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 some grub.
One thing it’s taken a while for us to get used to is the amount of security presence and checkpoints around the Cebu city area. Our hotel’s vehicle entry point has bomb scanners at its guard post, and visitor luggage is X-rayed before one can enter. There is also a manned security guard post at the side entrance we use to walk to SM City Cebu. And the mall itself 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 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 was having a sweet corn shaker fries promotion 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 such a short span of time: an automated ordering kiosk that could not generate item invoices and did not show correct food inventories, a manned counter that was unable to check received orders — it should have been a simple matter to match the most recent order against the paid value shown 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 the dining tables.
Well, at least the fries and burgers were good.
A flustered lunch experience over, we returned to the hotel, checked out, and ordered a Grab ride (~450p / SGD10) for the 20-minute journey to Mactan-Cebu International Airport. The airport wasn’t busy, with just the SQ check-in row seeing activity. Since we’d already done our Internet check-in, processing at the counter was quick, and 15 minutes after arriving at the airport we had cleared immigration and were at the boarding gate at 12:45PM — almost three full hours before our 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 we pretty much took things very easily — content to just chill, vegetate, and watch TV in the comfortable hotel room. We enjoyed great weather for the most part, had no significant unexpected spending, none of us suffered injuries, health ailments, or broken bones, and — importantly — I didn’t get nausea during the numerous boat and vehicle rides over the course of the trip.
The one bit where I think the experience could have been better is the snorkeling. Yesterday, while writing my reflection posts for this trip, I started looking at possible short trips to nearby places specifically for snorkeling. Perhaps Tioman for a short 4–5 day vacation? I saw a Minton neighbor’s Facebook 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 final one reflecting on the trip. More to come soon!