To make long things short I’m bringing out this post straight to the point about the Mindanao Bloggers Summit. Although, I wanted to make this a quite long one which turned out to be effective for Ate Brendel and Kuya Lyle when they read my Digital Filipino Club post.

So, I was on my way to General Santos City on my own. No one accompanied me when I went on a Air Conditioned Holiday Bus set for Gensan with a single stop at Digos City. I was supposed to meet Ate Grace and co at around 1 o’clock but it took them years to respond, so my mother made the move and told me to get on the bus now.

It wasn’t quite long until I had some accompaniment I could talk to, someone I knew since the WordCamp in Davao and someone who I met at the Digital Filipino Club of Davao. You guessed it, Charles Ortiz was beside me on the bus from Digos City onwards. He was also the kind person who sponsored all my goods like food and beverages in General Santos, including fare every now and then. 🙂 And not to forget, he was my room mate at the Sleep Inn.

We arrived in General Santos City around 6 in the evening. The sky was cloudy and the athmosphere was pretty lone and monotonous. My eyes tend not to see any visible changes between Davao and Gensan, but I felt what was the difference. The atmoshpere was quite thick, the warmth around the place was different. In general, Gensan is a place of some temperature.

After waiting a couple of minutes, the said “sundo” that Kuya Avel has promised us arrived, with a fella from WordCamp Philippines, Aethen. He brought us right in front of the Sleep Inn’s door steps and left us after a while since they had to fetch other participants from the terminal as well.

I felt sleepy already but hey, the night is still young and there’s yet more to come!

We went to the Family Country Hotel, looking for the others, since Aethen has told us that there’ll be a dinner with the other organizers. But unfortunately dinner at the Family Country Hotel was negative. But, we were able to make use of their Wi-Fi Connection, check out some plugins, install some and maintain our blogs for a while. As we transferred from the Cafe to the Lobby, sad news reached me.

Pinoy Teens Online (pinoyteens.net) was down for more than 14 hours already, including the website of my host and almost all other websites that I run on that same server, not to forget my hosting service. I felt very nervous indeed, “what should I present to the people tomorrow if in case they would like to see my blog?”

I immediately setup a tempoary blog with wordpress.com, yet I misspelled the word KABATAAN to KABTAAN and decided to pay 10 USD to map my other pinoyteens domain name to the account to mask that mistake committed. And that’s the story how the 10 USD got wasted. Now, let’s set aside my personal problem with my domain name and hop over to a dinner at Grab A Crab.

I’m not quite a fan of seafoods, so I can’t tell how the food tastes like, but hey, it looked pretty yummy and almost seduced my lips to be devirginized for the first time eating crabs, but I insisted. All that I ate was a little beef sauce and a cup of rice, nothing more, nothing less. I just had too much trouble on my mind that time. At Grab-A-Crab, I was able to meet Kuya Avel, the one who emailed me to attend Mindanao Bloggers Summit and finally came to convince me.

Their stay wasn’t quite long and a talk was not to be expected since they all departed from the Restaurant and went back to the venue to prepare everything for the upcoming 2nd Mindanao Bloggers Summit which happened on the next day.

The main event up ahead:

It isn’t quite noticable that I was very sleepy that morning. Seems like I started my day with the wrong foot. Or was I just too stressed from Pinoy Teens Online’s downtime?

anyways, the event kicked off and everything was set. My site was up and running we’ve got a laptop and internet connection, everything was just fine and how it was expected. But, the internet connection really sucks big time.

The Mindanao Blogggers Summit in general was a great event and venue for all bloggers around Mindanao to inspire them, make them realize and understand the beauty of our place. Convince them to promote our dearest Mindanao in a good way. Wash away the negative image that media has put on us and make them come to see, what they haven’t seen yet. The other, positive side of Mindanao.

I met quite a couple of familiar faces from other blogging events that I have attended. I was able to exchange a couple of words with the people  present and was able to listen to what the speakers had to share. Everything seemed to be interesting the way they engaged the people in attendance. And the event has almost convinced me to create a blog for Mindanao and contribute to the Mindanao Bloggers Community. Yet time and energy won’t allow me to. Since I’m a student yet who’s up for graduation.

Speaking about being a student, another student in attendance who was able to give a shout out was Mikko. One of the people I recall who flamed here on Pinoy Teens. I wonder how he made it up there and talk. Well, his school, University of the Philippines adds much to his reputation. Whilst I see it from the rear opposite. But that’s another blog post that I’ll be writing up.

For those who are really wondering why I said that and are looking for answers well, a couple of months ago, when I was still a newbie in the blogoshpere and was a little voice among the others (I still believe I am one), I was so bad and got a very interesting article from ABC-CBN which I wanted to share to my few readers, unfortunately, I forgot to add the foot notes of the post (credits bah) (it’s the first time I left them out). A few hours when I checked on my dashboard the incoming links and my comments I saw a link from his site to mine and a comment on my blog.

He wrote a post about me copying content from other websites and labled the post On Posting Copyrighted Material. Wouldn’t it be nicer if he would have just left a comment and reminded me about it? Being someon who’s quite old in the blogoshpere that time, it shouldn’t be a problem. Unless…. – Princess Quin

The morning and afternoon sessions were completed. (parang WordCamp Saint Benilde, may sessions sessions?! XD) Sachimi dinner was next on the list, oh wait, Kuya Lyle sets us all up with his Mr Almighty prank!

Heading back to the hall, I was left alone by my buddies because I was yet blogging again. Though I wasn’t all alone, the band scheduled to perform later on was rehearsing their numbers.

After the tasty dinner, Party time was on again (just like at Digital Filipino Club) but just a little bit more wacky!

Hope to see more people during the 3rd Summit here in Mindanao and all the objectives set for the next  months to be achieved. Let’s altogether witness the positive change here in Mindanao and all of us contribute to the development that everyone dreams of..

I would love to share even more from the event which I can’t do with just so little time left. Hopefully, I can finish my post about the trp last Sunday with all the pictures and link love to all those I have met. Let this be all for now and good night!

ps: Thanks to Kuya Avel. More thanks link love, photos, stories about the whole Gensan experience coming up soon!