HOW MANY DIPLOMATS DOES IT TAKE TO SCREW IN A LIGHTBULB...?

... just one, but there'll be 28 outcome documents about it.

(ba-da-bing!)

Thank you, I'm here all week.

Actually, I might be here all year. My foreign travel cold-streak continues, and it looks to go on for quite a while. Fortunately, the big diplo-events seem to be headed over here: there was the ASEAN Summit, of course. And just recently concluded, the 1st Policy Consultations with Heads of Post, or P-CHOP for short.

(there was actually a conscious effort to call it Pol-Con instead, but people just liked saying P-CHOP out loud. Try it. P-CHOP! P-PCHOP! P-CHOP!)

(strange...suddenly, I'm very hungry)

Anyhoo, 70 of the country's ambassadors and consuls general from around the world gathered in one place for the first time ever. It was a grand alumni homecoming of sorts, only everyone came back as a success story. I mean, when you pre-print the name tags "Hi! I'm His/Her Excellency ___________ ", you don't expect to find any Romys or Michelles at the place.

So that leaves yours truly to bottom-feed at the event as a rapporteur (french for stenograph- er). This is actually much harder than it looks, because everyone had A LOT to say, each talk spawned at least five different forms of reports, and I don't have any touch-typing skills at all. Fortunately, there was a battery of batchmates and other junior DD's over there, sleek laptops in tow, who helped me out with everything from transcribing to choosing the right dinner fork.

Some random observations:

• I don't know if this is a fair comparison - given that P-CHOP involved top-tier government officials - but meetings of DD's absolutely kill meetings of LL's. I've been to many lawyer conferences, and the speakers usually sound like boring, pompous professors (as in fact, many of them are), the audience talks and leaves in the middle of speeches, and the open fora - oh, man. Every person comes up to the mike looking to promote himself rather than make a point. They drone on and on, keep looking left and right for validation, and constantly quarrel over who has the floor (one time, I saw an entire 30-minute question-and-answer session taken over by panyeros stepping over each other just to add lines to an already lame joke about a horse). On the other hand, the P-CHOP lectures were generally direct and concise (note to event organizers worldwide: get multiple speakers to talk for no more than 15 minutes each rather than have one speaker talk for more than an hour; the time limit creates a sense of urgency, like a coach entering a quarter down by double digits), the audience was quiet and attentive, and the open fora was refreshingly orderly and informative. Somehow, there was a good matching between what was being said and what needed to be heard (the only exception was one speaker who was feeling himself a little too much; his time was already up, but he had only just begun to recount how he singlehandedly saved the world).

• There was a disconnect at P-CHOP between how we DD's saw things and how some media reported them (the thing about the news report - which was printed as the large font banner headline, by the way - I thought the ambassador who brought up the subject did so as a straightforward request, or as a wish list at worst, rather than as a complaint or rant; anyway, I didn't see any more reporters let in at the meeting after that).

• Call me biased or unqualified, but I'm beginning to think that Manila has the best hotel buffets in the world. The variety alone is superior - not just at any given meal, but also from day to day. And whoever thought of setting up an omellette and a crepe station separately needs to be fast-tracked for sainthood.