Last Friday, my company trooped to Clark in Pampanga to hold the main event of our annual sportsfest. Six teams have competed in various events like basketball, volleyball, and badminton months before, so the only remaining event was the parlor games.

The parlor games event is a series of fun smaller games. In my opinion, the more fun games were the ones where the everyone in the team got to participate. These were the charades and the scavenger hunt events.

For the charades event, the six teams had to guess a total of 42 Pinoy food items. The funniest acting was the one for leche flan—the actor was doing some decidedly obscene gestures. And you can only imagine how tortang talong was acted (the actor concentrated on the second word). And finally, a very shy girl was given the task of acting danggit. She first made a fish gesture, then a book-like gesture (suggesting that the fish was sliced open), then did the “sounds like” movement before indicating the spot between her legs. Hehehe.

The scavenger hunt was a riot too. Each of the six teams had to bring in 50 items. Among the objects on the list (those that I can remember) were a nightgown, pajamas, wine bottle, nail clipper, map, menu, policeman’s club, whistle, bill, car key, swiss army knife, pair of pink socks, red underwear (kinky people were thus exposed), 10-peso coin, 10-peso bill, shaver, first aid kit, shower bucket, shower cap, spool of thread, needle, shell necklace, hair rollers, cassette tape, fresh flower, salt, sugar, mug, green toothpaste, swimwear, and a camera phone.

The staff and guests at the venue we stayed at must’ve been mystified at a 100+ people in matching colored shirts asking around the place for various odds and ends. In the end, no team got all the items. The winner got 48 items while the others were very close behind. Boo to the gay parlorista who wouldn’t let us borrow, or even buy, a single hair roller from his salon.

That night, several of us trooped to the Casino Filipino Mimosa Estates to try our luck. For most of us, including myself, that was the first time we’ve entered a casino. So we looked to those who have tried it before to show us the ropes.

Needless to say, I burned 300 pesos on the slot machines. (Now that I think about it, I find it scandalous that I basically threw away a minimum daily wage’s worth into gambling.) In retrospect, I should’ve stayed away from the slot machines since they give the house a very unfair advantage. However, Arvin, a fellow first-timer, managed to almost double his 300-peso stash—he earned 270 pesos when he managed to win 100 5-peso tokens in a play.

The biggest winner would have to be Darwin, the only person among us who tried the card games. He played Blackjack with an initial seed of PhP 600 (the minimum bet is 300), and he was able to quadruple it to 2,400. Lucky guy. Alvin, another friend, also hit it big when in a daring move, he placed all of his remaining chips on the “Third 12” slot at Roulette. (He said it was a final all-or-nothing move.) The ball landed on #29 and he tripled his chips since the odds were 2:1.

Three of us earned money while three lost some. Oh well, I guess I wasn’t lucky that day. I should’ve taken a clue from the series of losses I got when I played Pusoy Dos earlier that afternoon.