It's been somewhat of a whirlwind since I left Kingsburg last 9 days ago. What with afternoon cruises on Sydney Harbor, meetings with the Australian Government Treasury to talk about business reporting initiatives, presenting on product directions at our company partner conference on Tuesday, receiving kudos for some of our initiatives from a customer live on stage at the customer event that evening, flying direct to Manila (via Melbourne) on Wednesday, preparing for a surprise product demo at the surprise press conference on Thursday lunchtime - where we unveiled the localized version of the product my team had been hard at work on - and then attending the final customer event of the tour on Thursday night before heading out to Spicy Fingers for some local music and comedy (video coming soon), it had been a pretty busy week.
Friday saw us slow the pace down a bit with just a couple of meetings in the morning, followed by a team lunch - to celebrate the successes mentioned above - and then a relaxing evening split between the Whisky and Martini Bars chatting about literature, music, family immigration histories and whatnot with Anton and Kamlesh.
That brought us to Saturday (yesterday) where we had a team offsite meeting outside of Manila at a place called Magaytay. It's a small town built on the top of a mountain overlooking an extinct volcano and huge lake. It's also the place where the Marcos family were in the process of building a small palatial retreat when they were ousted from power. The place is stunning. The journey there is pretty interesting as it takes you out of the big city - where the roads are pretty congested and bad - to more rural parts of the countryside - where the roads are worse and even more congested. Not the easiest place to be preparing and editing presentation slides en route in the back of the van.
We had lunch in a restaurant overlooking the lake before retiring to a conference room in a local hotel for a few hours for a team meeting before beginning the journey back to Manila Airport to drop Anton off for his flight home. I won't dwell on the journey itself but needless to say it was a little hairy - lane markings are either non-existent or considered a suggestion (at best), people walk across the street in front of oncoming traffic, people decide suddenly that they are going to turn across the road and do so even if there is traffic coming, there is overtaking in the face of oncoming traffic even when there is no space to pull back into, etc. Oh, and all this takes place going downhill. We basically just had to close our eyes and hope for the best. The funny thing is that, in spite of all of the above, it didn't really feel super dangerous at any point; rather, more like being on a rollercoaster - some of us even did the hands-raised motion on occasion...
Anyway, long story short, we made it back just in time to get Anton on his flight and headed back to the hotel where we had a quick dinner and I then headed up to the Spa to take advantage of the massage voucher I had and had a nice local lady with strong hands soothe away the stresses of the week and the drive we had just experienced.
In the picture you see from left to right - Kamlesh, Patrice, Hanako, Anton, Me and Jan.
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