After a long 24 hours starting with my arrival at JFK late Thursday night, I arrived at my home for the next 4 weeks – B Hotel in Alabang which is in the metro Manila area. Although the long journey started in a bit of a panic mode (I’ll spare you the details, but it has something to do with credit cards being left at home and my husband having to drive all the way to the airport at 11PM to bring everything just in time for me to board the flight. To say I was stressed is an understatement!). BUT it all ended well and I made the flight and managed to sleep most of the way. I met two CSC team members in Hong Kong (Ashley from Boston and Mary from DC) and we boarded the flight together to Manila. Please excuse the “I just finished a 16 hour flight” look 😀
Most of the other team members arrived here on Friday night so they were all together in the morning and about to go shopping and out to lunch. Unbeknownst to us, they were all waiting for us in the front of the hotel when we arrived. All I really wanted to do was to sneak into my room for a shower, but instead we met the rest of the team before we even stepped into the hotel. It was great to meet everyone for the first time, after several months of only seeing each other through video meetings. We have a team of 14 – 6 from the US, 2 from Brazil, 2 from India, 2 from Australia, 1 from Russia and 1 from Poland.
I finally got to the room and was able to organize a bit and then we went to meet the rest of the crew for lunch and some shopping at a nearby shopping center. There are a lot of shopping malls and a whole lot of traffic in this area. We learned from our local contacts that the only way to cross the street is to hold your hand up to stop the traffic, otherwise cars won’t stop. So that was a little scary but I’m sure something we will get used to! We finished the day with a team welcome dinner at the hotel and met the local development organization (ABV + Dev Concepts) who is organizing our stay here as well as the Peace Corps volunteers whom we will be working alongside. And got to try a local beer, Red Horse, which almost knocked me out after 1/2 of one since I was so tired! It was a LONG day but it was very nice to meet everyone and it seems like such a wonderful group. I think we can learn a lot from each other and will have a lot of fun too. Here are some photos from the day yesterday.
So after the long day on Saturday, I slept like a baby and then got to wake up and talk to my “babies” back home which was a great start to the day! They love seeing outside my hotel window because it is light here when it is dark back home. I think they are somewhat understanding the concept that I am far away on the other side of the world. Luckily my husband seems to have everything under control and is enjoying spending quality time with the kids (he even is ambitious enough to start his own blog!).
Anyway, today was also a busy day. We had a full day of orientation in the hotel which was jam packed with information. We learned about everything from the political climate in the Philippines (some interesting convos about current President Duterte) to classifications of natural disasters (typhoon season now in the Philippines 😳) to the cultural norms in the Filipino workplace. It was a great day which ended with a quick dinner with some of the girls at a local restaurant that felt more like a Texas steakhouse, followed by a 60 minute massage which was a whopping $8! Now I and feeling nice and relaxed before meeting with the client tomorrow for the first time. Some of the key players from the agency will be coming to the hotel to meet us tomorrow. We will be working with the Department of Science and Technology and we will discuss more about the scope of our work, etc. tomorrow. I will give some more details about the agency and the work in another post. For now, I’ll leave you with some pics from today and then I’m off to bed. Will share more tomorrow!
The Opposite Side of the World 