I consider myself brave because I went to SM Hypermarket at Mall of Asia, a far, far away mall I've never gone to by myself before, to meet fellow bloggers, most (if not all) of whom I've never met before, for a bloggers' meet, an event I've never tried attending before. But, hey, it wouldn't have been an adventure if it wasn't like that.

I didn't actually get to eat a lot, but what I did eat was good. There were two chocolate fountains, one with "normal" chocolate, and another with dark choco. Of course, I went for the dark one. And, gosh, it's SO typical of me to firstly talk about chocolate. The bamboo shells dish was cool! Spicy, exotic and nice! I wish I attacked the Japanese food, though. Rawr.

So, anyway, as I said, I didn't eat much, because I was doing some kind of a social butterfly thing. Haha!

When I got to Taste Asia, I had no idea whatsoever what I was going to do. I got there a bit late, 8:00 pm, so a lot of people had already settled in their seats, gotten introduced, and grouped together around the cocktail tables.

Whereas I, the girl in blue, was standing alone by the doors.

But then — AHA! — I saw a couple of suspiciously familiar faces, who, to cut a long story short, turned out to be two of my friends from UP Los Baños. I hadn't seen them in four years. FOUR YEARS! And I didn't even know that they blogged. Haha! Dontcha just looooove small world encounters? Hello to Layla and Heidi! Hehe. I met Carla there, too.

Right after meeting them, Aileen passed by, so I pulled her over and introduced myself. Yey~ we finally meet in person. She then introduced me to Jomar, which led to the whole social butterfly thing.

After being introduced to Happy the happy photographer and Mister Vader the DJ and magician (who solved a Rubik's cube blindfolded, and did a freakishly simple but awesome magic trick on me), I made like a debutante going from table to table to get to know people and promote my blog and group writing project. (I even interviewed some people why their names were so.) Haha! It was so funny, I don't know what came over me.

I met Arlene and Hiyas, Kirby, Jun, Gary-(ay Gharri pala)-all-the-way-from-Cavite, Cathy, and the other people in their table. I swear I will update this when I get your names down. And then there's — I can do this — Karlo (whom I recognized at once because his photo was on his blog), Darwin, Poell, Tess, Shari, Eric Dee, Neil, Billycoy, LA, Lalon, Elmo, and some other people I cannot, for the life of me, remember at this very moment. I think most of the people (if not all) on that table were Pinoy Blogosphere members. I saw Jori there with the Yehey people... The Racomas were there, too. Ms. Dine was the only one I recognized, but I didn't get to say hi to any of them. Too bad.

Sheesh. I should've written all those names and blog URLs down. I think I'm forgetting so many people. I'm such a ditz sometimes.

And, because I had only a measly 16MB memory stick in my camera, and because I was too busy talking with other people, I only got to shoot a couple of photos. I think I've got a LOT of photos in Happy's and Jomar's cameras, though.




I think what made me do the whole "Hi, I'm Sarah, writing in SarahCada.com, and you are...?" thing while offering a handshake was the relaxed, we're-all-a-big-happy-blogosphere kind of feel in the place. Aside from the continuous flow of yummy food courtesy of SM, there was laughter everywhere — NOT kidding — and cameras were flashing left and right as people met, talked and shared life, outside their blogging platforms.

I think Carla put it nicely when she said, "At first I kind of thought I was a bit out of place because everybody seemed to know everybody." Ah, but then most of us only met personally for the first time that night!

I loved it. Not just because I met other bloggers, but because of what happens now that I've met them. They're not anymore the cool writer who comes up with nice content for his blog. They're now friends, and commenting on their blogs and reading their comments now has a different feel to it.

Things like this should happen more often!

More pictures:
Cliquebooth
Aileen's Taste Asia Blogger Foodfest Picasa album
Jomar's cameraphone shots
Happy's photos for the event

Selected Cliquebooth pics with me in them:
Layla, Heidi, Carla and Moi
Me, Happy, Jomar, Heidi, Layla and Carla
Pic with Layla, Heidi, Jomar and Jun

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