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More pics after the jump. Continue Reading »

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Answers to the questions you’re probably asking:

• I got the tie from MBK at 149 baht. Cool, eh?
• Yes, that’s the same pinstripe shirt that I wore to Square Off earlier this year.
• Yes, that’s my favorite pair of pants.
• The white patch on my left chest is an ATHEISTA sticker.

One day into the tournament and it’s clear that Assumption University will do everything to ensure an excellent Worlds tournament for everyone in attendance. Debates won’t start until the December 29 (Day 3), but the event definitely started with a bang with a nice ice breaker party in the King’s Court – the amphitheater situated in the middle of the three residential buildings were the debaters are staying for the competition.

Here are the pictures from Day One!

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Pardon the audio.

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Our contingent is now in Thailand. Registration will start in a few hours.

Thank you for all the support and words of encouragement. I’ll definitely give it my all to do everyone (my self included) proud. You won’t have to wait for my post-Worlds entries. There’s free internet in the dorm rooms. And yeah, the dorm rooms are as nice and cozy as they look in the pictures. I can’t believe this room is a dormitory room! The rooms here are comparable to a very good three-star hotel! Crazy good, I’m telling you.

Assumption University is a great looking school. The buildings evoke a certain degree of awe that no educational edifice in the Philippines could match. And I’m not the only one who thinks that way. This school hosts students from no less than 77 nations.

We’re really tired – and our day is about to start. Ugh.

Here are the pics. More to come soon.

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The Worlds Universities Debating Championship first appeared as blip on Atheista back in August 10. I was being my old beggar self asking for any alms that anyone would want to give me. Those days, I saw going to the Worlds as an uphill battle and as something that was clearly going to require a lot of luck and breaks. Luckily, things did fall into place and now, I’m a mere eleven hours from boarding the flight that would take me to the host city of the Worlds – Bangkok, Thailand.

I would like to thank the countless (read: 2) bloggers who contributed financially for this project. If I had a soul, I would have sold it to the two of you. They would stay anonymous for the time being. I’m sure droves of desperate mendicants like me would crowd them in no time should their identities be revealed.

Thank you to everyone who left comments, twits and other words of encouragement. I’ve printed them all out in nice pink stationary so I could look at them when I’m feeling emo in Thailand.

This is it people!

Thank you for being part of this experience.

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WITH ALL OF THIS ALREADY SAID, I’m passing the baton to

Benj the MD/Master-Debater…

I usually don’t do memes, but since this came from Dr. Ian Gomez from the Department of Community Medicine, I think I’m pretty much expected to answer this lest I  want to be subjected to the consequences. It seems like a pretty decent set of questions so I guess it wouldn’t be that detrimental to fill this one out. As an  added treat, I’ll be very sincere and frank. LOL

How long have you been blogging?

If posting a log on a website is tantamount to blogging, then I first started blogging in 2001. I was a kid having fun with WYSIWYG webpage editors who just kept on updating and redoing his page on Tripod. Of course, the ‘log’ part wasn’t really the selling point of the site. I’m willing to bet that people like Jon and Carlo were suckered into viewing this site back in those days.

Real blogging started for me when I signed up for my a Tabulas blog back in 2003. After a couple of uneventful years, I went on an even more uneventful break from blogging. Back in March 2006 though, I signed up for WordPress and that got me back into the groove. After almost 10 months in WordPress, I moved to MyJournal to have greater control of what my page would look like. Continue Reading »

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