Best Pizza Hut Ever

As we left beautiful Hangzhou, we stopped by a Buddhist temple for a while then took the bus ride back to Shanghai. As expected, 3 hours. More actually, but then that also includes the journey to the airport, where a few people in the group are to disembark and return to the Philippines. We chose to stay an additional day for shopping purposes.

Usually I wouldn't elaborate on the bus trip back but here's basically how it went: one of the people on the bus actually brought a final cut of the Filipino indie movie he produced starring Piolo Pascual (Chopsuey) and while somewhat reminiscent of Rachel Getting Married the bus isn't the most suitable place for these movies. At one point we got down the bus to buy a little lunch and go to the restroom while the movie was playing so really there's not much point in pursuing its core explanation. Things got a bit annoying however because whipped out videos of himself for everyone else to watch.

Of all the egotistical...

As ridiculous as it is to bring Chiang Kai into an already Communist country, the bothersome boredom of those babbling blokes finally got me inclined to play Trauma Center 2 for the DS. It's not good to play a notoriously difficult surgery game when a bus is going up and down but hey, it's a fun, sadistic twist.

We checked in Downtown Holiday Inn (of which there are two in Shanghai... we got down the wrong one and were forced to drag all luggage down and up the underground PARKING LOT with no concierge people to assist) and proceeded to Nanjing road for, yes, shopping.

Department stores are abundant in this part of town, and at night it is plenty lively. We did have to take the subway there (which isn't as efficient as Hong Kong's MTR) but it's not much of a hassle.

Some shopping and relatively expensive jackets later, we got hungry. When you want to find something different in China (meaning something other than the Chinese food we were consuming the past few days), it's either crowded Korean barbeques or American fastfood chains. It's quite fun to scrutinize the differences between McDonald's menus here and at home base anyway, but we wanted something better than McDonald's, so we took to Pizza Hut.

And what a pleasant surprise it was to discover that, as usual, the selections and service made available at the China branch is superior to the Philippine counterpart by a hundredfold. It doesn't take forever to get your beverages, pasta and pizza. But the beverages sure are mighty expensive though, but maybe I'm overreacting because the Philippine Pizza Hut resto had high beverage prices as well. Well, I guess the Chinese drinks are more unconventional so they're worth a shot.

We ordered some baked rice, a bowl of pasta and, of course, a pizza. Not just any pizza. It was a pizza propped with a little amount of cheese, some Japanese mayonnaise, wasabi, octopus meat, bell peppers, onions and topped with some smoked salmon. You won't ever find anything that comes close back at home. They don't skimp much on the ingredients either, so while kind of expensive (as is common with the Pizza Hut branches anywhere in the world), this one was evidently worth every penny. After that, we were done.

It started raining. Time to go back to the hotel.

Just when I thought the Holiday Inn was not on par with other hotels with the area in terms of modernity, I find out that the alarm near the bed was actually an iPod dock as well, so it's one of those alarms where you could have the iPod play music as an alarm sound. Nice.

Well, gotta turn in for now. It's midnight and we gotta wake up at 6. More shopping, then it's back to the red eye home.

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