Joy and I are renting a condo, our landlord is an Italian guy who depends part of the year in Italy and part of the year in the Philippines with his girlfriend who lives in one of the condos that he owns in this complex. The unit is a two bedroom unit and is furnished which makes the whole deal a lot sweeter. The Italian's girlfriend is the one we actually give our rent to, and with whom we communicate; she manages his properties. But anyway, this was our first time to really see the place we would be living for the next 6 months which was kind of exciting (I'll have some pictures of this in later posts).
So we connected with Matt and Heidi the next day (12/27) for food and spent some time with them and then the next day the rest of the group began to arrive. Dan and Jenny Crank, Matt and Rachel Nikolaiev, Erik West, and Fuad Loutfi all flew in on the same flight and went to the SIL guest house.
Then we all met at the Greenhills mall (a nice mall near the guest house). There we ate a nice dinner and spent some good time catching up.
We met again the next day (12/28), this time at megamall. We needed to pick up barongs for some of the guys (myself included... apparently sending measurements made by untrained people to a tailor in another country is not so effective). We had some really great noodles at a place on the 4th floor of this mall. it was somewhat interesting that the noodles were hand-pulled. If you're wondering what that means, watch the video here:
That evening we all came back to Joy and my condo and Joy had a shower while all the guys went down to the clubhouse and did very little of anything. The guys part of this was decided on the spur of the moment and it was truly uneventful. The girls, though had good bonding time.
