Singapore and Beyond

It was a quick trip to Singapore and we had to check out by noon today. In the morning, we spent about an hour just trying to pay for a ticket to ride the MRT downtown. You see, despite a credit card slot, and despite a super fancy system of being able to use one's phone as a ticket (supposedly), neither method of payment actually worked. We went to an ATM and I thought the $10 SGD notes would be fine for paying for a $5.60 SGD metro card, but the machines refused anything larger than a $5 SGD note.

After going to a hotel for change, we attempted the machines once more and were finally on our way downtown. We had a short walk in the 90 degree heat to find the Merlion, a mythical creature symbolic of Singapore. After all of our efforts, and my constant vocalizing of the word, "Murrrr-lion," Nicole was suitably annoyed and perhaps thought this statue was a "Meh"-Lion at best. From Merlion park we walked to a different metro stop and headed back to the hotel.



Now would be a decent time to remark that in spite of Singapore's modern ambitions and the whole cashless society thing, it has really failed in areas of basic directional needs. The signage is poorly placed. Every time we were following a sign to something, the signs would abruptly end and you would have to make guesses at the next intersection. For example, if the last sign you saw said to go straight, you could reasonably assume that you are to continue straight until told otherwise. This is not the Singaporean thought process, however. You are to go straight until you end up blocked by a science museum, realizing you've gone too far, turning around, then noticing that only after making a u-turn, do yo see a sign oriented your way now telling you to make a right and go down an escalator, which then leads nowhere, until you reverse again and see a sign telling you that it meant the elevator, which is TOTALLY different.

This pattern continued at the airport, where we had some time to explore. It has been repeatedly ranked the #1 airport in the world by various publications. The bar had been set high for our expectations. Check-in was easy enough, especially considering we were flying standby. Nicole had a bit of trouble clearing emigration because her fingerprints from the entry did not seem to match her thumbprints on her way out. I kept close watch on her until they just shrugged their shoulders and released her into the terminal. In an unrelated note, all gum in her possession mysteriously disappeared and it's
unclear at which stage of our travels this occurred. My nail trimmers were confiscated as well. I rolled my eyes when told it was too sharp, which was a dangerous move on my part. One that is surely punishable by caning.

In any event, we had a few hours to explore Changi Airport, and it was fine, clean, and adequate, but it didn't knock my socks off. In many areas, the ceilings were very low and the carpeting was something out of the 70s. Places that had been promoted by the airport's main website underwhelmed. A cactus lounge, for example, an outdoor space with . . . cacti, was really just a smoking area. After killing some time, we boarded our KLM flight to Bali, a two hour flight away, which for some reason, required a Boeing 777-300ER to make the trip. After clearing customs, we were assaulted by taxi hawkers.

One basically followed me into the bathroom. I was very much losing my patience for this kind of thing, and I refused to reward their aggression. We approached a quiet older man standing next to a large sign with fixed rate cabs and called it good enough. After dealing with a surprisingly large amount of traffic, we arrived at our hotel in Ubud more than an hour after leaving the airport. It is our hope that the masses of crowds from earlier ended up just staying in trashy beach hotels and that we found a bit of an oasis up in the hills. So far at least, our place is very relaxing...