extended stay?

Hi all,

Since everyone thinks I'm lying on the beach all day long, I'll give you guys some background on my job.
The project I'm working is an IPTV (digital TV over the internet) project for 2 telecom operators. One in the Dominican Republic (Codetel), the other in Puerto Rico (PRTC). Both belong to the Telmex group, which is the group of Carlos Slim, the richest (or at least one of the richest) guy on the planet. Haven't seen Carlos around yet, unfortunately but if I do, I'll make sure to make friends.

The project is led by the Spanish team, not by the Belgian which explains why I had to work with the team in Madrid for a few monts. Changin my boss from "de joeri' to "el ramon'

My assignment here concerns a monitoring solution for Codetel's broadcast TV channels. I'll try to explain a bit on how we get MTV and CNN from the air to everyone's TV at home.
Codetel has some huge satellites installed in the backgarden from where I work. These satelitte TV signals are processed by decrypters, decoders, encoders and encryptors before we blow them into the world wide web. Anyway, it's a bit a complicated process and lots of things can go wrong.
What we do is following; we take video samples after each main processing point and we display them on some huge screens. When something goes wrong with a signal the operators can perform some actions to locate the failing equipment as fast as possible so everyone can relax and return to watching HBO again without making nasty phone calls to Codetel to ask why Carry all of sudden isn't kissing Mr Big anymore. We also have probes installed so we get numerical measurements on the video quality. My job is to make sure everything works in the end and that everything is configured correctly. That includes making sure no porn is displayed on the big screen, but instead on a small screen in a different room. Untill now, I failed once and unfortunately the room was full of people, it wasn't my fault though, codetel kinda forgot to mention an adult channel to me. Thank god, the audio wasn't turned on at the moment!

My Spanish project manager has asked me if I wanted to stay a month longer on the project which would mean I'd be only coming to Belgium in October. They need someone to give trainng to Codetel and -congratulations to myself- hereby I've become a trainer. Will be funny though explaining all this stuff to a class of Dominicans. After the training I would stay like a week or so longer to give some support and then I'd finally go to Puerto Rico. That will probably be around 15th of August. By then I fear that PRTC is grumpy because I got there later then expected and the race to make everything work as fast as possible will start again.

I guess I even could stay longer on the project but that might mean that I'd need to transfer from alcatel-belgium to alcatel-spain since spain now has to pay belgium for my work.
Complicated stuff... But anyway, I'm glad I can stay a bit longer. I just hope my Belgian management agrees on the one month extension.

By the way, my Belgian number is still working (0477 961429) but keep in mind I'm 6 hours behind you guys.

My beloved readers!
An update on my life in Santo Domingo:
During the week, I’ve been working way too many hours which immediately explains why I haven’t been posting a lot lately.
But in the work-hard- play-hard philosophy, I’ve been having great weekends and some great week evenings as well.

Alcatel-Lucent was still looking an apartment for me, but, as usual, my moves are faster then the company’s, so I found myself a place. I’m living now with Will, a guy from NY in a very nice apartment in a good neighborhood. (You can see Will on the picture on the top, he's the one on the left) Where the Delta-hotel, even though also supposed to be a “safe” area, still had some extremely young hookers on the street, I have now the feeling I can walk around freely on my street and I feel really happy at my place, even though I don't spend too much time there.


Alejandro is one of the people who contacted me through couchsurf. He took me out once in Santo Domingo to a nice non-latin club which I really appreciated cause the meringue, salsa, bachata, regueton is coming out of my ears as we would say in Dutch.
Besides the fact we love the same music, another great thing about Alex, are his trip-organisation skills. His friends call it Ale-tours.
Two weekends ago I went with Ale-tours to Samana. Samana is a peninsula in the east of the island and also the name of one of the village we went to. We spent Saturday on an island. Ale-tours managed to get us a decent discount on the boat there as – and I quote- we were 7 Dominicans and only 2 foreigners. Well… just the way it works here. I’m already used to the fact that my white skin means paying more then Dominican people.
As usual, hiding myself for the picture :)
The village of Samana has 1 all-in hotel that even has an elevator to the beach!
Three bridges connect the mainland with 3 small islands. Adventurous as we are we took a look to find out where they lead to....
and well… doesn’t seem to very much actually.
The next day we went to Playa Rincon. Supposed to be number 7 in the top 10 beaches of the world, but I think many lists exist. Anyway, it’s number 1 in my personal ranking which in the end should the most important one, right? Ale-tours offered cool drinks, music and good company.

It was quite late when we got back to Santo Domingo because it was just too damn difficult leaving paradise to go back to the hectic city and my daily 9-to-9 job....

My life in Santo Domingo

Mis queridos!

I'm already in my third week in Santo Domingo so about time I give you an update! I can feel the competitive breath from my more frequently blogging friends! (How fast do you guys write anyway?)

I got some worried comments after my previous posts but I can assure everybody that I'm really having a good time! Besides the not-being-able to move around as used to in Europe I enjoy all of it. I made some great friends already. The dominicans are really funny and open. I'll try to dedicate a post to introduce them.

I'm still living in the hotel Delta which in the end is not the worst either even though I would love-love-love them to change their breakfast buffet. The street is not the nicest either, there is actually quite some prostitution going on on my pavement. But anyway, I'm not so much at "home". Still, the queste for an appartment continues...

Mondays to fridays I'm working in Alameda, Codetel's data and sattelite center which is in the outskirts of Santo Domingo so it always takes us quite some time to struggle our way through traffic. I'm still not used to things I see on the road, but getting there... slowly...

In the office it's mainly...well... cold. In general, Domincans have this thing with airco. Outside it's mostly +30 degrees while inside in general it's just simply freezing. And Codetel's datacenter is probably the worst. We haven't been able to locate the airco yet so my most worn clothing is sadly a fleece sweater.

Work is different from what I used to do in Belgium and Madrid. It's more hands-on. I'm technical project manager which means I'm looking after the end-to-end solution and making sure the thing works in the end.






The best thing about work here, is that we regularly have dinners, parties, and last tuesday they threw us an Argentinean parrillada. (Our meat doesn't stand the comparison with the Argentinean one). My colleagues are all latino's or spanish, except for me and a french guy and they're all good fun. As usual, I'm the baby and same old, same old, not so many girls in the office, so they treat me very well and I'm never without a dance partner!

See me thinking....

But work is not the most interesting part of my life so...

Weekends then: last weekend I went to Isla Saona, an island in the southwest. We drove up to Bayahibe, which is the village from where boats to the island depart. Bayahibe is a scuba diving village and is concentrated around one main bar, here known as colmado. Very small, not the nicest village you can find in la Republica but ok. After this village starts a national park, the park including also the island Saona.

Bayahibe... Where even the cyber cafe's grow on palm trees!

By accident we got ourselves some free cocktails from the all-inlcuded hotel. Hey, if they're stupid enough not to use bracelets and not to close their beach, then it's not my fault, no?

Saona is a popular destination. Everyday, some catamarans dump all the tourists on the beach to fill them up with ron and food. What we did, was rent a private small boat, which is called una lancha, and we went there early in the morning so we had the beach to ourselves. The ron we bought ourselves ofcourse which our captain Jose, appreciated a lot.





With the boat we followed the coastline which is amazingly beauty since it belongs to the national park. According to Jose, the original inhabitants used to live in these caves.


We stopped at piscinas naturales, the water stays very low for about 100 metres from the main land. Wildlife spotted:
Sea stars


CHECK!



Pelicans:

CHECK!

the funny thing about them was that there was always a sea gull following them. To catch some fish, pelicans just kinda drop themselves in the water. It looks very unprofessional if you ask me but hey, they'll know best how to do it and personally haven't been close to catching a fish yet. The sea gull would just comfortably install himself on the head of the pelican to rob him his fish! Hilarious actually! Go sea gull!!! Although on the picture the pelican just threw him off his head.






On our way to the island we passed mangrove! Mangrove are trees that grow in coastal areas in the water. And I'm a true mangrove fan.










This is Saona. You'd expect a Bounty falling of the tree any moment now. When we got there, there was nobody yet on the island except for the bartenders which according to me is a perfect balance between isolation and civilization.
The island as a whole is a national park so no hotels or lodgings are allowed. There are only a few bars on the beaches. The internals are rainsforest. The Dominicans from the bar told me that if I would go in I'd be eaten alive by the mosquitos, so I wisely followed their advice. Especially since by that time my legs were twice as big as usual. Don't know what it is, but the mosquitos just see me as a huge birthday cake.

After a few good hours of sunshine, we were once again surprised by a tropical rainfall which has nothing to do with rain in Belgium. By then I was almost dying of the itch on my legs and Jose told me to go in the sea which I did and which I can recommend everyone whenever in the tropics. It's a weird sensation because the water is really warm and salty while the rain is cold and sweet. And since it rains really strong, it's funny to see how the drops make the sea water splash up.

Well, that's all for today. To all my friends, look out after each other while I'm not there and don't do anthing I wouldn' do!