Quick look into the future posts
Recently, we’ve had many travel difficulties and had to change plans in a whiplash fashion. However, we did make it through Palau, Guam, and escaped Manila (luckily). I will post about them soon. The blog is approximately 2 weeks behind the present. Currently, we are safe in Thailand trying to put our trip back together again. It is looking like a Humpty Dumpty story right now. At this point, many of our future flights have been cancelled and we are working on a new plan.
Back to the normal blog post
We made it to our sanctuary city! It feels great to be back in Singapore, Singapore, Singapore (City, State, Country). Singapore is a culturally diverse land of ultra strict rules, clean public areas, impressive creations, systems that simply work, widely spoken English, and Crazy Rich Asians.
Strict and unique laws
Yes, it is true that gum is banned. Yes, it is true that drug traffickers face the death penalty, having a single bullet can get you life in prison, annoying someone with a musical instrument is illegal, singing songs with obscene lyrics in public is illegal, forgetting to flush a public toilet is illegal, and even feeding pigeons is illegal. This is the wrong country in which to be a bad person. If you are not a bad person, it can be a great place to visit. I think of it as “Asia Lite”. The last time I visited, I stayed in a “bad area”, but it still felt perfectly safe. In fact, there was a crime billboard that said “3 tools have been stolen from this area this month.” Singapore is a safe place. Maybe even a bit too safe.
Singapore superlatives
Singapore seems to love creating superlatives to attract the masses. For example, Singapore is home to the highest infinity pool in the world, the largest dome structure in the world, the tallest indoor waterfall in the world, the largest fountain in the world (as of 1998), the largest waste-to-energy facility in the world, the cheapest Michelin-starred meal (~$1.42) in the world, and the best airport in the world (for over seven consecutive years), and it has a bridge to the southernmost tip of continental Asia,
Fun during our unplanned stay
Originally, we were supposed to be in Singapore for about 12 hours. We extended that by a week to put our world trip back together after our first mass cancelation. We used my international calling plan extensively to call all over the world. Ok, that’s boring. We still had some fun in Singapore. We spent time in the airport (truly incredible place), we went to the Gardens by the Bay, took pictures with murals near Arab St, ate food at Clarke Quay, mailed a 5kg package home, walked through the Promenade Shoppes, saw the Fort Canning Park underpass, and even managed to get my camera repaired overnight!
Broke part of my new camera 😦
Yea, I cracked the viewfinder of my shiny new camera on the 11th day of the trip (back in Christchurch, NZ). My bag fell off the airport trolley and landed face down on my camera. Unfortunately, we have not been in a single location long enough for me to have it repaired. Each place we checked quoted me at least three weeks. Singapore fixed it in 24 hours! Now, we’ll see if my insurance will cover it.
Oops! We forgot that we changed our flight!
We had plans to return to the amazing Changi Airport with tons of extra time to soak up (see “mooch”) the lounge experience, shower, change, and take more pictures. Amidst all of the coronaggedon canceling/rebooking, we forgot that we had moved our Singapore outbound flight to a new flight that took off eight hours earlier than the original 10 pm flight. We discovered this unfortunate fact as we were leisurely riding the metro to the airport at 12:30pm, 40 minutes away from the airport, for an international flight at 2:10pm! We had to hustle. We even got off the train and took a cab the rest of the way. We originally expected to arrive at Changi clean, rested, and stress free. In actuality, we arrived stressed out and sweaty, half of us were smelly, and we could not afford the time to snap a single picture. The classic running-to-the-airport scenario.
Hopefully, we will lounge it up again soon, but now we are headed to one of the most unusual experiences of the entire trip. We are going to swim with hundreds of thousands of jellyfish in Palau!
Travel Knit Dance 