On February 12 I arrived in Manila airport close to midnight. As agreed by e-mail beforehand I had a few beers as soon as I touched down with the CEO at the office. Very nice :)
There was no room available in the Headway apartments in Kingswood towers when I arrived so I've been staying in a dorm in Manila untill now. Today I'm moving to Kingswood in Makati though, very exciting!
The following day was my orientation day at the office and I got to meet everybody working at Headway including my fellow trainees. I had a bad jetlag so I had a hard time staying focused during briefing but I managed to pick up some of it. I offered a box of "stroopwafels" to everybody and a bottle of "kruidenbitter" from the town where I studied (Groningen) which was finished the same evening of course!
The major event of the following week was my Balut ritual. It's a tradition at Headway that every new trainee eats Balut. This is an egg with an unhatched chick inside that you're supposed to eat... The bar in HBS (I'm quality control officer in HBS - Shared Services Group) was to eat at least two eggs. Flo showed me how to eat them and everybody was watching and hoping that I wouldn't be able to handle it. When I discovered that it's actually quite tasty I decided to raise the bar to three eggs. So for the future trainees, because of me you'll have to eat at least three :) Enjoy!
During my second weekend I discovered a very loved hobby of the Filipinos: malling (to mall). This was a new verb for me so I decided to try it. There are tons of big malls in Metro Manila and after a few hours of malling I was the proud owner of some new shoes! Ready for the next week to continue on my project in style! On saturday night we went to an AIESEC event at club Ascend where we entered a drinking contest against the Filipinos. Do I even need to mention who won? Ok, we won! We got ourselfs some cool San Mig Strong Ice t-shirts that we wore to the office to show our winners mentality to the rest of the company!
The third weekend started of very well. The guys from Kingswood 17E organized an ALCOHOL party! This particular theme was chosen because the week before we got 11 (eleven!!) bottles of gin from AIESEC and they were taking up too much space in the fridge. During this party I figured it would be a good idea to introduce some proper Dutch drinking games! The game I chose was Kings, with Dutch rules. After a few hours of playing and the creation of a drink that tasted like Dutch liquorice, half of the gin was still in place and most attendees of the party were not able anymore to finish the rest. That calls for another ALCOHOL party in the future in 17E so that we can trash the place again ;)
The next day I woke up really early because of the office ritm I'm in. I agreed with Karla that if we would wake up early we would meet up and go to Puerto Galera. White beach to be precise. So that's what we did. This was the opportunity I've been waiting for to flee the busy city with it's polution for the weekend. At noon we arrived at White beach. I loved it right away. We booked a hotel and had some lunch. Then we stayed on the beach the whole day. Tanning, swimming, tanning, some more swimming, jumping of cliffs, and getting a massage on the beach while the sun was setting and the ocean was sounding in the background. That's the live!
That evening there was partying going on everywhere. Earlier that day we met some Filipinos who we saw again sitting on the beach and listening to the music. We joined them and drank lots of Mindoro Sling (Mindoro is the name of the island and sling is a fruity punchlike drink). While doing that we met more nice (international) people who live in Manila. Everybody was friendly, even the gay guys dressed up as girls, who I thought were a scary in the beginning.
The next day was another tanning, swimming, etc day. Although this day I saw the dark side of the Filipino sun at noon. In half an hour I got quite badly sunburned as I haven't seen the beach for a long time. While writing this I'm kindly reminded by my skin that I shouldn't go in the sun around noon no matter how much sun block I use...
I was kind of saved by the weather because around 12:30 it started raining a bit and the sun failed to kill me in action :)
We had a great lunch with fresh fruit shakes and fresh fish and after some more swimming and cliff jumping we got on the boat back to the mainland. This was a very nice trip and only the first of many to come!
Keep following the blog and you will be able to follow our adventures here. I'll keep you updated!! Now I'm going to move my stuff to Kingswood and chill out in my new home!
Cheers,
Cees
1 comment:
that's life! :)
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