Welcome to my very first blog! Some people might be surprised that I started writing a blog, in fact it is quite surprising to me as well! The reason for starting to work on a blog is simple. This blog gives me the opportunity of killing multiple birds with just 1 stone. Because it saves me time to keep all you fine people up to date, I will try to write a little more then I normally would in any average email that I would send to one of you. It's been already more then 1 month since I left the Netherlands. Therefore it will be kinda hard to summarize more then 4 weeks in just 1 blog. Nonetheless I will try to do my best providing you all with some of my adventures here in Cebu (the Philippines).
First I will take you all back to how this internship started for me and what I'm doing here in Cebu. In September 2009 I started the master program International Development Studies (IDS) at the university of Utrecht (Holland). In this master program there is a internship integrated of 4 months. After being in the field gathering data, a master thesis will be produced which will form the 'end assignment' for this master. The list of possibilities was endless, ranging from basically anywhere in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Every internship is linked to a specific topic, again with endless possibilities. During my bachelor (Human Geography) I mostly studied Economic Geography, Development Geography and courses like Globalization and Geography of Network so when I got the list of internships I straight away searched for a internship where at least some of these topics were involved. This led me to my current internship in the Philippines. The topic formulated around this internship was 'the impact of the economic crisis and how to cope with the crisis'. A very broad but interesting topic which I narrowed down during the first 2 periods of my master program to a specific sector, the business process outsourcing sector (namely call centers). The business process outsourcing sector is a very competitive global economic sector mostly situated in developing countries but very much linked to our 'developed' world.
With this being said, I will actually start to write about my adventures in Cebu and some other places. On the 6th of February me and my co-student Karin (doing her internship on micro-savings in Cebu) flew from the Amsterdam (Schiphol) Airport to Hong Kong. A very long flight but a rather good one compared to some flights in the past. We stayed in Hong Kong for 3 days. It is really an amazing city, very much Asian but definitely with some British influence still present in the city today. Because our time was limited we tried to see as much as possible but both jet-lag and weather were against us. Don't get me wrong we did see
plenty of things but just not as much as we wanted to. On February 10 we flew to Cebu City & Mactan International Airport which is a direct flight from Hong Kong. We arrived around 15:00 in the afternoon (some delay) and were picked up by our host organization, the University of San Carlos. In the first 4 weeks we stayed at the Golden Valley Hotel, situated just behind the main campus in downtown Cebu City. Downtown is a pretty dirty area with open sewers etc. and he&she bikini bars lol. Golden Vally Hotel formed our base camp for making trips to around Cebu City and in fact the entire island. The first 4 weeks can be divided into 2 parts. The first 2 weeks were basically just about getting to know the city, the island, the way of life and where to eat or not. We made trips to beautiful places like moalboal (west side of Cebu island) and malapascua (small island just above the north tip of Cebu island) but also the Spanish fortress downtown in Cebu City and the big shopping malls of Cebu (Ayala & SM). As transportation we used taxi's in the city and the big regional bus for our trips to moalboal and malapascua. The second part of these 4 weeks were more focus on the internship itself. We switched from taxi transportation to jeepney's. Jeepney's are basically mini-vans which are open on the backside, people hop in and out for 7 or 8 pesos (12 euro cent). These jeepney's ride specific lines and t
here are tons of them riding around on each route so its really easy to get around in them once you get to know their specific routes. As I said, the second part of the first 4 weeks was more focused on the internship. The biggest problem was that things were going really slow. Something which is common in the developing world I reckon but still somewhat annoying for us Western people. We didn't get our university card, library card or any local supervisor until the fourth week of our stay here which was last week. My local supervisor is assistant professor Frank Largo, he is working for the economics department at the university. The economic department is not situated at the main campus but at the north campus or talamban campus. Via the external affairs department I found out that Frank Largo, at first, was very hesitate to work with me. This is/was because of his experience with foreign students in the past. Last year a guy from the University of Amsterdam studied here doing related research to mine and he left a very bad impression on the local people. This is/was of course putting me in a weird situation where people are reserved to work with you and I can't really do much about it. Basically he wanted me to pay him extra for his service to help me. Something that I thought was really weird and external affairs did not agree with him either. Not really a great way to start working together but nonetheless the way it started for me. I just hope that he will put at least some effort in helping me gathering information on the business process outsourcing sector in Cebu and perhaps he can introduce me to the local/national organizations that work in the sector and the companies. Already he said that it's gonna be very hard to conduct interviews. This is something that I will have to see in the upcoming weeks.
Yesterday we moved from the Golden Vally Hotel to an uptown condo at Pete's Condoville. I found this place online after searching for a while, since both Karin and I wanted to move out of downtown more towards the talamban area (uptown) for easier contact with the economic department of the university. The upcoming weeks will be all about getting people in the companies and organizations to do interviews with me, which will hopefully provide me with the information I need to answer my research questions.Thanks for showing interest in my very first blog! I will try to update with another story soonish.
Greetings, Peter
