My visit to Cagayan de Oro was not really all of a junket trip. But there were fun times. Like I met new friends. I got to visit some places I would not forget, courtesy of my brother in law and his beautiful wife, Jojo. My husband's relatives all did their best to accommodate the visiting in law and I thank them for that although I know I had been quite a handful. lol.
She is the typical woman behind her man, waking up early in the morning to see to breakfast and that everybody is off to school in time (that included me. On my first day there she knocked on my door with genuine worry in her eyes asking me what time I should be at my seminar venue. I smiled at her concern because I had been enjoying myself with my facebook games. I know there was time enough for registration at the N hotel.)
She is the conservative house wife and indespensable ally to her husband, the office in charge and manager of the new business that the couple have put up after her husband's retirement. Despite all the effort and time they put in the new venture together, for Jojo and Paco, family comes next to God and business comes only third. That is how I sized up the couple's values after staying with them for a week. They are active with a church group and are genuinely concerned about the spiritual development of the whole family, including my husband's family.
Paco took me to and from the N hotel, the seminar venue, which I discovered later was quite a distance from the family residence and with road renovation that was going on, we had to take a longer route and that naturally added to the concern of Jojo, who was so anxious that Paco, my brother in law should get me to the hotel on time.
I hate all these brown outs that have been upsetting things in the house including my blogs. I have been almost done with this blog when another power outage came after a thunderstorm. gosh!
So I continue and rewrite while it is fresh in my mind although I can not promise to reconstruct the old text. Now I see the wisdom in using drafts.
This is the lobby of the hotel which was the venue of the seminar. I took several photos here as the hotel was new and therefore pristine in its beauty.
This one is taken by the poolside at the back of the hotel where most guests congregate. The Hotel's name aroused a lot of curiousity. Then some native told us that the hotel was named after the siblings who owned the hotel. All their names start with N. Thus the name of the hotel.
Jojo kept asking me about the food that they served as she was looking for a venue for the next church activity that they were planning to undertake. I told her it was nothing spectacular, just the usual fares in many Filipino homes.
They serve soup in small bowls followed by the main dish which always had rice and then dessert. I can not forget how they glamorized the lowly turon (which is bananas wrapped in lumpria wrapper) then fried and embellished with sesame seeds. It came with a choice of two sauces, ube jam and syrup which literally stuck to the dish in spectacular thinness, but was very artistically presented.
I met new friends as I said. This one came from Samar, an island close to Leyte where
I live. He told me he would present a paper in another Asian country after our seminar. He is full time into research, being the head of the research department in their university. Although a little fickle minded, we had a good time malling after the seminar, as we had time to kill, unlike the other participants who were in a hurry to go home.
The next one is from Davao, from a private college. Like me she is a newby in research and I promised her I would post in facebook all the pictures of the seminar that I took, specially those of her, but until now I could not make that promise good. Sorry Gloria!
The hotel room was freezing and that explains our attire. On the whole, I learned so many things especially about international standards for publication of researches and how easy it was to detect fraud and plagiarism especially in these days of the internet.
But the best thing about it aside from adding to my knowledge of peer reviewing research articles are those that happened outside the seminar. The visit to Ace's workplace, meeting my goddaughter Aya and attending her birthday party, and the visit to the city of El Salvador, where the following pictures were taken.
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