Pictures! Random! Good times! Philippines!

Goodbye Bacolod & Rotary GSE; Hello Manila and Luzon Area!

I can't believe it! 

GSE has come to an end...and we spent one of our last nights partying it up with our good friends...some of the wonderful, wild, vivacious women of Rotary in Bacolod.  We sang karaoke 'till our voices were scratchy, we danced 'till our feet hurt...we ate tons of food like lechon (an entire pig!), cake, and other delicious foods.  That was excellent.

Tommi heads out to her other adventures in Taiwan and Malaysia for the next two weeks; Emily is off to Palawan and other islands in the Philippines with her husband; and Lauretta & I are off on our own adventures in the north Philippines!

We arrived back in Manila just about 2 hours ago today. We booked some bus tickets to travel late tonight to Baguio City, 6 hours north from here.  We will depart at 11:45pm tonight and sleep on the bus :) 

We were adventurous and took a Jeepney from the bus station to the MALL OF ASIA; we're so proud of ourselves! We've finally rode in both a tricycle and a jeepney now.  So this mall...this place is giant!  It's like an entire city to itself.  But we have quite a few hours to kill...

Thanks to everyone we met through this fantastic trip.  We have been reminiscing on all the good times, the strange times, the funny times, the crazy times, and everything in between.  Overall...we are so grateful for our experience here and all the new friends we have made.  We want to come back and see more!

Much love to all our Filipino friends and beyond.  To all the Rotarians here and their spouses, families, friends, and all the support we received through this trip.  Our experience wouldn't have been as valuable and wonderful without all of you.  Thanks to all the Rotarians back home in Oregon in our district.  This has been a fabulous past 4 weeks....

Saying Goodbye

As we are wrapping up our GSE, we are saying goodbye to all of the friends and host families who have welcomed us, fed us, taught us, laughed at us, and laughed with us along the way.  We are excited to see a few of them in Oregon next month, and to all of the rest, we hope to see you in Oregon someday, or we'll drop by to say hello when we bring our families back in the future.

We are truly honored to have been welcomed so warmly into the Filipino community here in the Visayas.  From way down in Zamboanga, all the way up to the top of Pan-ay, we have collected beautiful memories and invaluable information.  Hopefully we can start up a few short-term and long-term projects which will bring our countries and respective Rotary groups closer through international collaboration. 

A giant thank you from the Oregon team to RI District 3850.  Please keep in touch!

Until we meet again   ;)

During the last week we enjoyed an Eco Park which is working to preserve some of the remaining critically endangered species of Negros such as the lovely philippine spotted deer. We spent time with youngsters at a day care education facility supported by Rotary and toured the historic remnants of a sugar cane plantation hacienda.

Bacolod, The City of Smiles

Currently, we are in Bacolod of Negros Occidental!  We've been here for a few days...and we will be here through DisCon, where we hope to see many of you once again! 

Again, we have all been so busy with fun filled days with Rotarians and our host families...it's been difficult to find time (or functioning internet) to post updates on our blog.

We had an amazing time through all of the cities.  Thank you everyone for the wonderful experience thus far...

Bacolod so far has offered us an array of exciting scenery, fun activities, amazing people and more amazing food.  We explored Mambucal forrest resort up in the mountains where giant flying fox bats reside, thousands hanging in the trees and flying through the sky above us as we soaked in a natural sulfur hot spring.  We explored the waterfalls and the varying trees and plants.  Beautiful! 

We also were able to tour the Hawaiian-Philippine sugar cane mill...a fantastic tour that showed how loads upon loads of sugar cane gets processed into the sugar crystals we love to eat! 

My host family took me on a lovely scenic view up the mountains to Don Salvador, a small town of 20,000-ish people.  That was amazing!  I was able to see many beautiful mountain rice terraces, higher altitude pine trees, waterfalls, and hills that resemble the Bohol Chocolate Hills. 

Pictures to come later!

Thanking our Hosts so far

With limited time right now, we have not done justice to all the other amazing hosts and locations that we have been treated to, for example, Antique! We promise to do more when possible. For now, thank you to all. Everyone should come and experience the Philippines for themselves if they can. Last night we were treated to dinner with Douglas, president of the Rotary club of Borocay. We leave tomorrow for Roxas so we all plan to go out dancing tonight. Last night I am afraid we all fell asleep before the party even started, but batteries need to charge before the fun can begin.

Iloilo, San Jose Antique, & Kalibo, in a nutshell!

I apologize that I don't have a lot of pictures up nor many descriptions right now...but here are some of our latest photos of where we've been!  I'll work on updating this more later...we are headed to Boracay today!