Category: Outside

  • Hyatt Regency Newport Beach

    Hyatt Regency Newport Beach

    My parents came from Perú to Los Angeles for our wedding, and as they were planning to stay for a week afterwards, I thought this could be time spent relaxing together and catching up. We booked the Hyatt Regency Newport Beach with Chase points, and asked our in-laws for help with a Guest of Honor booking to benefit from their Globalist status.

    We got one Two-Double Bed Room and One-King Bed Room for two nights. Rooms got upgraded to balcony bedrooms each. Somehow, even though both rooms were booked by the person with Globalist, only one room was marked in Hyatt’s systems as Guest of Honor, (to my wife’s Hyatt account) and the other one was listed as a regular booking. (under my Hyatt account, which has Explorist) We tried to fix the issue by talking to the Hotel manager and Hyatt concierge, but both sides were seeing everything normally. (Concierge was seeing 2 GoH. Hotel was seeing 1 GoH). We had 1 car so parking was good. (Otherwise it would be $50/night) During check-in we asked whether it would be possible for all four people to have free breakfast, and the front desk staff after juggling around it said that while they couldn’t grant Globalist benefits to the second room, the GoH room technically had breakfast credits for “2 adults and 2 children”, so it would be enough for all 4 of us. I think this was the extra adjustment the staff did to meet our ask.

    Breakfast was a la carte through the hotel’s SHOR Restaurant (I think? same space) and it was pretty impressive. We charged everything including the tip to the GoH room and it was covered up to about $110 per day, and I think we went a bit over and paid about $5-$10 which showed up in the room charge as “breakfast gratuity”. Egg benedicts, salmon toasts, french toasts.. it was delicious.

    The hotel is only 3 floors tall and spreads across a pretty wide area. There are three pools, each surrounded by a cluster of guest room buildings.

  • Wedding favors

    Wedding favors

  • Hurricane Hilary

    Hurricane Hilary

    • Transform OC social
    • Waiting for medical clinial trial appointment, and in the meantime I found better seats in this “UCLA Clinic” lounge so I sat there. Turned out that it was an Ob/Gyn clinic.
    • Chinatown & Little Tokyo night. There was a mysterious circle thing in the ground of the Chinatown Station with 62 chinese characters with virtues (“community”, “peace”, “Sovereignty”, “harmonize”, etc, that we couldn’t figure out. If it’s the years (十二支), it’s supposed to be 60..
    • Cajun Chicken, Corn & Barley Bowl with Pickled Peppers & Sour Cream: i’m pretty sure this is Korean fusion
    • Christine at Harmony Toluca Lake
    • Hurricane Hilary. There’s been an interesting storm of opinions on reddit with someone claiming it had a significant chance of becoming a major storm due to global warming, followed by a rebuttal. The back and forth arguments got out of hand, and someone else did a recap of how the first claim was fearmongering.
    • DuoLingo Diamond
  • Escalator Repairs

    Escalator Repairs

  • Barbie

    Barbie