With the Philippines’ Enhanced Community Quarantine in place, wanderlusts do not have much choice but to stay home and wait this plague out. After all, we need to stay alive to pursue our future meanderings, right? So here I am relieving adventures from the past. The blog posts that I will be writing are outdated and wouldn’t serve you much use as reference for your next travels. I guess this is me trying to find purpose on old photos that I have overlooked in the course of chasing my next adventure.
Scanning through my photo archives, I chanced upon those I have taken at the HISTORY Con 2017. This was held August of that mentioned year at World Trade Center, Pasay City. To give you a brief background, HISTORY Con is an event that united fans of History Channel, vintage collectors, paleophiles, antiquarians, bikers, chefs, and a whole spectrum of people that shares common interests!
Writing about it now, I can still recall the rush I felt upon walking through the doors of the convention center. It was pure bliss seeing the dazzling displays! HISTORY Con 2017 was made for us who are in love with a hobby and can manifest that ardor into something spectacular. There were big bikes, there were military dioramas, one section reeked of old comic book pages and it was incredible. People were chitchatting with those they find a similar ground with and I was snapping away, a self-confessed nerd who can only squeal at the sight of items that tickled my fancy.
There were scheduled talks from HISTORY Channel’s show hosts and we lined up to attend all that we could. We attended Corey Harrison’s In Conversation and it was so hard not to fan girl and ask about Chumlee! Yes, Pawn Stars was there!
We also had the opportunity to have our posters signed and our photos taken with John Weisbarth and Zack Giffin of Tiny House Nation. They were warm and asked how we’re enjoying the event. We were also in awe having met fellow Filipino Ryu Lim, the Forged in Fire winner famous for his Viking Battle Axe. It was just sad that we weren’t able to witness his live demonstration but seeing his performance on the TV show was enough to turn us into fans.
And talk about being a huge fan of Adam Liaw! My partner wanted to have a photo with him so bad that we ended up running after him! He was the winner of the second season of MasterChef Austalia and the host of one of our guilty pleasures, Destination Flavour.
The highlight of the entire meet and greet we attended was with Counting Cars’ Horny Mike! He was being ecstatic while conversing with us and it was so hard to limit our talk because we all clicked! We had our photo taken and everyone in the room laughed because we shared this cool pose. I became an instant fan—not that I wasn’t before.
We also met Sir Ram Mallari, the famous Filipino Metal Sculptor and Draftsman. I have admired his work since I laid my eyes on his Maximus sculpture. It was a detailed, steampunk French Bulldog wearing a post-apocalyptic radar-glasses. How cool is that?!
It was difficult to forget that HISTORY Con 2017 experience and as I am writing this post I wondered why I didn’t take my time to sit down and tell this story earlier. We didn’t had the chance to attended the following year’s convention, sadly. But I am willing to bet that it wasn’t as mind-blowing as this one.
Almost 3 years after HISTORY Con 2017, I am still a fan of the channel. I still watch Ancient Aliens and have this love-hate relationship with Tsoukalos’ theories. I sincerely wish that after this pandemic, they’d decide to have another event like this…but here’s to hoping for the best.
Jannispaghetti = Wanderlust 