Philippines. Day 1.

After what felt like 6 days of travel, we have all officially arrived. Nobody has caught malaria yet.

Day one seems to be all wrapped up in Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The "days" confuse me here, but I'm sure I'll get used to that. We began our travels Thursday; David M came from Pennsylvania and Candice came from Missouri, but we all gathered together for the first time at LAX. I'm sure it will hold a special place in all of our hearts. We finally boarded flight PR103 for our 15 hour flight to Manila at 10:20pm LA time. (That's 3 hours different from Tampa time, so it was officially 1:30am and we had been traveling for 11 hours already).  I immediately fell asleep upon take-off only to be woken up 30 minutes later so they could serve us our first meal of the flight (there were three total). After 3 meals, two movies, and a couple potty break, we arrived in Manila at 4:10am local time. I feel I mention, that 4:10am was Saturday. At some point during our journey, we crossed the international dateline and completely skipped Friday the 13th. Darn. I hope you can feel my disappointment. After touching ground in Manila, we existed the plan, went through immigration, found all our bags after a minor fiasco with Bryant's luggage (all bags made it and only a few items were stolen from Dave W's bag) and finally breezed through customs and out the door where we had the pleasure of meeting 3 UHG employees with bright smiling faces. I think they were just as excited to see us as we were to finally be on the ground. Before loading our luggage Dave W had to get a picture in front of the airport with our little buddy that Carla sent with us. (I don't think it has a name, so feel free to make suggestions)

At long last, Dave took his picture and we were on our way....to watch the sunrise over Manila. What a perfect way to end our travels and welcome us to our new home.

The hotel rooms are pretty fantastic. Thank you corporate for putting us up in some pretty sweet digs. I, personally, am on the 18th floor and have a view of Makati to the left, residential area in front, what looks like water straight ahead (I will be obtaining binoculars to comfrim. Watch for a future post) and then mountains even further out. It's gorgeous!

We met for breakfast after we arrived and had some fantastic food. I had 4 plates of food. For those of you that know me, know how extraordinary that number is. After breakfast, we all passed out and decided to meet at 7pm to start our day. No sense sleeping when we have a new schedule to adhere to. I don't think workforce will appreciate us sleeping all night.

After sleeping through my alarm, I woke up at 6:55pm and ran downstairs. (nothing has changed. I'm still late as always) Susan gave us a little tour and showed us a few important places, like the mall and grocery store, and then we went for breakfast. Dinner? Breakfast? I'm so confused. At any rate, we ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe where we had some good ol' American food and listened to the most amazing singer. She was singing all the current American music and sang it better than half the artist. Nailed it! Candice and I were singing and dancing right along. I'm certain you will hear more about mine and Candice's adventures as we're both ready for clubs, dancing and karaoke.