Point to note: the line-of-sight distance between Mactan-Cebu International Airport and Radisson Blu Cebu — the property we’re staying in for the first night — is not nearly the actual distance you’d need to travel to get from the airport to the hotel.
Our Grab ride took 25 minutes in moderate traffic on a Saturday afternoon, and cost 465P (about SGD11). The traffic situation reminded me of Hanoi: with vehicles moving between lanes in close proximity, and motorbikes weaving and squeezing in and out. Like the Vietnamese city too, horns were used very sparingly, and only to alert drivers — not as a means of aggression or annoyance as is common nowadays in Singapore.
We dropped off our luggage at the Radisson Blu Cebu, set up what we immediately needed to — basically quick charges of our key electronic gadgets — before heading out to explore SM City Cebu, a mall that is literally across the road from the hotel: we exit the hotel, walk for 10 seconds to a pedestrian crossing, cross it, and we’ll arrive.
I’d read earlier that this mall is one of Cebu island’s most popular, and I can see why: the mall has everything. There’s a wide range of F&B outlets that includes food courts, pop-up carts, cafe joints, the usual fast food chains like McDonald’s and Jollibee, and restaurants offering different international cuisines, including Italian, Japanese, and Korean.
At the basement level also sits a large supermarket. There’s also a mid-sized Decathlon that looks and feels like any Decathlon store in Singapore, and part of another floor that’s devoted to all manner of electronic gadgets. And finally, there are a number of stores that are familiar to any Singaporean, including The Body Shop, Gong Cha, Dunkin Donuts, MiniSo, Uniqlo, BreadTalk, Starbucks, and Watsons — and signboards also show that Tim Ho Wan and Hawker Chan are coming in August. Before long, we expect to also see Popular, Bata, and Ya Kun Toast. LOL.
The two ladies in the household were thrilled to see bubble tea outlets offering drinks at approximately half the price they’d pay in Singapore.
The sprawling mall seems to have different wings, and it’d probably take us a few more visits to get our bearings right. Thankfully, we have three reservations at Radisson Blu Cebu, so we’d be returning to the property two more times in the coming days.
We kept our first day short and retired back to the hotel in the early evening to enjoy the room. It’d be a long Day 02 tomorrow!