(This has probably been the busiest I have been in about a year's time so my messages are coming in a lot more slowly and my posts tend to be about stuff that happened more than a week before I actually posted about it. Anyway, I hope my few readers bear with me. I should be calmer in the week of August 15, during which time I will be blogging about a lot of stuff: rafting in Cagayan de Oro, trip to Coron, my marathon for a cause, plus more. So please stay tuned! In the meantime...)
The entire Asia SNS team went to Shenzhen in China last July 24 for our annual team building event. The event itself was about 1 1/2 days long - Monday whole day + night, and Tuesday morning.
It actually started off a bit badly. On Sunday, we flew to Hong Kong via the Cathay flight that left Manila at 1230. It was actually delayed by about 45 minutes so we ended up in the HK airport at around 315. Our bus was supposed to leave HK airport at 345 and arrive in Shenzhen at 530. However, the bus ended up parking in the wrong place and it took us ages to find it, so we ended up leaving the HK airport at 430. Then when we were in Shenzhen, the bus driver couldn't find the Waterfront hotel which is where we were supposed to stay. So we ended up arriving in the hotel at 8pm. Wow! Considering that I had to leave my house at 9am to get to the airport 2 hours before my flight, you could say that I had lost my entire day to travelling!
Anyway, we had a pretty big dinner that night. Karen, Denden and I sat in the same table, and we ended eating most of the food in our table (well, Guoliang too =)), which was funny because most of the other Pinoys didn't fancy the food too much.
Monday had a lot of information sharing during the day. In the evening, we had the SNS awards. The Pinoy SNS community won a lot of awards, including my team and Grant (we tied for the Magic Innovation award) and Mhar, who won the organizational excellence award.
We also had the country presentations. There were four groups: China, Singapore, Philippines, and Japan. China performed some Chinese traditions, like taichi and dancing with fans, and Chinese rap and stuff. Singapore did a skit that revolved around Singlish (or Singaporean English). Japan performed this Japanese samba number. They ended up winning due to audience participation coz almost everyone danced along with them. However, the Pinoys put in a great performance (we later lamented that we shouldn't have joined the Japanese group when they invited us to dance with them because the audience impact cost us the top prize hehehe).
Our presentation started off with a spoof of what was going on in Philippine politics: Mando as Erap and Jobim as Ping were trying to take the presidency from Beni as GMA (they were terribly funny!). Then Paolo announced that Pinoys all over the country had united in cultural performances to celebrate unity (which was kinda the theme that night). Then it started off with an incredibly professional-looking Ifugao dance number (to the tune of 'Magkaugnay') from Karen and Erwin, who were in full authentic costume (they also won best costume that night). Then Denden, Mhar, Eric, and Ivan did a Muslim dance number. Tina, Lourdes, and Ava then performed Pandango sa Ilaw. The boys - Grant, Reden, Pabs and I - followed with a semi-funny Hagibis dance number in our barongs. We ended the night with a grand song performance, led by Denz, of "Isang Mundo, Isang Awit" which is the 80s song by Leah Navarro that says 'I love you' in multiple languages, including Japanese and Chinese (much to the delight of our audience). A pretty good performance, if I do say so myself. =)
My other personal highlight for that offsite was the fact that I joined this eating contest with Mando as my teammate, and while he had to eat polvoron, I had to consume a Japanese cracker that was dripping with intensely spicy wasabi. My tolerance for hot & spicy food has never really been good, so you can just guess what happened when I had to eat that. =)
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