Happy Birthday Mom, Welcome Back Mom and Dad

After 3 months in Canada to spend time with my brother N's family, Mom and Dad are now back in Manila just in time for Mom's birthday!  We celebrated at our favorite Crossover Sunday buffet at the Dusit Thani. As usual, we stayed at the Umu Japanese restaurant, we even had our own room.  But of course everyone enjoyed the food of all of Dusit's restaurants.  We even finished 3 (or 4?) bottles of champagne/ wine which are part of the buffet.

Happy Birthday Mom, we're so glad to have you back here:-)

N, we miss you guys!

Travel Notes

Some interesting things that we learned during our last trip to Hong Kong were:

1.  The iPhone is indeed the best gadget in the world.  It is the only thing you need!  All our photos were taken by my trusty iPhone.  Although we brought a digital camera, we decided to leave it at the hotel after the first two days because we did not actually take it out from my handbag.  I got to  go around with a lighter bag.  Also, some malls are already free wi-fi zones in Hong Kong, thus I can easily log onto the internet while out of the hotel.  At the hotel, I got to use my iPhone for surfing while E used his MacBook Pro.

2.  The past few travels, we learned to bring drinks like bottled water and coke zero, and also some snack food.  However for this trip, one of the coke zero in cans got punctured while inside our Rimowa luggage.  We don't know how exactly this happened but it was a lesson learned.  Next time we have to put the cans in plastic bags.  Some of our clothes got wet that we had to wash the clothes in the hotel.

3.  Tod's ballerina shoes are the best travel shoes!  My feet pretty much held up all throughout the trip, plus, I get to be stylish too:-)  They are so worth it!  These shoes are now on sale at 25% discount in the Manila stores, which can be payable in 6 months.

Day 4 and Day 5: More of Shopping and Dining in HK

On our fourth day in HK, we tried the Teppanyaki restaurant at Food Republic in the Silvercord Arcade.  Photos are actually prohibited in the restaurant, took this photo just before the restaurant manager reprimanded me.  What's up with that?  Isn't it good PR to allow photos by customers while dining in their restaurant?  The food was good actually, we had the beef and seafood teppanyaki cooked right in front of us.

It was more of last minute shopping the rest of the day.   Over the past days, we had several items that we kept on hold before purchasing to allow us more time to think about whether we really wanted those items.  This was our deadline to decide on those items.  Here's E's photo with his new friend in one of the stores we visited:

Again, we found another coffee shop to rest our aching feet.  This was actually after we were shooed from sitting on the steps at the Ocean Terminal, where we rested after so much walking:  This was at the Cova Cafe.  We were wondering if this is a franchise of the Cova coffee shop in Milan.

We finally found a place to rest for free after more walking.  An outdoor lounge which is supposed to be a smoking area.  It was almost empty, probably because it was too cold to stay outdoors.  This was outside the Uniqlo store.

Of course a trip to HK would not be complete without a meal at Crystal Jade. We were however disappointed because there was no Hakaw.  

On our last day, we still had to have some dim sum.  This was at the Airport Food Court.