MozTour Goes to Zamboanga City

Team Mozilla Philippines made a day trip to Zamboangao City
(some 860 kilometers south of Manila) to attend the first local community meet
up organized by our fellow ReMo (Mozilla Rep) RJ Ian Sevilla.

Mozilla Philippines Community Manager Eusebio “Jun” Barrun,
Jr., Jean Austin Rodriguez, Gervin
Rodriguez, and myself took the first Philippine Airlines (PAL) out
of Manila to Zamboanga City. We left RPLL (NAIA) at around 0450H and touched
down RPMZ (Zamboanga International Airport) past 0615H.

All of us four were first timers in that Philippine region, so
we ceased the opportunity have our pictures taken at the airport tarmac and in
front of the terminal building …

The event is scheduled to start by 0900H at the E-Learning
Center – a vocational and training school offering short term courses on
different IT fields.

Jun started the meet up with a presentation on Mozilla for
WebGeeks. He also gave an overview of what the ReMo (Mozilla Reps Program) is,
as well as the Mozilla Student Reps Program – as majority of the attendees are
still students.

After Jun (since there was still time left), I gave the
attendees a brief overview on the Localization Efforts of the community and also
made a run of my Boot to Gecko (B2G) presentation.

After my slot, Jean gave a small talk about the use of Open
Source and your Awesome Carreer (after school) …

We wrapped up the event past 12 noon. Here’s the group pic with
the attendees …

The group, together with some members of the local Mozilla
Community in Zamboanga headed to town proper at a restaurant called Bar Code to
have our sumptuous lunch. While we were ordering at the counter, we noticed that
their POS (Point Of Sales) system is actually a web app running on Mozilla
Firefox (check this Twitter post from Jean).

Since our return flight to Manila will be early in the evening,
we took the opportunity to roam around the city and visit some of the tourist
spots like the National Museum Zamboanga City …

… the very first time that I saw an actual Vinta (locals call
it the “lepa-lepa”) – a traditional boat with a colorful sail …

… of course, a Mozilla Philippines event will not be complete
without our “traditional” jump shot:

Our flight back to MNL got delayed for almost an hour. We were
tired, but we’re all very happy to share the good news about Mozilla to the
local community at Zamboanga City.

Until next time …

To the Mozilla Zamboanga Community:
Thank you
very much for your very warm hospitality and interest in helping make a better
web!

Note: This blog post was originally posted at BobReyes.com