11 Weeks in the Philippines

September 10^th  - November 26^th 2011

My time in the Philippines – truncated.

My apologies but in order to get us all up to speed on my current events I must give you a rather brief and truncated version of my 11 weeks in Manila.  As you may recall I was hired by my previous company to be the ‘man on the ground’ as they opened a new office in the Philippines and would have me complete the training for the entire new production department.  So…..

I arrived in Manila and found myself checked into the Vivere Hotel.   A nice place with many extras but nonetheless still a hotel.  To my dismay the temporary office was a giant broom closet that was to fit 15 of us until we moved to the new office down the street.  As it turns out they all moved the day after I left for New Zealand.  Weather was typically hot and muggy although I did get to experience my first typhoon; somewhat unimpressive by my storm standards.  My coworkers elated in convincing me to try all sorts of new foods, including but not limited to chicken intestines, pig ears and balot. That is a duck egg that is but a day from hatching and when you open it you can see the head and beak and feathers and wings and then you eat it.  Suffice to say chicken intestines are good; balot not so much.  Traffic is as wretched as one might imagine in a city of so may and yet the drivers displayed a remarkable amount of patience.  On two separate occasions I rode in and on top of a Jeepney. It seems everything in Philippines is found at a mall: restaurants, grocery stores and even bars.  That being said I spent more time at the mall in 3 months than I had in my preceding 26 years.  My hotel did my laundry, my dishes and had a good gym with a couple of nice trainers.  It was here however that I tore my left pectoral muscle after 4 weeks and got to visit a Manila ER.  The hospital was quite good; my prognosis and recovery not so much.  I took a long weekend trip to the beaches of Boracay which are supposedly some of the best beaches of the world.  They were nice but after touring SE Asia I think I was a bit spoiled too not find them more impressive.  I took another long weekend to the island of Mindoro to visit my cousin and his Filipina wife and her family.  Truly one of my best experiences in Asia as I was able to stay at their modest house and have one of the most genuine and warmest experiences of my entire trip.  In between all of this I sampled my share of San Miguel and caught up on a lot of TV.  Afterall, I was in a  5 Star hotel but all the same, I was still living in a hotel.  After 11 weeks my coworkers said goodbye by hosting me a Filipino Thanksgiving which succeeded in only having one traditional dish, mashed potatoes from KFC.   Anyway, that’s 11 weeks in a paragraph.  Time to write about …..NEW ZEALAND.