A night to remember

Together with my 5000 best friends I will celebrate my 25th anniversary Friday! Among the guests will be DJ Tiesto, who will be in charge of changing the CDs! Its probably going to be a fantastisic night, and otherwise I will make it a fantastic night! Since our Dutch friend isn't well known here in the Philippines, the crowd will probably consist of mainly foreigners and especially Dutch, which is nice for a change! Will be back here Monday to post the pictures of this weekend! Take care

PS check out PostSecret; an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Norman Island

An a-ma-zing weekend! Last Friday we; Dean, Alvaro, Yihit, Salvador, Roy (Philippines), Martha (Espana), Dominique (France) and me left for the 100 islands! After 6 hours bus, we found our selves at 2 am drinking, dancing and singing in the street in front of worlds most dirtiest hostal! Next morning our boatman Ricky brought us to our new home for two days: Norman Island!

The mix of eight different nationalities, a desert island with a batcave and our invisible friend Norman made these 72 hours to a great experience; check here for your self!

Survival of the fittest

This weekend me, Dean, Alvaro, Yihit, Salvador and some more people will take the bus to the south of the northern island and will visit the 100 Islands National Park. Here we are going to spend a day and night on a small deserted island, which is going to be cool! After weekend I hope I will be able to tell my stories and show some pictures!

Makati City

When the working day is over; I go home to my apartment. Located in the center of Metro Manila, Makati City, Palm Tower is the perfect place to live. In the building next door, two Aiesec friends (Dean and Alvaro)live and together we sometimes have dinner and hang out! With them, Yigit (trainee from Turkey) and Salvador from my work, we are planning to a deserted island one of the next weekends, and we try to go to the bounty island Boracay for Holyweek, which is mid-April!

Check pictures apartment and Dean,Alvaro, Christina and Yigit here!

Headway

After my first week I got to know the basic ins and outs of Headway. Run by a Filipino (Mike Cardenas) and a German (Florian Groebel); the main service the company sells is mobile enabled processes. This means mobile b2b payment systems, ordering systems and customer service systems.

Headway is located in Mandaluyong. Every day it takes me 30 minutes by jeepney (old American army jeep) and 15 minutes by metro to get there. The atmosphere at the office is campus like. So everybody works on his/her own pace to fulfill their projects!

The people that work at Headway are all Filipino except for me, trainee Salvador (Cataluna) and Florian (Germany). Here are some pictures of my workmates!

First Impressions

After being stuck for 5 days in airports such as Baghrain, Abu Dhabi and Singapore, (Damn those people at Gulf Air!) I finally touched ground at my final destination: Manila Airport! Picked up by members of Aiesec, I was taken to the temporary apartment they arranged for me. After a long, long sleep I woke up ready for my first day Metro Manila!

Metro Manila is a huge area of 17 cities that covers the greater part of the northern island of the big three ( Luzon/Samar/Mindanao). Just like other big Asian cities, the street scenes are; lots of traffic, people and animals.

There is big difference between the seperate cities in Metro Manila. Some cities are clean, have big buildings and serve as business areas, other cities are folk neighbourhoods, usually dirty, people live in small cardboard houses and children run around naked. In these areas people basicly live on the street.

Right now the weather is krazy hot and dry (27-30 degrees Celcius), but within two months, the summer rain season will start which means that temperature will go up to 37 degrees and the flooding will start due to lack of proper drainage-systems. Whohoo looking forward to that!

My first week at the office was good! I met my two bosses, employees and learned what all three companies at Headway are doing. Through one of the trainees I work with, I got in touch with Dean (India) and Alvaro (Colombia). Also two trainees, who work at DHL. Their landlord had another apartment for rent which I checked out. It was perfect! Great living room, good bed and great view from the balcony. After five days in the Philippines I settled my self in Palm Towers, Makati City!