lakes of the sun

...at least that's how babelfish.altavista.com translates lagos del sol from spanish to english.

yes, the oft-delayed and relocated company finally came to pass. and it was ultimately held at the lagos del sol resort on the shores of lake caliraya in laguna.

incidentally, lake caliraya is artificial, constructed in 1937 by an american. by damming the cavinti valley of the sierra madre range, this resulted in the creation of the lake, allowing hydroelectric power generation. the lake is at an elevation of about 1,200 feet above sea level (or about 700 feet lower than the altitude of tagaytay city). (information in this paragraph courtesy wikipedia).

...now, after some googling about that eventually led to wikipedia and then some handy-dandy calculator work, i learned that temperature goes down by about 3C per 1000 feet altitude gained. which means that in the lowlands, if the peak temperature is the recent average of 36C at 2pm, it would therefore be 32.4C at the elevation of lake caliraya. which is still quite hot, actually. its a good thing that the winds never let up when we were there.

anyway, trip assembly time was 5:30am with a 6:00am departure. lack of sleep notwithstanding, make it to the office, and after a quick side trip to the local mcdo for a takeout breakfast (idea of j, and a good one) board the bus...

...and are expectedly delayed, by the order of 50 minutes, as we await one notable straggler; and the impossible man decides to just then accomplish his royal morning duties -- is almost left behind but for the quick thinking (darn! oh well.) of his seatmate.

9:11am sees us at the gate of the resort. interestingly, close to a decade ago, i and three others drove to the shores of this lake (with outdated instructions, missing the road up, finding a restaurant that served sizzling snake, backtracked, found the lake, rented a boat, fished and caught nothing, drove back to the metro) -- and the route the bus took held nothing familiar at all. wow, my memory is really full of holes. hence the blog. hehehe.

i mean, i should have remembered the circuitous and snakelike road up to the lake, but even that didn't register any recollection.

anyway, the resort: nestled among the mountaintops (which is what they really are) surrounding the lake, a bunch of low buildings (which appeared to be made of wood) with the main activity centers (reception, gift shop, swimming pool, gym, ping pong and billiards) clustered together near the entrance parking. the main dining hall, though, was separate; reached by a long-ish stairway at what might be the uppermost extent of the property, the balconies afforded a good overview of the entire resort.

overall, a good place to revisit (though i don't have an idea of costs at the moment).

now, it has to be admitted, that i approached the whole office outing thing with more than a little trepidation. for one, it was never made explicitly clear just what went into a company outing (seeing as in our entire almost-three year existence this would be the first ever). previous get-togethers had been team building exercises (attended the first and second, missed the third) and i wasn't looking forward to more of that.

it didn't help that the second reschedule of the trip included a rigid schedule for the day's activities. eat, swim, lunch, group games, swim, pack up and go.

so, though the day didn't turn out that way, i have to say that it was hardly relaxing to wait for the shoe to drop; to hear the announcement of forced socialization...

at any rate, the day was spent mostly in the shade of one of the shoreline trees, in partly alcohol-fueled conversations, with an hour's break of ping pong when the table was freed up (there being only one table).

boy, did my knees hurt after that impromptu exertion.

upshot of it was that the next day was announced as a holiday, too.

all in all, a good day.

interesting, too: the sexbomb dancers were there, shooting for some tv series of theirs. wonder if anyone caught it on the tube...