo.  If anything, bulalo is my favorite Filipino dish.  I’d go to many places to look for it, to eat it, and to warm my heart and soul with its quintessential simplicity and taste.

   Because bulalo is served on almost every bus stop or travel stopover in the Philippines, the proverbial hat is overflowing with all sorts of places where “the best” bulalo is served.  But if I have learned anything from eating late dinners at greasy spoons, the best bulalo is not the stuff served at Michelin-starred restaurants, or in places where it’s a mortal sin to take soup with the wrong spoon.

   But allow me to add another place to that long list of bulaluhan, where a bulalo addict like me should go in the search for the best-tasting bulalo in all 7,107 islands of the Philippines.

   It was 3 AM today when me, Jayson and Inin decided to cap off the night with a feed of bulalo at the 3H terminal at Abanao Road.  I’ve eaten bulalo in all sorts of places, and figured the bulk of them to be tasteless, chewy, sinewy, and expensive.  The bulaluhan where we ate was characteristic of the many places where I’ve eaten bulalo: dank, dark, musty, and smells of diesel oil.  This was different: it was deep inside a bus garage.  There was no sign: this is a place that you go to by word-of-mouth.  Because it was unlighted, I expected a hobo sleeping under a bus chassis or a woman being raped and snuffed out on a very dark corner of the place.  It looked like a scene straight from Wes Craven when he started out making horror films.

   The place was well-lit enough for you to see the comfort room-green paintwork, the cracked tiles, and the tattered linoleum floor.  This place had no menus or menu boards: the old signs made out of cigarette boxes or used white folders made it blatantly obvious that this place served bulalo, and nothing but bulalo.  For P60 a bowl and a P7 plate of rice, this was a cheap place.  There were no glass cases that showcased other food served.  There were no frying pans in sight: there were just dilapidated gas burners where big cauldrons of bulalo continued to simmer away.  This was a bulaluhan, in its strictest, most honest sense.

   Not exactly a family-friendly environment, either: the people who ran the place aren’t the cheery people of McDonald’s who have smiles literally sewn on their faces from serving Happy Meals.  I doubt that they would break out tambourines to sing the “Happy Birthday” song when a birthday is celebrated there (if there ever was).

   But for all the unappealing things you can say about this place, the first thing you should notice is that this place is crowded.  This is not the kind of “crowded” that there is in coffee shops in between shifts at call centers, or “crowded” Sundays at Jollibee.  This is the kind of “crowded” that says that the food here is good.  The people in there encompassed and represented a broad spectrum of society, from bus drivers to call center agents to clubbers from Legarda Road looking to stall a hangover.

   I think I know the reason why this place is crowded: the bulalo tasted damn good.  Unlike other bulaluhan’s that cheat the flavor by adding beef boullion cubes, the bulalo soup had that unmistakable flavor of bone marrow and beef that has simmered for hours, and imparted its flavor on the stock.  The beef was extremely tender, but still retained its texture and its character.

   The most impressive thing about it is that it didn’t need any side condiments like soy sauce or patis: it was perfectly seasoned.  You won’t see the smallest packet of Ajinomoto in the place: it was simply stock and beef garnished with young onion leeks.  I think that the bulalo was an old family recipe that wouldn’t be sold even to the Sultan of Brunei himself.

   Yup, Jayson was right.  Best.  Bulalo.  Ever.  Don’t mind the screaming woman.

   Last night, me and a few friends scored invites at a gala dinner sponsored by Shell Northern Luzon, held at the Baguio Country Club.  It’s a lot like a Hollywood buffet, without Wolfgang Puck, the caviar canapés, and Jack Nicholson.  It wasn’t bad… but as long-time Marochaholics would already know by now, I’m not at my happiest in corporate-sponsored dinners.  All four of us - me, Dette, Bep, and Bonnierick - were underdressed.  In our blue jeans and rubber shoes, we stuck out like sore thumbs in a sea of three-piece suits and evening gowns.

   As much as I’d like to write about the “Jingle Shell Rock,” I would rather have it that it never happened.  It’s like a bad hangover that ended up with a menopausal old woman getting pregnant by your seed.

   While I like to have my own fun at the expense of rich people, even I know when I’m supposed to feel a bit of shame in being underdressed.  Thank goodness that Dette’s family was there and registered all three of us boys for the event, or else we would have been booted out for being common folk in the same social strata as gas boys.

   Not that there’s anything wrong with filling up gas tanks, but when the waiter is better dressed than you are, you might as well wish you dissolved into the glass carafé that holds your water.  Or if you’re like me on a lucid interval, you would have approached the table with the most glamorous-looking people, unzipped your pants, and gave them a healthy helping of the bubbliest champagne from the very depths of your bladder.

   That’s for jacking up oil prices, bitch!  While I’d like to give the next ass a Belgian chocolate fondant from… uh, my ass, that wouldn’t sit (so to speak) too well with anybody.

   I half-expected that waiters would take up my order of binagoongang baboy and free soup, but I forgot that this wasn’t my usual fare from turo-turo: this was a buffet.  A snooty one where “bistek Tagalog” is “beef striploin” and “chopped bacon” is a misnomer for bits that come off a plastic can.  Because I’m not well-acquainted with dinner-table etiquette, I assumed that I should just take a little bit of food and not go back for a second helping.  Then we all realized that the buffet table ran out of dessert.

   Don’t get me wrong: I had fun… sort of.  Pictures will follow.

   It’s been a while since my last cup of coffee, so I broke out the instant coffee and mixed it with French vanilla-flavored creamer as a treat.  It tasted pretty good: way better than the flavored coffees they serve at Gloria Jean’s Coffees, or back when Seattle’s Best Coffee was still open at SM Baguio.  I don’t know if I have problems holding down my caffeine or anything, but I fell asleep at 4:00 AM.

   Save for the annoying episode of insomnia, it’s high time I started drinking coffee again.  The air is getting cold here in Baguio: brewing the morning coffee takes earlier than usual here nowadays.  Heck, any time is a good time to have coffee for a coffee-drinker.  I’m more of a tea person myself, but nothing warms your blood - save for a steaming pot of bulalo or a hefty serving of pinapaitan - than good old coffee.

   The coffee scene here in Baguio City can get a bit expensive: thankfully (or rather mercifully), Café Véniz serves bottomless brewed coffee for P37.00.  There’s also Ionic Café and, of course, Pizza Volante (I don’t know what’s the relationship between that place and the singer-musician Nyoy Volante).  Because I’m a rather casual coffee drinker, I don’t have a very discriminating or sophisticated palate for coffee.  Coffee is coffee: I don’t care if it comes from instant coffee grounds or more expensive tins of brewing coffee.

   I did have a phase when I completely got into the oils of Benguet brewed coffee, but that’s for another time.

   It’s easy to get around a problem surrounding the lack of your favorite cigarette: you look for a substitute.  In the absence of Marlboro Lights, there’s always Winston Lights or Marlboro Reds.  The same is true when it comes to drinking… or is it?

   Two summers ago, when I spent the summer term at UP Diliman, me and a few friends from the boarding house decided to drink a round of beers to celebrate the end of my exam.  I didn’t know much about Manila, so I expected that they drank the same kind of San Miguel Beer I was used to guzzling here in Baguio.  It was a relatively rural area (the irony of it), but the nearby stores didn’t carry SMB.  After a few stores - and a trip to MiniStop - we finally got San Miguel.

   For the non-alcoholics, it’s a different sort: back in those days, I literally had to train myself to drink RC Cola.  Here in Baguio, there’s no such thing as “not Coke:” you’d have to be a lowlander to appreciate Pepsi.  Coke Sakto was just about as far as the Coca-Cola continuum will go in that neighborhood, where the nearest Coke-selling place was the soda fountain at CASAA.  The soonest I got to the bus terminal on my way out of Manila, I drank Coke to my heart’s content.

   Nein.  So the Germans say.