We awoke around 7:00am so that we could finish packing and be out of the hotel and catch a bus to the airport leaving around 8:00. It takes over an hour to get to the airport, and we were hoping to get there by 9:30 or so for our 12:00 flight. We checked out and started walking towards the bus stop, making a quick detour to put 2000won on David’s transit card (Caitlyn filled her last night but David’s was in the room). We got to the bus stop just a few minutes late, but thankfully it was only 15 minutes or so until the next one.
At this point, David found a sign saying that the fare to the airport is actually 17,000 won per person, or just over $12 USD. We only had enough cash on hand to fill one card, so we booked it to a nearby convenience store to see if they had an ATM. Thankfully, there was one just out back. We pulled out 20,000 won and went into the store to have them fill our cards up. Back to the bus stop, it was only a short 5 minutes before hopping on the bus. We both got comfortable seats that even had chargers in front of them, as well as a place near the front to deposit our luggage.
In just over an hour we arrived, hopping off at terminal 1. We get into the station to see that our flight has been delayed and isn’t scheduled to leave until 2:45.
This was a bit of a blessing, as it seemed this would give us a few hours to catch up on our blog. We checked in and checked our big bags. With over 4 hours to spare, we walked around to find some information on the available food options. It seemed that the food was much more plentiful before going through security and on a train to the building where our gate was.
We found a place with Korean ramen and dumplings and decided to go there. We shared a spicy ramen and the 6 piece dumpling set, which was all delicious.
We wanted a place to sit and work on the blog, so went through security and headed to the fourth floor food court. We found a taco bell selling cheep draft beer, so we grabbed one for each of us and sat at a table and worked at our blog for a while. Eventually, we headed to the other side of the food court and found a place that sells Stella Artois draft and grabbed one of those.
Our process on the blog has been refined to us working together to make a barebones structure of what we did every day by looking at pictures, and then David will work on writing the blog while Caitlyn works on the pictures. Saving the photos directly to the WordPress blog website worked well at first, however we ran out of data as they store all the photos on their servers and only offer limited storage without paying huge amounts for upgrades. We eventually found out we could bypass this by uploading pictures to Flickr (an image hosting site) and embedding the photos on the blog page, where it will display the photos without storing them on WordPress servers. The only issue here is that you can only store 1,000 photos on Flickr for free, however you can just keep making new accounts and getting another free 1,000 photos. We are currently on our third Flickr account with how many photos we upload. Anyways, Caitlyn will upload her photos onto flickr via her phone, though David has to upload his on his ipad as an unknown error hasn’t been letting David upload photos. Instead, he will send photos in batches of <25mb on multiple gmail emails and then we will either use the ipad or Caitlyn’s phone to download them and upload to flickr. Then, Caitlyn takes all of the photos from Flickr and copies the embeddable URL, individually putting each picture in the blog. David then goes in and cuts the writing up in between photos, and will then caption the photos. It is quite a process, and it has taken well over 6 hours for some of the longer days to get a page done.
Back to the airport…David managed to get all caught up in the writing, while Caitlyn made huge headway uploading pictures to the pages. We sat for a while before finally heading towards our gate. Once in the building with our gate, we realized we only had a few minutes to make it to boarding before they cut it off.
David sprinted ahead, making it to the desk to learn that they haven’t even started boarding yet. We decide to grab some food for the flight as we didn’t purchase any meal options for the 6.5 hour flight. The only food in this area is Auntie Anne’s, and while we don’t want to resort to any western food while in Asia, we didn’t have many options. We both got a hotdog/corndog (caitlyns was spicy, David’s plain).
We board soon after and find our seats. We played the game of booking a window and an aisle seat in hopes that no one would take the middle seat. Should it get booked, we assume no one will ever say no to switching from middle to aisle for us to sit together. Thankfully it was not booked so we had a ton of free space.
We both fell asleep for the first 1.5 to 2 hours, then woke up and watched The Imitation Game (David has seen before, but gave it 3.5/5 stars. Caitlyn gives it a 4-4.5/5 stars!) After this, we only had about 80 minutes until landing, so we switched to an animal documentary on Octopuses for a while, as an hour out Caitlyn has to put in some pressure relief earplugs and can’t use the headphones anymore. After the earplugs were on, David started watching the first episode of 1899, only getting a little through before having to take out his headphones for landing per the flight attendant.
We landed early, and everyone started standing. An older lady behind David who was with a large group started to get her suitcase right above David’s head with minimal care for if she would drop it or not, practically pushing David back down into his seat. We got off and quickly got through security and customs. In the Changi airport now, we walked around some, taking in the opulent, excessive, and beautiful aspects of this world famous airport. We weren’t planning on getting a SIM card as we’re only here for 5 days, but we decided to check with a few counters. The prices were high and only offered 30 day minimum options. Eventually we searched the internet and found that convenience stores will have them cheap and in lesser quantity.
We also tried finding transit passes for bus and rail and a counter tried to sell us a super expensive package, saying it was the only way. We saw through this and eventually found the train station in a different terminal, purchasing cards for a small fraction of the price of the counter. We found a convenience store near to this that sold 1 week simcards for around $10 USD, with high speed and a super high data limit, so we bought 2. We tried to work out how to get in via bus or train, but the prices seemed pretty equivalent to a ride app, which would get us there twice as quickly. We ended up going with a ride app, which quickly arrived. Upon walking outside, we noted the stark contrast between the weather. We hop in and a super nice man takes us towards our hotel. After finding it is our first time in Singapore, he gave us a little “and on your left…” tour, and offered suggestions for good places to eat. He dropped us off in front of our hotel and we went in to check in. Check in was simple and we got our room key. The room was very nice with lots of storage including a place for our bags under a semi-lofted bed.
We headed right back out, hoping to grab a meal before too many places close as it was past 10:00 at this point. We walked to a nearby hawker mall where a lot of good restaurants are supposed to be, but they were all closed. We kept walking towards the Chinatown area, as our driver said it is super close to us and has good food often open later.
We went in the first open place we could find as we were a little tired and wanted to plan out more of Singapore before tomorrow. We shared some beer (wusu and a snow beer) and got the twice cooked pork and the house spicy chicken.
The chicken was the perfect spice, and was interesting as they cut off the tips of wings and cooked those. This means that there were multiple bones in each bite, so we had to work to figure out the best way to extract the meat.
The pork was very good and not particularly spicy, but had some amazing cooked onions with it. We finished up and paid, very happy with this Chinese food, and took the short walk back to our hotel.
Along the way, we stopped by a 7-11 we saw earlier. They seemed to be open, but inside realized they were closing up. They were very nice and when we said we just wanted some cold drinks, they said they will happily take us and told us of some 24/7 convenience stores nearby. We walked the rest of the way home, took showers, put on some friends while we planned tomorrow, and we went to bed.
David’s thoughts of the day: We knew Singapore took their laws very seriously, but seeing signs saying “____ is punishable by up to 3 years in prison and caneing” made it extra real. Also, people are very friendly and kind here!
Caitlyn’s thoughts of the day: it’s so hard to wrap my mind around the fact that singapore is a country, when the DC metro area where I grew up is nearly 20x larger than it. Just from the short time we have been here, it feels like such an incredible city with so many beautiful sites to see, cultures to experience, and of course, good food to try!
Steps walked: 15,623
Miles walked: 8.24
Bluming Travelers 