Our flight home to Singapore was departing Mactan-Cebu International Airport at 3:40PM, and check-out at the Radisson Blu Cebu was at noon. The most convenient place to get lunch was still SM City Cebu which unfortunately only opens at 10AM. So, we took our time to slowly pack, tidy up our room, then headed out to get grub.
One thing it’s taken a while for us to get used to is the amount of security presence and check-points around the Cebu city area. Our hotel’s vehicle entry point has bomb scanners at its guard post, x-ray scans all visitor luggage before one can get in, and there is also a manned security guard post at the side entrance we use to walk to SM City Cebu. And the mall itself also has its own security guard posts where, yep, our bags also get checked and we get scanned.
Our plan was to take an hour for lunch, then return back to the hotel to check-out. We figured that the fastest, and safest F&B option would be McDonald’s. No, it’s not as though the adults in this family are huge fans of their fare [the kids in comparison are!], but it was just as well – since McDonald’s Cebu is having a sweet corn shaker fries thing going on. Our lunch experience at McDonald’s Cebu City turned out to be pretty bad. The Google review I posted – the daughter quipped that I was raging as I thumbed through the phone keyboard – is below.
The staff were apologetic, but gosh, there’s no excuse for goofing up so much in a short span of time: an automated ordering kiosk that could not churn item invoices, and did not show correct food inventories, a manned counter that was unable to check received orders – it should had been a simple matter to match the most recent order against paid value that I had on the credit card receipt, swapping one of my food items without getting our consent first, and finally, not checking for completeness of the delivered order. And to top it off, a restaurant that had roaches around dinner tables.
Well, at least the fries and burgers were good.
A flustered experience over lunch over, we returned back to the hotel, checked-out, and ordered a Grab ride (~450p/SGD10) for the 20 minute ride to Mactan-Cebu International Airport. The airport wasn’t busy, with just the SQ check-in row seeing activity. And since we’d already done the Internet Check-in, processing at the check-in row was fast, and 15 minutes after getting to the airport, we’d cleared immigration and were at the boarding gate at 12:45PM: almost three full hours before the 3:40PM flight. Plenty of time for me to write closing blog posts, like this one!
This has been a great trip: we had busy days for 7 out of the 11 days, and at the tail end of the trip pretty much took it very easily and were contended to just chill, vegetate, and watch TV in the comfortable hotel room. We enjoyed great weather for the most part, we didn’t get any significant unexpected spending, none of us suffered injuries, health ailments, broken bones, and – importantly – I didn’t get nausea in the numerous boat and vehicle rides over the trip.
The one bit that I think the experience could had been better is the snorkeling trip. And yesterday while writing my reflection posts for this trip, I started looking at possible short trips to other nearby places for snorkeling. Perhaps Tioman for a short 4-5 day vacation? I saw a Minton neighbor’s FB posts about his Tioman trip happening right now, and not only are the waters as pristine as what we’ve seen here in Cebu, there seems to be a lot more coral life.
Either way, there are four more blog posts planned for this trip: the first describing our itinerary as it was operationalized, a second on equipment, a third on drone videography, and a last one reflecting on this trip. More to come soon!