First post - 2 weeks and Happy Canada Day!

Hi - I want to be able to easily post pictures and news about my time here in SE Asia and a blog seems like the way to do it.  I'm not going to commit to long posts, or witty posts, or frequent posts, but will share some photos and provide some details of what I'm doing.

I've been here for two weeks now.  Week 1 was not a lot of fun as I left Canada on Friday at noon, lost most of a day in transit, overnighted in Hong Kong on Saturday, flew to Cebu City on Sunday and started work at 8:30am Monday morning.  The only problem is that 8:30am Monday here is 5:30pm Sunday in Victoria, and a 15 hour timezone change is hard to adapt to.  I don't believe it takes 1 day per timezone (thankfully) but it definitely took me a half day per timezone before I felt functional again.  Thank goodness for Melatonin.

All being well, I move tomorrow into a 4 bedroom, 5 bathroom condo (so I have lots of room for guests).  Actually having guests is a bit complicated here but more about that later.  I went to the condo today and took some pictures.  It's furnished but doesn't come with things like dishes, towels, sheets, etc. so yesterday we went shopping at the S & R store, which is just like Costco (except the service is much better)!

Here's a picture of the main room of the condo.  The kitchen is at the back, living room at the front.  Off each corner of the main room are the 4 bedrooms.  The ceilings are very high and it's going to take some work for it to feel homey, but it's definitely better than living in a hotel.

Here's a picture of the outside of our office building.  It's only about a block away from the Marriott hotel, where I've been staying.  

This is me in our office on the 12th floor of the Ayala Life-FGU Center in the Cebu Business Park.

Once I move into the condo, I'll be cutting through Ayala mall to get to work.  The mall is, to be frank, the centre of my little universe here.  It has stores, of course, but it also has the fitness centre, two grocery stores, a hardware store, movie theatres and many restaurants.  I just googled and apparently there are 59 eating establishments in it, with everything from authentic Filipino food, to Thai, Mexican, Greek, Italian, etc, mostly sit-down but with some fast food outlets too.  This is a picture of the mall taken from my hotel room yesterday morning.  

Happy Canada Day everyone.  There is apparently a reception tomorrow evening put on by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines that I may have to attend, if I can find out where it is.  Interesting fact about Cebu - buildings are not numbered - they just have names.  Sometimes the name is posted on the outside of the building but sometimes it's not.  An address for a place is the building name and sometimes the street that it's on or sometimes just the area that it's in.  I have no idea how taxi drivers find anything.