I went to Lingayen, Pangasinan last week to attend the 1st Pangasinan Digital ICT Congress, organized by Vanj Padilla and her Pangasinan Digital team. I'm one of the resource speakers for the topic of blogging for students and social media management for businesses and SMEs. Its my first time here in Lingayen, Pangasinan and my last visit here was years ago when me and my relatives went to Hundred Islands in Alaminos, Pangasinan. Its a new adventure for me and I love visiting different places here in our country, its a big opportunity for me to learn more about and share it here in my blog. (More story below)
Traveling to the North side of Luzon is very common to me, but I usually travel to Pampanga, Zambales, La Union and Baguio. I didn't even got a chance to check out the different town here in Pangasinan, but this trip is very special because the city is big, rich in culture, heritage and history. Here are some photos I took on my 1st drop in Lingayen, Pangasinan.
The beauty of the crescent moon, colorful dawn and stars welcomed us when we arrived in El Puerto Marina Beach Resort in Lingayen, Pangasinan, we arrived at around 5am.
Welcome breakfast meal is here, we traveled on another side of town and headed to Capitol Resort Hotel, there we met Vanj, the one in charge for the congress and who transported us here, after the meet up we ate our breakfast and its a lovely meal in a Pangasinan style, sunny side up egg, rice, longanissa Alaminos and espada dried fish. The Longanisa Alaminos is very different from all the longanisa that I encountered, this one has toothpicks that sticks from both ends, this one is very tasty when fried.
Bam and Jinkee photo op at the hotel's signage
the entrance to Capitol Resort Hotel. The guard is so nice here and he even told me to take a photo of their main entrance door.
Infront of the main door, I spotted this parking space exclusive for Governor Espino of Lingayen, Pangasinan
Outside view of the hotel
After our breakfast, we drove back to the other side of town again, going to our resort hotel. In the road, we saw the morning faces of the people and it was a busy morning at around 730am in Lingayen.
Inside the van, me and the Phil-IT.org group, as usual, I always go out wearing my trusty old sun glasses, this sunglasses always protect my eyes from the rays of the sun
Back at the resort hotel, we slept and took a quick rest and then after some hours we woke up again and drove back to Capitol Resort, and then near it is the Pangasinan Training Center, that's the venue of the ICT Congress and here we caught up Vince Golangco having a talk about blogging to more than 500 students. During our breakfast sessions, Vanj told me if I can volunteer to have a talk on blogging after Vince, I agreed and I'm glad that I brought some of my presentation slides.
at the end of the talk it was the time for Q and A, the organizers gave away some free stuff to students who asked questions, items and lootbags are from the event sponsors.
Students are from Lingayen, and most students are taking up BS Math and others are Com Sci
Inside the venue there's a series of photo exhibit, this photo set shows the beauty of architectural structures of their provincial offices, newly re-constructed and they just used an old building to restore it. I just learned that the provincial color of Lingayen is yellow gold.
The golden era of Pangasinan symbolizes the new yellow color as its symbol, new administration, new governor and good economy for the whole town.
Here's my view during my talk
Time for lunch break
We ate our lunch there in the venue, and they provided a mini buffet to us, yummy sinigang na bangus, chicken and veggies. Here's my photo having a coffee break.
During our lunch, I met JV Rufino of Inquirer.net, here he gave a talk about mobile tech information
It was a very informative talk, awesome to hear JV's presentation
Students are here surfing around with their laptops and mobile devices, Thanks to Globe for offering free Wimax connection to all people inside the venue.
at the end of the program, me and my group decided to have a little walk around the Capitol, here we spotted the event poster and we saw our face in the poster.
Here's a closer look of the poster
here's a large tarp of the poster. LOL. our friend blogger FPJ told me that our face is all over Pangasinan hahhaha.
Here we have Jinkee Umali posing a photo infront of the poster with her photo in it
Watch out for my next post as I will feature the different places we visited here in Lingayen, watch too my attempt in doing a photo walk at night, Lingayen is a large town and there are lots of interesting topics to shoot and show it here in my blog. So watch out for it.
