Ok, most of you are probably saying… It’s about time! And yeah, I know it’s been two weeks since my last post and a lot has happened. I’m no history book so I’m just gonna blog about what happened recently, my mom’s birthday celebration and the cheap teambuilding.

As for my mom’s birthday, nothing out of the ordinary really happened, except for the fact that Ira and her mom tagged along with us. We had dinner at Outback over there at Glorietta and the food was good, though not as good as Highlands Steakhouse.

The Amazing Race. That’s the concept of our teambuilding. There were 10 teams composed of 8 people (some had 7) and the budget was P200 per person. That P200 includes our lunch and dinner. What’s up with the cheap shit??? Effin Safeway. Anyway, each team had two team reps and they had to do the very first task – use the stairs to climb to the helipad of RCBC Plaza from the 21st floor! Just so you know, the helipad is located in the 50-something floor. The destination marker is located in the helipad and after getting there, they had to go back down to the 21st floor and fetch their teammates (us).

I’m not sure what time they started but it took them around 2 hours to finish the task. Martin and Jan Paul were the team reps from our team and they were exhausted and dripping with sweat by the time they came to get us.

The team minus Jan Paul

I’m not gonna explain everything in detail here because I’m just too lazy to blog right now and I also can’t remember some of them. Some of the highlights (in no particular order):

Task – Hula Hoop: We had to find two good Samaritans within 10 minutes to do the hula hooping for us. As luck would have it, when we were about to do this task, it effin rained. Since the place where we were supposed to find people to do hula hoping for was in a park, by the time we got there, there were no people around. The ones who were there weren’t good Samaritans. Since we couldn’t finish the task, there was a fallback task. Each and every one of us had to do the hula-hooping for 1 minute. This is not your usual 1 minute running time. The team marshall stopped the clock every time we dropped the hula hoop. This task gave me the cramps afterwards even though I wasn’t feeling fatigued. I had to stretch my hamstrings to relieve the pain and luckily, it never came back.

Me, Hula-hoopin’

Task – Tire-pumping: This was a tandem task, meaning only two people are allowed to perform the task. Moreover, those two people cannot perform any more tandem tasks unless everyone on the team has already done so. Anyway, the objective of this task is to pump two 15” tires to around 30 psi. Alecs and Jan Paul were the ones who did the pumping and they got it on the first try! Impressive.

Task – Golf-swinging: The objective is to get 1500 points and in order to earn the points, we had to hit the golf ball as far as we could. Easy? Not quite. Except for Arbie and Jan Paul, the rest of the team pretty much sucked. There was one time it would take us three or four swings just to hit the damn ball. Oh yeah, did I mention that despite how I sucked, I was the one who made the final shot to make our score reach 1500? I’m just sayin’.

The whole gang including our team marshal at the golf center

Task – Wall-climbing: Another tandem task, this time, Arbie and I were the ones who performed this one. The objective is to get the flag that’s on top of the wall. There were a total of three flags which means one of us has to climb two times. Since Arbie was so excited about wall-climbing (he volunteered himself even before the actual task itself), I gave him the privilege to go two times. The first climb was a cinch. I did fall down once because of carelessness but was able to pick up my pace afterwards. I even finished a second or two faster than Arbie despite falling down. No offense Arbie, I need to gain some macho points with my girl. The second climb was a lot harder since the wall was slanted a bit. Arbie had to rest at the ropes around four or five times before finishing the task. Hats off to you Arbie, I would’ve rested a lot more had it been me who went up there.

Arbie Wall-climbing

Task – Bowling: A tandem task wherein the two people involved had to bowl a score of 120. It doesn’t matter whether they do it in one game or two. The scores will be added up anyway. Yeah, this was the easiest of the challenges. Martin and Arbie did this task.

Final Task – Make the globe. This is kinda hard to explain so I’m not gonna dwell into this anymore. Basically, there were a total of 24 cloth strips on the floor and we had to form the globe using those strips. The strips can either be horizontally or vertically aligned and we had to figure that out. One strip should be carried by three people, no more no less. This means we had to wait for all of the other teams to arrive before we can begin working on this task. The deadline was 7pm and we finished 5 minutes earlier.

What final task? They’d rather pose

By the way, we were the first team to arrive at the destination of the final task and the reward? Just some extra food and water. Complete BS. Not only that, after the final task, we thought that there was gonna be some service van of some sort which would bring us back to the office. We thought wrong. We had to use the budget allotted for us to go back to the office! Another BS.

Upon arrival at the office, we still had P500 left from our budget so we went over to KFC and ate our hearts out. It’s just chicken but how satisfying it was!

After the feast, we all parted ways and went home. I drove home and after cleaning up myself of the dirt amassed from the ordeal, I went straight to bed.

Overall, the Amazing Race concept was cool. Just don’t cut us back on the funds Safeway. You got money to fill a whole city. Share some of it. Don’t you have the Christmas Spirit? Remember, it’s better to give than to receive.

More pics in my multiply site so go over there if you feel deprived.

Later.