Cakes, Shakes and Quakes!

Monday July 28

Spent the day in the office at City Hall trying to get a few more meetings

Santa Rosa City Hall

We started working on the first part of our initial scope of work which we will review with the customer on Monday. Making some progress! 

Carina brainstorming; Brian approves!

Looking busy! 

We are getting stuff done but we want to take some time out to present some pasalubong to our client Judith. Pasalubong is is the Filipino tradition of travellers bringing gifts from their destination to people back home,  so we bring a few treats from a bakery in Tagaytay where we were the day before.  We bring a bag full of cookies and treats to the first floor and leave....with more loot then we came with after a pleasant social visit. It seems Judith was away for the weekend so she brought some stuff back with her. A great tradition this is! 

We head back to work for a bit and then ready to pop out for a quick bite for lunch.  Our other client contact, Paulo, says he will join us. We head outside to walk but Paulo heads us off at the pass..."we will take my car". Seems a bit much to be driving the car to local shops, but it turns out Paulo is "kidnapping" us for lunch at another Filipino favorite chain, Shakey's Pizza.  Paulo is a "take charge' guy so Shakey's it is. They specialize in Pasta, Pizza and Chicken. I have walked by a few of them and they are always busy. The food is very decent and we try a bit of everything except for the pasta.

The team at Shakeys Pizza!

Nice lunch at Shakey's and then back to City Hall.  OK, now it's time to get rolling and get some work done. We are ready to get going and ......what is that?  An alarm?  It's an Earthquake drill which they have in Santa Rosa several times a year, we need to evacuate the building.

Rescue vehicles roaring in!

Hands over head for the drill; me on the left.

Alright, now that the drill is done it's now 3 pm. Still time to get something done...so let's see now; where were we?   RING!!   It's one of the other teams that came down to the downtown core with us. They want to know if we are OK to leave a bit earlier since their meetings are done and one of them is not feeling well.  Of course we will. Well there is always tonight or tomorrow to get caught up; it is a government Holiday on Tuesday so we will have to batten down the hatches and get our presentation done.

All in all a good day! It is very social but every meeting and discussion whether surrounded by food or not is another opportunity to get to know our clients better.  We will not be here that long and that is a big part of how business gets down here; it is very relationship based and people really do seem to know each other well.

#ibmcsc philippines