☀ In Anywhere Else: a day in paradise: the banquet

i recently made a 3-day trip back home to cebu and with how short the 3 days could be, i tried to squeeze in as many activities as i could and made sure my stay was worthwhile. although it was such an easy feat because my time was well spent with my dear ones and i didn't even care if i only caught up with sleep while on the road -- just to maximize my time.

about 5 hours of my limited there, breinn and i headed to shangri-la's and availed their one day use package. our wallets weren't big enough to accommodate an overnight stay in the 5-star resort in mactan so the one day use was already a sweet deal for us!

i'm even splitting our swift and abrupt experience into two posts so that i can rewind that moment in a longer span of time by reading two lengthy narratives.

after a short climb up shangri-la's driveway, our hired cab came into a halt in front of the resort's lobby half past 12 in the afternoon and we were greeted by the welcoming resort staff with bright and sincere smiles.

when we got our blue wristbands after payment, we headed straight to tides to avail our lunch which was included in the day use package. read on for more delectable parade of photos!

oh, don't be disappointed! this was only the prelude of the ultimate binge on good food. my first agenda was tossing some greens into this bowl, sprinkling generously some powdered cheese, putting a little bit of bacon and other fresh greens i fancied from the salad bar and then finally, topping it off with a vinaigrette dressing. yes, it tasted good as it looked!

it is unnecessary to state the obvious that this was breinn's plate. for the guy that he is, it's all about meat and rice! these were the grilled beef and salmon he overly adored the entire lunch. his plate was not interesting at all, with the grilled meat that did several appearances so, i didn't bother to take pictures of his plate after the above photo.

a trick when eating in a buffet is to eat in small portions! and the following two pictures were still my plates and i forgot if i had other few plates in between. while i was enjoying decorating my plate with other fancy food, breinn was happily devouring his favorite grilled meat. with how eager i was in my food experiments, i even took a small lump of blue cheese. it was my first time to try one and it bluntly tasted mold! breinn admonished me in disgust because i told him to eat a bit. haha! i was still able to finish off my blue cheese by piling other cheeses on top of it and putting it inside the bun. and i missed these olives in my garden salad! i should have roamed around first.

here are the rest of the banquet in tides. the cooks were a nice bunch of people who were very much willing to answer our curious queries.

not in the pictures were the indian food section where there was a selection of various roti prata, the noodle section, the grilled meat, the typical filipino viand and rice pair, and the seafood section which we only saw when we had devoured enough.

though the selections may not be as many compared to the buffets i had been to, the good food in tides was more than our happy stomachs could ask for.

if you enjoy sipping a hot tea after a filling meal, you would be grateful if you similarly find the prices of the drinks expensive. drinks are not included but you will get a free flowing of purified water but another free is this hot tea! we only found out about it when we got our bill with only breinn's iced lemon tea in the receipt. we say the drinks are expensive because a coke in can worth 150PHP is a price gone overboard in the philippines.