Michael Alfred V. Ignacio Where and when was your first trip outside of your home country? My first trip outside of the Philippines, alone, was when I left for Spain to take up my masters degree, back in 2002. I resigned from my work in San Miguel Corporation in Manila to pursue my degree in international business at the Universidad de Alicante in the Valencia region. Looking back, I actually do not know if I would be as brave now to do the same thing all over again. I enrolled in a course where the medium of instruction was purely in Spanish, armed with only my high school Spanish from St. Pius X Seminary and my own self-study a few months before I left for Spain. For the first two months, I could barely understand a word of what the professors where saying in class with their dizzyingly fast Castilian Spanish, and I thought I would fail my subjects ... until I realized, even my classmates from Latin America also had about the same challenges in comprehending the professors. After abo...
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” - James Michener