Pinoy Cuisine Update

Alright Foodies, this is where you start tuning in. I haven't updated my blog with the dining experiences lately but here is some highlights. We've tried a bunch of different restaurants around town but the group consensus is that Imay's is still the best. We can all go there, order up a full table of food with at least 1 family style dish per person and still walk out for under $6 each. TingTing's is also in the running because they have live seafood wells where you can pick your own fish, lobster, or crab and tell them how to prepare it. Overall, the food here remains awesome.


The drink on the left is a fresh mango shake. The mangoes here are the small yellow ones that we call champagne mangoes in the US. They are so super sweet. The drink on the right is Sago Gulaman. It's a fruit punch like drink with tapioca pearls and cut up pieces of red jelly. It's a drink and a dessert all in one!


This is a sampler platter from TingTings. It included grilled octopus, chicken, prawns, fish, steamed crab, and fresh raw oysters. It is served on the left there with cut up salted duck eggs and fresh tomatoes as an accompaniment.

Limes and little green chiles are also a popular condiment here to go with the food whether it's seafood, pork, or chicken. The limes are tiny - about the size of a walnut - and they remind me of key limes from Florida but the favor is a little different.


This is lapu-lapu - a fish in the grouper family. In this case I picked it out of the live well at TingTings and had it prepared chinese sweet and sour style. We demolished this fish head to tail in quick order thanks to my other chinese teammate Qiong and I. Love FRESH fish.


Grilled Managat - another local fish in the snapper family. Very simple preparation - the fish is gutted, butterflied, seasoned with lots of salt and pepper and thrown on a hot charcoal grill. Lots of nice flavor although sometime it is overcooked in my opinion.

Finally a nice sizzling cast iron plate of mixed seafood - prawns, clams, baby squid, and fish in a creamy sauce. That's it for now. I'm sure there is more to come! I still have to try the lechon.

Chillaxing

This weekend our team took a trip to Sipalay on the south part of the island. It was about a 4 hour drive and along the way we passed through many small farming villages including sugar cane, rice, and fisheries. It was hard to see some of the lean-to shelters that the farmers lived in made out of nothing more than pieces of scrap wood and metal and thatched roofs - especially when we arrived at our 'luxury' dive resort called Artistic Diving. The level of poverty here is immense.

I am the only certified diver on the team and got in a couple of cool dives including a big reef full of lots of corals and several different species of fish. Some others tried the intro dive and the rest did some snorkeling. It was a nice way to get out of the city for the weekend and enjoy some fun in the sun.

Business Development Day

Friday was the first of the seminar series that we are tasked to deliver. The event was sponsored by our client - BNeFIT and the audience was local business leaders that were looking to expand their skills and business. We prepared four topics that were of interest to the business community here:

• Trends in E-Commerce
• Marketing in the 21st Century
• Creative Effective Proposals
• BPM & BPO

I think the audience was definitely overwhelmed with the amount of information we crammed into one day and hopefully some of it will sink in. Everyone was really appreciative of our efforts and we've already made the local paper. Yah - another press impression!

For those of you reading my blog, you are only getting one view of our experience here. If you are interested, you should check out some of our other blogs from the team:

• Jaana
• Robert
• Gisele (Portuguese only)
• Alina (Russian, German, English)
• Guillermo

Gisele presenting Web Marketing

Jaana presenting Effective Proposal Writing

Class Picture

Time to get serious

The first of the series of seminars that Jaana and I are responsible for delivering is this Friday. We've been working with the rest of the team on preparing the presentations and working with our clients on the event logistics. The first module is for the local business leaders to help them with business related topics. I'll be presenting a session on BPM (of course), Jaana will cover building effective proposals, Jaydip will cover eCommerce, and Gisele will cover Web Marketing.

Last night we were invited to dinner by Mr. and Mrs. Dumancas. They are members of the BNeFIT organization that is my client and local real estate developers. Words cannot describe their home - if I could dream of my ideal home it would look exactly like theirs. I couldn't even take pictures to do it justice, I'll just have to wait for it to come out one day in Architectural Digest! They treated us all to a huge buffet of local and western cuisine and a delightful evening of conversation. At the end of the night, they showed us their plans for a BPO Park that would include space for BPOs to establish their delivery centers, restaurants, condominiums, a medical center, and even an outdoor amphitheater. Once again - outrageous ambition - I LOVE IT!

Of course no update would be complete without a little cultural touring. On Monday evening at sunset we visited the Ruins in Talisay City. Quite spectacular to find this stone structure standing in the middle of sugar cane fields. There was also a percussion band with a fire-twirler performing on the grounds that I videoed.

Baloot!

Yum...look some fresh eggs from a street vendor. WRONG! These are baloot or baluut, a half-hatched egg and popular in the local cuisine. Basically, it's an egg that is partially through the embryonic stage of development (15-16 days) that has been boiled and served with salt. Depending on how late they let the egg go you can start seeing features of the chick like the beak and even feathers. In my case, I think it was pretty early so blood vessels and organs starting to develop and appear along the yolk. You may have seen these on the reality TV show Fear Factor. Well, guess what? Fear is not a factor for me! Check out the pics and the videos below. Delicious!!!