My other brother-in-law is a New York Giants fan. So much of a fan, in fact, that he woke up at 7 in the morning, eat breakfast, pack up his room, watch the first half of the Giants-Raiders game on ESPN starting at 9am local time, check out of his room at 10:30, jump in a taxi, race across Manila, and check into his other hotel room in time to see the end of the game. Now, admittedly, this was a game with playoff implications for his team, but still, it warrants mentioning as admirable dedication.
The rest of us were on a bit more leisurely schedule, and after our episodes of the night before, it was just as well that we took things more slowly. Nothing but fruit and bread for me for breakfast, and the wonderful Mrs. Dave had taken it upon herself to pack up our stuff while I was convalescing and moving my creaky-ass body around the bedroom last night like your average nonagenarian, so we had very little packing to do. We managed to load ourselves into taxis for the cross-town trip and ended up in room 735 a half-hour later or so.
And then, out came the tiles...because no visit to the Philippines would be complete without a Mrs. Dave Family Mahjong tournament.
Some families play a variety of games together, others sit in front of the TV, or go out to a movie, or sit around and have a drink together. My wife's family is a group of mahjong fiends, and I was indoctrinated into this very early on in our relationship. Hi, my name is Dave, and I'm a mahjong fiend too. Normally we play on a card table, but Manila hotel rooms (most hotel rooms in general, really) are lacking in the appropriate furniture. So we took an end table, Vince "borrowed" one from elsewhere on the floor, along with a conference room chair, we drapped a towel over it (to make the shuffling quieter), chipped in 400 pesos each (about 8 bucks), and the game was on.
Well, sorta. It was practically over as soon as it began, since Mrs. Dave proceeded to romp, winning six of the first eight games. Victor took the other two, then I began to creep toward respectability, but by the time her cousin Keith showed up with his big airport-going car - the same we arrived in, actually - she'd opened too much of a lead to overcome. We'd also had someone call from the front desk to say that a few people had complained about the noise coming from our room. Who would have thought that my first citation for hotel-based disorderly behavior would have come halfway around the world while playing a friendly game with my family?
Unfortunately our trip back home was not as cushy as the JFK-Hong Kong leg had been - the ticket agent who checked us in in Manila was a bit dense and impervious to Mrs. Dave's charms, so coach it was. In a bit of oddness, the flight that we'd gotten from Orbitz for San Francisco to Boston was taken out of service between when we bought the tickets and when we flew, so they changed our itinerary but didn't issue new tickets. We tried to resolve things in Hong Kong during the layover, but they were only able to have our baggage held in San Francisco. And a good thing, too - after our Hong Kong-San Francisco flight (miserable, thanks to the short guy in front of me putting his seat as far back as possible within 20 minutes of takeoff, crushing my kneecaps and rendering the tiny movie screen unviewable), we arrived amidst a heavy snowstorm. So heavy, in fact, that our San Fran-New York flight would have been delayed to the point that we would have missed our New York-Boston leg.
The American Airlines ticket agent called the United desk (and, irony of ironies, was put on hold for a good ten minutes!) to get us two "involuntary reroute" tickets on a direct flight, San Fran to Boston. We got in three hours early but had the chance to alert my co-worker, who gladly trekked down to Boston to pick us up. We got home around 7:30, immediately collapsed and woke up about 11 hours later. Our body clocks were out of whack for most of the week but I think we're finally starting to get back to normal...
But we're missing the 80-degree weather.
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