Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since I FINALLY got around to blogging about the experience of moving to the Philippines and so I figured it was time to add to the canon…
After five weeks in our AirBnB Condo on H.V. Dela Costa Street we spent Saturday-gone moving into our freshly found, permanent address, which is / was handily just across the street. I have always been intrigued by living in a high-rise and while I am not going to claim retroactively that this weekend’s transition has somehow fulfilled a lifelong goal or anything so grand, I have to admit that there is a certain wonder and excitement attached to our new environs that I was not expecting. For one thing, we can see the Ocean from our living room!
Work continues to be an exciting mixture of strategy and problem-solving with a large side-order of never-ending recruitment, and a smaller one of little bits of coding. Before you ask I most certainly am enjoying it. The rush of being involved in a growing and increasingly successful start-up is a drug I’ve been exposed to before, and it is no less potent this time around, but so far I am managing to make time to smell the roses as well, where I can.
I am starting to hatch a plan to take Lee-Anne and the kids to the beach in a couple of weeks time, preferably for a long weekend, and we are already talking in looser terms about exploring some of the more far-flung parts of the archipelago, with particular reference to Palawan and her white sand beaches and relative lack of people in general. I have heard people talking about Hundred Islands in the North and Mindanao in the South and it does appear that we might well be in a position to fill our free time quite admirably without ever repeating ourselves or actually leaving the country for some time to come, though the prospect of places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, not to mention the Thai beaches and even Japan being so much closer than they have ever been before is all very tempting as well. Once our Philippines visas are through – they are being processed at the moment, and that may take “some time”(tm) – I suspect we will gad about the South China Sea quite a bit, given half a chance…
For now I need to get back to the recruitment grindstone – finding software engineers locally is a bit of a relentless process, at least finding good ones is, even more so than back in London, and even reaching out to networks back home bears the difficulty of persuading anyone that moving to the other side of the World makes for solid decision making. From what I have seen so far I am not only certain I made the right decision in bringing our family out here and taking this job, but I am already much more excited about the future than I thought I could be. I just hope that I can get some other quality people enthused about the road ahead, as growth is happening and I am going to need to feed that growth with more output and better output, one way or another. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certain that we’ll find people given a bit of time and a bit of luck, but there is no doubt that it’s the biggest challenge I have on my plate for the next couple of months.