The Cebu Provincial Government is working on a really tight deadline to finish the Cebu International Convention Center (CICC) in time for the city’s hosting of an Asean summit this December.

Capitol had long planned for an international convention center and even held an architectural design competition for a megadome but the project was stalled during the time of then governor Pablo Garcia because the Provincial Board refused to approve it.

The project has already been approved and awarded to a contractor this year. It will be built on a lot in the reclamation area in Mandaue City. And there’s the rub. It is located in a spot in Mandaue City notorious for its suffocating stink.

If you’re on your way to Cebu City from Mandaue, here’s how you can spot the site of the megadome.

1. Pass by the reclamation area road and when you spot the city’s sports complex (look for Mayor Thadeo Ouano’s huge photograph) start taking really deep breaths.

2. When you reach the Welcome to New Mandaue City marker, time you’re breathing carefully, you only need to do three more in-and-out deep breathing cycles.

3. When you spot another of Mayor Ouano’s pictures, this time on a billboard on waste segregation, hold your breathe.

4. When you start gasping for air, look to your right, the area fenced off with WTCI signs is the area where the megadome or CICC will be built.

The stink in the area is so suffocating it shuts off all your other senses. You see, you feel, you hear and you taste nothing but the nauseating, enveloping stink.

You’d start seeing a toxic cloud even if it isn’t there and you’d be paranoid for the next few hours that the stink has stuck into your clothes, into the very fiber of your being. The smell is so bad that anything built on that site will be a monument to stink.

To be fair to Mayor Ouano, though, the stink isn’t as bad in the past three days but the difference is only by a few degrees. It’s still nauseating and you can still taste it.