One month and counting

Greetings everyone, and welcome to another installment of the GSE Philippines blog. A lot has happened in the past week, so let's get to it.

Like the title says, we're down to our last month before we board the plane for the Philippines. There's still a lot of work to do before we depart, and much of the meeting was spent going over the various steps needed to take. Perhaps the biggest task left before us is completing our Powerpoint presentations. We each assigned ourselves a different area of American culture to cover; Laurie will be taking history, Shelly will tackle education and family life, Jon will become an expert on pop culture, and industry will be my subject.

We decided to make next Saturday a work day and complete each presentation. These will be shown to Rotary members while we're in the Philippines, so it's important we do the best job possible. We also got a look at the terrific introductory presentations which Shelly and Laurie completed, and decided to combine them, using the best elements from both.

We got a look at the new brochures, and man, they look great! Each member has written a pretty in-depth description of themselves, and next week we'll be going to a professional photo studio for some high-quality brochure pictures.

The meeting was held at Marla Luzzi's beautiful home in Weston. We got to meet her family, and she treated us to a fantastic Filipino meal. We had adobo, (dark-meat chicken braised in garlic, soy sauce and vinegar and cooked until dry), longganisa, (Philippine sausage), sinigang, (pork, fish or shrimp in a tamarind stew) and delicious Filipino noodles. Desert was halo-halo, which translates into "mix-mix." It's a an ice cream with mashed purple yam, plantains and jackfruit thrown into the mix. As always, there were questions aplenty.

There's a lot of work still awaiting us, but we've come a long since we first met a few weeks ago. This is going to be a life-changing trip for all of us, and we're not going to stop now.

See you next time!

Max B.