CSC Thailand 3 — Day 1 — Meeting the team
Meeting the team and durian
I'm writing this actually during day 9 so there is a chance that I already forgot something.
The agenda for day one (Saturday) was simple: 1- Meet the team and receive some basic initial orientation and 2- Walk around to discover the hotel neighborhood
During the morning we all met at our office room at the hotel which is actually a normal hotel room (it has a bed, living room, kitchen, etc.) prepared with additional desks and chair. Pyxera team provided us the basic instructions about the hotel logistics, team communication (each member received a local SIM Card with a local phone number and a good pre-paid voice and data package). It's great to have a local SIM Card and that I'll be able to keep it to use in my vacation days in Thailand after the assignment finished, I'll just need to top up the phone.
We also had a great introduction/review of IBM Design Thinking concepts, provided by our IBM UK teammate, Arabella, and how we may be able to apply Design Thinking techniques in our projects here in Thailand to achieve some WOW results.
After that we went to our first team lunch, in a nice restaurant inside Central World Mall. In the end it was the same restaurant we had lunch/dinner yesterday (trying to find the restaurant name — will update here if I find).
It's amazing how the team was already having a lot of fun and learning form each other. Everybody seemed truly interested in building a good team experience.
After lunch we went for a walk in the neighborhood. We discovered this big supermarket inside the shopping mall, found where is the closest and best place for currency exchange, purchased our ticket used to access the BTS (or Sky Train) system, that is usually the best option to commute in Bangkok.
The Durian
Right in the first day, one of the team mates was brave enough to do what many of us were already thinking about. He bought durian! And we tried, and I liked it!!
If you don't know what durian is, please google it !!!
But in case you are lazy, here is a great article about durian
Basically durian is a fruit that you either love or hate. It has a very very strong/intense smell and it is banned in many hotels and public facilities due to this strong smell. For me it takes (and smells) like jackfruit (which I like). Some people say it is a very very stinky smell. Personally I don't think it is that stinky
After we left the supermarket and tried to enter the sky train system, the security just told that we should eat the Durian before entering the train, as it is not allowed to enter the train system carrying Durian. We just ate it real quick. And, as said, I liked it !!
Other fruits
One interesting thing is that they have big variety of fruits in Thailand, the number of different fruits they have is similar to the variety we have in Brazil(from a quantitative perspective). But there are some fruits here that I had never heard about before
Then we came back to the hotel and it was already starting to get dark. Later on we went to a nice bar to relax a little bit.
And day 1 is done !!
