Hi Everyone, I am now working at Inmarsat (http://www.inmarsat.com/). It's only day two but things are very pleasant. People seem to enjoy working here and everyone is very friendly. I have the biggest computer screen I've ever had anywhere!! 24" widescreen! And a spare 19" so I might be able to hook that one up as well and have two monitors. Very techy and since my role here is a Business Analyst I might not do it ;)
The office environment is very spacious, bright and modern and directly outside the exit to Old Street Tube station.
Everything got set up pretty quickly like my network login, email, application access, intranet, security pass, etc but still waiting on a few things to come through in due course.
The canteen here is slightly subsidized and is all cashless. The security pass doubles up as a stored value card. There are top-up machines that take your cash and apply it to the card and an ATM if you need the cash to put onto the card! Then when you buy food or drinks you just put your card in the reader. All very simple and advanced but not seen it implemented anywhere I've worked before.
Just easing into the job this week, more concerned about finding a place to stay in London now and thank goodness work does not place any restrictions on web sites I can visit!
The next day after the wedding we (Jenny, Andy, Matt and I) had an 11:00am flight from Manila to Boracay where finally I could really get a break from all the jetting around! There was a slight issue with checking out of the hotel as we thought we'd already paid the hotel room charges but they thought we hadn't. Anyway we had a plane to catch so we left the matter with Jon's parents who were staying in the same hotel and checking out later. Heard afterwards that it was all sorted out so all's well that ends well. Checking out of hotels in the Philippines is quite a different matter to what you may be used to in Australia. From the many hotels I've been to over the years I was expecting the check-out to be a 3-5 minute affair but what happens in Manila is they actually send someone to your room to check your mini-bar, check the snacks, make sure you haven't damaged anything, stolen anything and also helpfully tell you if you've accidentally forgotten anything up there. So with the room check and the charges misunderstanding it took a while longer than 3-5 minutes.
We managed to get to the airport in good time and switched to an earlier flight which was a great idea as the domestic airport is fairly low standard. They also don't even let you in the front doors of the airport if you don't have a ticket in the Philippines. Probably the right thing to do as it would be packed out in the extreme otherwise.
Here we said goodbye to Arianne and Jerry as they were taking a different domestic flight to the provinces. The flight to Boracay was on a jet plane and was only a 30 min actual flight time.
When we landed at the local Boracay airport there were all these people, who looked in no particular way associated with the airport, crowding around in the small arrival room asking for our baggage receipts. We were a bit hesitant but it seemed to be the done thing. We then registered our hotel with the desk as transfers were organized by the hotel. We got to wait in an air conditioned van while our luggage was being retrieved for us but I was in no way comfortable about letting others (complete strangers) get our luggage and having it out of our sight. Needless to say there was no luggage conveyor belt or anything of that sort. Later checks revealed nothing missing or added to our luggage.
In the end our luggage got loaded into the van, we gave some tips and drove towards the ferry. This was quite literally around the corner, a short block away!! If they had some visible signs or a paved walkway there would be no need for vans! In fact these two white people who were on the plane with us arrived at the ferry the same time we did and they had obviously walked!
There is so much tipping in the Philippines. I'm not sure I like it coming from an Australian culture. I don't even like paying the 10% service charge some London restaurants put on your bill. Just put that tip into your cost base and charge that! We weren't expecting all the tipping, at least I wasn't and was fast running out of appropriate small note currency. At one point with all the baggage people, drivers, ferry staff, hotel staff I just said stuff it, I'm not giving any more money to anyone!
Photos of the trip can be found under the, surprise surprise, Photos entry ;-)
It was a great holiday and a great hotel. We got a room on the ground floor just outside the perimeter of the pool. There were some apartments with doors and a balcony area that opened straight onto the pool. Pretty cool!
It was relaxing and uneventful except for when we hired motorbikes to go round the island. After going round all the roads that we could find we went to visit the 'Bat and Cyrstal' caves. I've seen plenty of bats so I wasn't particularly interested but crystal caves had me intrigued. Their 'crystals' were simply the stalactites and stalagmites in the cave. Hhhmmm. It was not a oft-visited place as it was far from the touristy areas and was some effort to get to. From the point where we parked the bikes we still had to walk through a lot of forest where we could have easily been robbed. Fortunately this did not happen. In the direct sense.
We reached the cave and there were no ropes, ladders, railings, lighting or other aides for scaling down razor sharp rocks. It was also wet and slippery in places and we were only guided by our 'guides' who pointed hand-held torches and told us to 'step there' or 'hold onto that'. After the sharp rocks we started getting onto the bat poo covered rocks and it started feeling like a sauna as well. We got down to the cave floor without any scrapes. It wasn't a big cave. The other end of it opened to the ocean and was probably entirely blocked by the ocean during high tide. The bats weren't bad but as I said, I'd seen plenty of them before. We were then informed that there were also sea snakes in this dark cave with us! This made me freeze where I was and not want to move around as I had been doing as I didn't have a torch and couldn't see anything! The guides even pointed their torches on a few snakes for us, as if to prove their commentary! Thanks a bunch! Scary stuff too!
Since the 'crystals' weren't much we felt we'd gotten our 50Pesos's worth and climbed back out.
These guides offered to show us the highest point of the island, a kind of lookout, where we could see the whole island. We agreed and set off on our motorbikes. There was also a 'zoo' up the top there but I was fast realizing to take descriptions with a pinch of salt. Got some nice photos up there before my battery ran out.
We were going to give them a substantial tip but were told that they wanted 500Pesos for the bat cave guiding and the escort to the lookout! We weren't happy about being sprung with this as they never mentioned it before. In hindsight we probably should have realized this but must have had our 'holiday' head on :) I don't think we minded the money as it wasn't much in AUD or GBP but it was just being sprung with it! After I gave them 500P for us they said it was 500P for two so it would be another 500P! I'd had enough so I just told Andy to tell them that that was it. They weren't getting any more money. I said this loud enough for them to hear but Andy was the liason person.
So that was it. They (two of them) drove off on their motorbikes and we followed down the same road about five minutes later. Nothing else happened. The Philippinos are generally quite honest though and less prone to 'tourist pricing' than Thai or Turkish people. I even tried to bargain down some mangoes by 20P and the lady wouldn't budge!! Kudos to her :)
Well I was on my way back to London and was in transit in Hong Kong when I decided to check my email at one of the free kiosks and found out that I would only have a job to go back to for one day!!! The project had been put on hold!! Now from the short email from the recruitment agent I couldn't tell the extent of the shutdown. Was it just a part of the project? The majority of the project? Or perhaps just people like me who had been away? The Wednesday was meant to be my first day back at work but would now be my last! When I got back to the project I found out that pretty much everyone had been given the boot including the external consultant implementation partner (one of the Big 4).
It was all done rather badly as some people only got an hour's notice while my immediate team had been told at the end of Monday that Wednesday would be their last day. My contract was due to finish at the end of Feb anyway so it was a week and a half early. I had paid rent for the rest of that week so I just began searching the job sites, updating my CV and getting over jet lag in Bristol. On the Sunday I packed up all my stuff and caught the train back to London. It was a bit of a hassle as now I had two pieces of luggage after having brought over all my ski gear from Melbourne and had to ask the the new girl in the house who I knew for two days to help me pull luggage to the train station!! In my defence the house is too close to the train station to call a taxi and I gave her the easy bag with handle and wheels. Indeed it was very nice of her to help me out!
It would have been preferable to just extend with Orange for another 3 months and stay in Bristol instead of having to look for work yet again...! I had just started making friends through work and getting to know people at Christ Church Bristol.
Anyway, my God is gracious and I have a short two week stint starting Tuesday doing some Global Payroll configuration updates for a consulting company here (London). This will finish in time for me to go on a week long snowboard trip to Tignes Les Brevieres, France. I also have an interview on Monday for a potentially longer term contract in London so I hope that works out as well.
I started reading All The President's Men by C Bernstein and B Woodward on the Watergate event (or 'affair' as its always referred to) but gave up. I just didn't like the way it was written. It was in the third person like a novel but seemed to be just one gigantic newspaper feature piece that was very dry and a mind boggling cast of (real) characters I'd actually have to study to keep track of!
Switched to Kitchen Confidential by A Bourdain who is a real chef writing essentially an autobiographical book on his life experiences in the industry. It was a very rivetting read and I finished it in under two days; reading it on the Tube and late into the night. Not a hard feat though while one is unemployed.
My favourite chapters are probably From Our Kitchen To Your Table (about what to not eat and when at resturants) and How To Cook Like The Pros (about the essential tools and the little things that make a big difference). I've toyed with the idea of being a chef-like person after an IT career. I don't think I would go through the whole career path towards chef but just learn how to cook well for friends and family in my own restaurant standard kitchen :)
Well the purpose of that Business Class travel was to come back to Australia and then the Philippines for a friend's wedding. I had already booked my Melbourne to Manila return flight before I knew that I was going back to London so I had to go back to Melbourne in order to use those tickets. I could, of course, have just gone London Heathrow -> Hong Kong -> Manila or something similar but it was good to be back in Melbourne even for the short time of 1 day on the outbound leg and almost 2 days on the return leg. Add this to 7 days in total in the Philippines and I had to take 2 full weeks off work!
In the 3 days from when I left Heathrow I think I spent more time in the air and at airports than actually on the ground!! The flight to Manila was via Kuala Lumpur flying Malaysian Airlines. I have to say I wasn't impressed with that airline. Their planes were old and passing by the Business Class section I could see it wasn't as good as the Qantas equivalent. For an 8hr flight from Melb to KL departing at 00:45 they didn't even give you socks or an eye mask! An eye mask would have been useful and I would have brought one from the hundreds of spares that I have had I known! I was so tired at the airport I was about to fall asleep in the boarding lounge. In fact I was quite literally nodding off!
And the food! 8 hour flight and you get a sandwich and breakfast service. Definitely not impressed with Malaysian. In hindsight as well I should have just booked a direct flight with Philippines Airlines or Singapore Airlines from Melb to Manila instead of going through KL and having a 4 hr wait each way. Would have saved me a lot of time for perhaps $AUD200 extra. I had actually seriously enquired with some friends as to sleeping pills as I knew I needed to sleep with all that flying but never got around to getting any. I don't like to fly with pills and guess that remains an unbroken principle but it was a definite consideration.
Kuala Lumpur to Manila was better because the flight was only about a fifth full and it was a shorter 4 hours. KL airport is probably one of the nicer airports I've been to with free internet kiosks dotted around and a comfortable, large chair sitting area that shows the movie channel on 4 large TVs. Arriving in Manila immigration is always a hassle, there is never a quick way through that. Enough said. I was met outside the airport (where it was 30C) by Jon's dad and Pastor Ricky who drove me to the hotel. After a long shower I felt a lot better and it was good seeing all the guys as well. We went down to the local shopping mall as I had to get some shoes for the wedding. Things are cheap there, such as the shoes, but I don't like the quality of the merchandise and know they won't last long. It wasn't a big deal as I just needed them for the wedding day tomorrow.
After that necessity we decided to get a massage at an upmarket relaxation centre. Yes, it was just a massage! And a fantastic one at that!! They had spa, sauna, showers, robes and these 'massage shorts' that you wore when getting your body worked over. I opted for the Swedish massage for a full hour and it was only $AUD20! They knew what they were doing as well and there were different massage options (deep tissue, siatsu, etc.) but I wanted one that would make me feel better, not cause further pain! It was great fun, definitely do it again for the price - and did in Boracay but that's another story.
The wedding was the next day so I didn't want to make it a late night and I was drastically tired. It was probably about 11pm local time after finishing dinner by this stage.
My part in the wedding was to read a Bible verse and, along with Lesley, to put on the veil over Jonathan and Jasmine. OK, writing this right now I can't remember what the veil symbolises but there was also a 3 stringed cord, candles and obviously the wedding rings. I think the photos linked to in a previous post illustrate what it was all like without me going into it.
Jon and Jasmine had 3 photographers and a videographer so there must be a mountain of hard drives storing those digital photos and hopefully they'll all be published and made public in the near future.
