Frannywanny

Happy Friday!  I'm not going to lie, Friday is one of my favorite days because it means, we're just a day away from the weekend! Who doesn't love the weekend, right? This is the day when I give my twins my uninterrupted attention. We would start the day with any breakfast of their choice (normally waffles for J, pancakes or peanut butter sandwich for L) followed by an hour of doing their homework and in the afternoon, we head out for their swim class! Sunday is more laid back as we would stay home and just laze around the house otherwise, we would go and visit my in laws and spend the day there.  Speaking of the weekend, I suddenly remembered one of the best weekends that we've had this year so far. This was when we had our staycation at Seda Vertis North  and the twins truly enjoyed every minute of it. Of course, they love our comfy and very spacious Corner Suite with an adjacent Deluxe Room as well as checking out the hotel's amenities and the Vertis North mall ...

Cucina  is the all-day International dining restaurant of Marco Polo Ortigas Manila  and is one of my favorite hotel buffet restaurants in the metro too. While it may not have the widest array of dishes to choose from, I love how each dish is well-curated making it go very well with the rest of the line-up. I also love how they make it a point to change the themes every so often so I don't feel like I'm having the same old, same old in every visit. One visit, I had Italian , the next I had Thai, in another visit I enjoyed the best Filipino dishes and so on. There was even that one lunch wherein we had the most authentic British fare too . Despite the regular thematic changes, the top favorites are there to stay. I also love breakfast at Cucina ! I'll never forget that one memorable breakfast during our babymoon staycation at the hotel and I woke up so early because I was starving. I tell you, pregnancy hormones can sometimes just get so crazy. So there I was, part of th...

One thing that we love about staying at Seda Nuvali is it's proximity to a wide variety of food and retail establishments. You can literally walk over to Solenad or if walking is not your thing, it's literally a quick 2-3 minute drive. However, if you'd like to just stay in the hotel and enjoy a full R&R weekend, then you surely won't go hungry as they got Misto at the ground floor. Misto is Seda's in-house F&B outlet and it's actually not unique only to Seda Nuvali. You can see Misto across several Seda hotels all over the country. To try Misto  out, we decided to have breakfast, lunch and dinner there during our staycation weekend. Right after checking-in and resting at our room, Paul and I headed down to Misto  for lunch. They're having an on-going Bento Box promotion . It's actually a dinner promotion but we were so lucky to be given the chance to try it out at lunch. Before we got to our main dish though, Paul also got to try the...

Rise and Shine, Manila!  Breakfast has always been my favorite meal especially when I'm on a vacation. Lately though, I would always find myself up and about at 6am with a growling tummy. I guess, I got two hungry babies calling my attention so early in the morning! Luckily though, Cucina starts their breakfast service really early too and so I joined a handful of hotel guests a little past 6am on a Sunday morning. I've always been a fan of Cucina 's as I love the well-curated dishes available in their buffet spread. Their breakfast offering didn't fail to impress as well. Let me take you on a quick tour around the breakfast buffet line: Start off with something healthy in the morning! They have a good variety of muesli, yogurt and oatmeal for you to choose from.

Rise & Shine!  It's the start of a new week and while it may be hard to pull yourself up from bed today, I hope that these visions of delicious, mouthwatering food will be a good reason to greet this day with a big smile. One of the highlights of our last two visits to Manila were spent really early as we drove all the way to Roxas Boulevard to meet up with our fellow foodies for breakfast at Nobu Restaurant Manila . Since we were all so excited for this much-awaited breakfast meet-up. Of course, we didn't waste any time and decided to order practically everything on the menu. Let me share with you some of my top picks: Black Cod Tinapa Melt-in-your-mouth smoked black cod served on top of a bed of fluffy and fragrant garlic rice and a serving of runny scrambled egg. I'm glad though that Nobu's serving was just right for one to enjoy yet it's not too much allowing you to still have room to order more!

It's no secret how Paul and I love to travel. However, given that we have very limited leave dates at work and more than half of those are spent in Manila for Christmas, Chinese New Year and for family birthdays, we barely had any days left to really go on a vacation. That said, this is one reason why we love taking staycations every now and then. You see, we both love taking some time off from work to unwind and recharge. We both lead very hectic work lives so this is the only chance that we get to spend one entire weekend clearing our minds and catching up on sleep. Not to mention that we get each other's undivided attention as we don't have to worry about household chores or running errands too. During one of our visits to Manila, we spent the night at Edsa Shangri-la Hotel . As you may have read in my past entries, this hotel holds a special place in my heart as I've spent a lot of weekends with my family here. I love how it's located right at the center of ...

Days leading up to our much-awaited staycation at Marina Mandarin , I've been reading endless reviews about the hotel, the hotel amenities and on Aquamarine . This is where we will be having our complimentary breakfast buffet on the 2nd day of our stay. Most of the reviews were positive to the point that some boldly declared Aquamarine to be the best buffet restaurant in town. Reading all these good praises got me sooo excited for breakfast the next day. Never mind that we stuffed ourselves silly with pizza and wings the night before . We woke up extra early to maximize on the breakfast offering. First off was to check out the buffet line-up:

When we were sort of planning for our weekend trip to Kuala Lumpur , I'm glad that we had cousin J with us as he took care not only of booking our flights, but he went ahead and handled the booking of our hotel and he even rented a car too! He was so organized that I swear, this was the only trip where I happily tagged along without minding that we didn't had any proper itinerary and I know that we will still have a great time. Cousin J is the best travel companion, I tell you. So, when I casually asked him where we're staying in KL, he told me that he booked us all at Novotel Kuala Lumpur . Yay! If you remember, four year ago, this was also where Paul and I stayed for our honeymoon and save for the drilling and mysterious water sound, we loved the hotel's close proximity to the major shopping malls and the beautiful view of the Petronas Towers too.