5 April 2011
Singapore is hot
Getting here was easy, once I got on the plane.
Hong Kong airport tried to catch me out again, and it did catch out a lot of people, hence my flight was 30 minutes delayed while they tried to find the passengers.
My plane was due to leave from gate 47, near the end of one of the kilometre long arms.
About 30 minutes before boarding, it changed to gate 3, all the way back to the central hub, then most of the way up another arm.
I am not exaggerating, its a 1.5 km walk.
Now they had plenty of announcements, and an army of Cathay Pacific workers started wandering around with signs etc. But if you only spoke say, French, German, Thai or anything not English or a form of Chinese, you would be caught out.
Also if you were old, wearing stupidly high heels etc, you wouldnt be pleased at this additional walk being forced upon you.
My plane flight was smooth, 3.5 hours, I watched a Harry Potter movie, which was hard to hear and see, so I dont really know what happened, it kind of ended in the middle.
Singapore airport, constantly voted the best in the world, was very efficient. Despite everyones predictions that you will get arrested, beaten with the cane then executed for long hair and whatever else, there was no drama at all.
In fact my bags werent even checked, I have xanax tablets for sleeping pills when I go to England, I only remembered I had them when we landed and they tell you about the death penalty!
Also no one was interested in all the computing devices and the contents of their hard drives, I have heard stories that they take womens fashion magazines off of people because they are deemed to be pornography.
The airport of course links to the subway, and buying an RFID card is simple. The subway is great, but seems slow compared to Taipei, Kaohsiung and Hong Kong. The stations are also outdoors which is odd cause its so damn hot.
Finding my hotel was also easy, its huge, its an Ibis, its exactly like any Ibis, as such its a bit disappointing after the fancy hotels I had in the other countries for cheaper.
I was pretty tired so just wandered around my local area, there are a lot of tourists, and everyone seems wealthy, so many fancy cars, I saw 3 Lamborghinis in the space of 10 minutes.
Its also unusual to be back in a place where the majority of the population is overweight. This was very apparent especially on the subway, Indian men are all enormous here!
And It soon became apparent that the main hobby in Singapore is eating, everything is a big food court or restaurants.
Great mix of cuisines, more than Hong Kong, as here theres also Indonesian, Malaysian and of course lots of Indian foods.
Not sure what I am doing tomorrow yet, I have 5 full days here, so plenty of time to pace myself in the heat and humidity.
Heres my plane at gate 3, a massive distance from the original gate.
Inside the unmanned shuttle train that goes around Singapore Changi airport.
And might as well just keep photographing the inside of trains, even though they are all pretty much the same.
I was looking for dinner around 9pm, and most of the hawker style food courts were winding down and cleaning, so I gave them a miss for tonight.
This is out the back of my hotel, its a pedestrian area, but strangely dark.
Nearby is an electronics mall, I think this must be for catching tourists, as it was very expensive. Much more expensive than the airport when I arrived for example.
I had dinner in a pretty fancy place, yes more dumplings, but also my favourite long beans in chilli and shrimp paste. These beans were the best I have ever had.
The nightmarkets are a lot more westernized than Taiwan, this ones even air conditioned. They still had food on sticks, but nothing weird.
And fear not, next door to my hotel is a bubble tea joint. I was trying to figure out the currency to pay, and the girl says 'oh, you just get here?' and I said yes, she said 'where you come from?', and being clever I said 'Taiwan'.
She told me the tea is much better in Taiwan, they invented it.
Hers was pretty good though!