17th year anniversary at Crowne Plaza Hotel, Dinner at Pizza Hut Bistro and a little bit of shopping at Greenhills

For our 17th anniversary of being together, Chea opted to celebrate it with an overnight stay at Crowne Plaza Hotel in Ortigas Center.

It's almost a daily fixture in my life as I pass by it every working day for the last 12 years. I've been inside it once for a fashion show, and I haven't been there since. So this will be the first time I get to stay there.

As usual, Chea got all the work done with the help of her favorite travel agency. So around 1pm of May 24, 2014, Chea, Tita Fe, Thirdy and myself headed off to Ortigas, but after a brief stop at the Garden of the Divine Word Columbarium.

We arrived at Crowne Plaza at around 2pm, got the car parked by a valet, and proceeded to the reception desk to get checked in. The reception area of the Crowne Plaza isn't as imposing as other hotels, but the ceiling is higher than the newer, more modern hotels.

Try to find the wifey if you can

Area to the right of the reception. Escalator takes you up to the 2nd floor where the Seven Corners restaurant is located.

A bellhop helped us with our luggage, put them on a trolley and gave us a stub. After that, we just forgot about the luggage as they will deliver it to our room later.

Main entrance view from the reception area.

Thirdy by the elevators.

After Chea checked in, we walked to the elevator and went up to the 11th floor. We were billeted in room 1111.

That's our room

The beds

We were able to get a single room unit, but it was quite spacious. It had two double sized beds (or were they queen sized beds?) with about five feet of space from the foot of the beds to the wall with a long desk.

Not much clutter. I like it.

That long desk has a vanity mirror and legspace to accommodate a chair so you can do some desk work. It has drawers with glasses and some food in it as well. There was a drawer that hides a personal ref full of drinks and on the far end of the table, sits an LCD TV. It has cable and that's it. Nothing fancy except for a power up screen displaying the name of the hotel.

There's a rather roomy closet for all your clothes, which also contains a personal safe deposit box.

The comfort room is also rather big. The sink has enough space around it to put whatever you need to bring into the bathroom. I actually bring our ipad whenever I need to do a number two. The vanity mirror lines the entire length of the sink, so you'll always be conscious of what you look like naked. Lol.

There's a bathtub if you prefer to relax while taking a long, soapy bath. And there's a shower as well, surrounded by see through glass if you prefer taking your bath that way.

Bath tub. Pretty clean and does its job.

Enclosed shower

Shower's pretty good. Warm water never changed temperature even with me taking a long shower. Drainage is a concern though as there's about an inch of water pooling around the shower area.

Thirdy by the window. He spent a lot of time there watching people swimming in the pool.

Wide open view

Back in the room, there's a nice view provided by floor to ceiling windows, covered by thick curtains. The view is the Holiday Inn Hotel and other buildings around the area. You can also see the pool below. The nice part about it (or bad, depending on your situation), is that the people can see you (11th floor at least) from the pool area.

Thirdy keeps staying by the window looking below and keeps on pointing and shouting "pool".

When Chea and Tita Fe took Thirdy for a swim at the pool, they could see me by the window watching them from our room.

Thirdy trying out the chair by the window

A little bit later, I told Chea that I was hungry so I was gonna hit the mall. Chea on her part, was getting Thirdy ready for the pool.

So after a minute, I went out of the room, took the elevator to the 3rd floor, and walked along the hall way past Bar One, to the connecting area to Robinson's Galleria. This exits out to the area where the MotherCare and OshKosh stores are.

I was thinking that I need some drinks and junk food during the night, so I decided to head down to the supermarket. After buying a few items, I went to Jollibee to buy a burger meal, and to a Mister Donut to buy a box of smidgets. After that, I went up back to our room.

By the time I arrived, Chea, Thirdy and Tita Fe were already at the pool area. As I mentioned, I was able to watch them from our room. Chea also saw me and waved at me, and told Thirdy. I'm not sure if Thirdy saw me, but he was waving from the pool as well.

Before long, they went back to our room to rest for a while. Around 6pm, we decided to go out for dinner. We did a quick search for restos on Robinson's upper ground floor. We wanted to try out Papa John's but we were greeted by their staff that one of their AC units was out of order, and I could feel that it was indeed a bit warm, so we decided to look elsewhere.

At the top floor, we ended up at Pizza Hut bistro. It seems to me that Robinson's Galleria lacks upscale restaurant selections.

Chea ordered a menu that was around 400 pesos (or was it 300?). It included a small pan pizza (six slices), two plates of chicken with rice, a salad, and two drinks.

The place is small, with very small spaces between tables. It was also a bit warm being on the top floor and probably with the heat coming from the kitchen. They don't have kiddie chairs, but they do have booster seats.

Extremely dry chicken

A bit later the food came and it was very disappointing. The chicken was very dry. It was like they had been cooked earlier (if not yesterday), and was reheated in a microwave oven.

Their typical pizza

The pizza is their typical pizza dish. Their thick slice is soft and chewy, and also a bit oily. I wasn't able to try out the salad.

After eating, I went to buy tickets for X-Men Days of Future Past as it was the first week of showing and I've been itching to watch it as I'm a hardcore X-men fan since i started collecting the comic books back in 1992 I think. I picked the second to the last showing, at 10:00pm. We wanted to make sure that Thirdy was already asleep before we leave, so he wouldn't be running after us.

After buying the tickets and paying the bill, we went back to our room. We stayed there whiling the night away watching cable and dozing off a few times. At around 9:30pm, Chea and I got ready and went out back to the mall.

Since it was almost 10pm, the main connecting doors at the 3rd floor was already closed. However, there was another way back in to the mall. So from the connecting area, we walked around a few corners, and into the elevator area of Holiday Inn (I think). We took the elevator a floor up, got off, and then walked to the connecting area.

We asked the security if it would still be open at past 12mn, since that was the end of the movie, and we're told that the main glass doors would be closed, but there was an access door that was always open that we could use.

So we went to the cinema, waited for a few minutes while the place was being tidied up. Soon after, it was a pure 2 hour bliss of x-men action. We waited until the end of the credits that showed a scene that would lead up to the next X-film, X-Men Apocalypse.

After the movie we went the way back, and we found the door that the security personnel mentioned, and retraced our steps to our room.

The next day, I woke up around 7am, with Thirdy, Chea and Tita Fe already awake. We decided to take breakfast already to avoid the crowd, so we went down to Seven Corners. I'll blog about it on another entry.

After breakfast, we went back to our room. I took a nap while Chea gave Thirdy a bath in the bath tub. I woke up at around 11am with everything packed and ready to go.

We called up a bellhop a little before 12nn. He took our luggage ahead of us, while we checked the rest of our belongings. We then went down, checked out, and then got into our car and headed out.

But before going home, we went to Greenhills Shopping Center first as I was still in the lookout for a rashguard and a new pair of sunglasses.

We were able to buy a rash guard for 280 pesos, and I managed to see three knock off sunglasses that looked good on me. Unfortunately, each of them was around 1,500 pesos, which I found a bit surprising. Fakes at that price? I know the originals are around 11,000 pesos, but come on, really? 1,500 pesos?

So after three hours (I didn't notice the time. I must've been having fun shopping for sunglasses), we decided to leave for home.

And since we haven't had eaten since breakfast, we decided to have a very late lunch. Along the way home, we dropped by UP Town Center to see if they have newly opened restaurants. I'll blog about it another time.

Anyway, the stay at Crowne Plaza Hotel was excellent. Our travel agency gave us a very good deal, and Crowne Plaza turned out to be pretty ok as well. There's wifi but we didn't bother since we have data connection on our phones. The room is spacious, the staff are very courteous and helpful. And the best part about it, is that it's connected directly to a mall. So there are a lot of things you can do if you ever get bored in your room during the day.

However, if you want to do something from midnight until the early morning, the closest area is Metrowalk, which is a bit of a walk (pun intended). But that should be fine. Even at night, there's still activity in Ortigas area given the glut of call center companies so it's a bit safe to walk around.