November 8, 2024

8 thoughts on “Our Balikbayan Journey 2019 – 1

  1. Hello John, Hope you and Lita are well. I assume that you still live across the street fron Ciriaco.

  2. We stayed at the Go Hotel at the mall last year when I arrived the next day from Seattle. My wife departed the day before me.

    We stayed there for two days before renting an entire GrandTours Can non stop to Calbayog.

    I departed back to Seattle before my wife and stayed again at the House Hotel for a very early a.m. flight to Manila.

    Go Hotel is OK, AC is great. It’s OK.

    I like that it’s in the Mall for shopping and eating at Shakey’s Pizza.

    Our last trip out of Cebu to Incheon, we had a 9 hour layover. They had areas where you could sleep or rest area with recliners.

    I think having to do this every year sucks having to leave for one day.

    In the future, if we decide to stay beyond a year, we will look at other visa options.

    Balikbayan is the way to go for us right now as my wife might stay for 3-4 months while I might head back after 45 days.

    1. Yeah, it was an okay hotel, nothing special. The main reason we stayed there was that it was connected to the mall. I hear that Incheon has one of the best waiting areas of all airports, we’ll find out someday. When you leave on balikbayan, it doesn’t have to be for just one day. We just do it because we don’t have a lot of money to spend. We’ll have more after my social security kicks in. Maybe we’ll be able to stay a few nights someplace and be able to actually see one of these great cities.

  3. Good to here you and Lita safe after overnight trip John. I hate hanging around airports. I miss the good old days when you only had to show up 30 minutes before flight and still had to wait around to board. The wife and I stayed at the Go Hotel also a couple of years ago and she thinks we only paid 1200 pesos for a room but I was not with her when she checked in. I was standing out side smoking and keeping eye on vehicle and luggage while she and sister went in. The next morning after arriving at Airport found out PAL had canceled are flight to Cebu with connecting flight to Los Angles. They wanted to book us on flight to Manila and spend night before flight to LAX but when they said they would not pay for Hotel and transportation the wife started raising Hell with them. After several hours of calls they finally booked flight to Manila even though we had to hang around airport most of day and got us on Flight to Los Angles which was leaving early morning which also meant hanging around another Airport have the night. Finally made it home a day late.

    1. You’d think that they would want to help out their passengers as much as possible with all the airline competition. I was scared our flight from Clark to Singapore would be canceled. It was our last day to be in the PI under balikbayan and the Immigration guy did notice, as I figured he would. It was cool though, we had a laugh about it. Changi Airport in Singapore has some nice places to rest and they don’t mind you sleeping there. They even have a “Snoozing Lounge”. I think that we will not HAVE to do anymore of the only staying at the airport trips.

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