Rebecca's Travels: First Week

I've made it through my first week in Asia! Luckily it has all been pretty smooth sailing. Tuesday through Thursday we worked at the AP2 Dell campus on the mainland because it is where most of our Global Trade & Compliance clients work. Each morning the team eats breakfast in the G Hotel cafe where we are able to get a lot of western food breakfast items (eggs, waffles, cereal, yogurt, fruit, etc). I tend to stay away from the eastern breakfast food items for breakfast (porriage, noodle soup, century eggs), since most of my lunch and dinner contains eastern food (a LOT of fried rice and noodle soup). We leave the hotel together in a taxi van around 7:30 a.m. and it takes us about an hour to commute to the AP2 facility. The drive is pretty long and takes up a lot of the day, but we use it to debrief as a team as well as have some casual bonding time.

Most of the days at the office have been taken up with meetings with our clients to walk through their business and daily tasks. Soon we'll be spending more time testing the data they've provided us to make sure there are not any risk items - we'll be starting to do more of that starting tomorrow. Friday we were at the AP1 Dell campus building on the Penang island. Again, the day was mostly spent in meetings. The highlight of the day was getting to eat lunch with the FDPs that are based in Penang. Most of them are in the new class, so this was mine and Bob's first time meeting them.

Being that it was Friday, we were finally able to do a little relaxing after work hours. We walked about a half mile down from our hotel to a bar called Over Time to have some German beer and appetizers. The local GAT members as well as most of the FDPs also met up with us to hang out.

That's been the first work week here abroad. Below are some pictures I've taken during the week. I haven't taken many pictures yet because most of my time has been in the office, but you can expect many more after I do a bit of site-seeing this weekend.