Activity level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Modes of transportation: 👟🛫🚊🚂
First stop: mailing our postcards. We hadn’t found the time to send them all in New Zealand, so we had a bunch of built up cards to mail. Luckily, the post office employees knew exactly what we needed, and it only took a couple of minutes.
We got onto the trams (but forgot to “tap on”, like hooligans) and then the airport train, and got to the airport 2 hours before the flight.
Security and everything was no problem, so we ended up at our gate with time to spare. We separated to grab food, and met back up at our gate. Sarah got an almond croissant and coffee, and Eric got a meat pie (that wasn’t good), a bacon cheese toastie (which was tasty), and an egg spinach burrito that he shared with Sarah. Our gate was near the centurion lounge, so Eric popped in and grabbed some pastries since we weren’t sure what food would look like on this flight (and sadly, this was one of our non-business class flights). We also didn’t realize how long the flight would be (8.5 hours) until the night before, since we didn’t realize there was a big time jump.
We got pretty lucky because nobody was sitting next to us, so we sort of had “lie flat” seats. Eric wrote some blog posts for the first bit while Sarah watched “Speed” (her new favorite movie). Then, we both watched “Elemental,” which was solid (Sarah only cried a little). Lastly, we both got hyped watching “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”, the only movie in history to be set in Sarah’s hometown of San Dimas, California. Party on!
Food on the flight was decent: we both got the butter chicken with wine, and it hit the spot. They also had ice cream for dessert, which was most excellent (and fairly rare for a plane). Lastly, we got a little chicken roti hot-pocket type thing as a snack towards the end of the flight, which was also pretty decent. Overall, not bad.
We arrived around 5:00 PM we decided to tour the Singapore airport, which we heard was interesting. First, we stopped by the butterfly gardens, which are behind security. Eric learned that Sarah was a huge butterfly fan, and we both enjoyed seeing the hundreds of beautiful, varied butterflies eat, fly, and hatch.
The airport near the gates also had interesting features, like whole sections of recliners that weren’t attached to any gates and free city tours for long layovers. They also had a couple of paid lounges, koi ponds, and even movie theaters. Apparently, it’s pretty common to have 24 hour layovers at the airport, so they cater to long-stayers. It’s crazy!
We finally saw everything we wanted behind security, so we exited immigration and entered the public side of the airport. We tried to get a stamp, but we were sad to learn that Singapore didn’t do those any more. Sad!
The Singapore airport had a mall attached to it called “Jewel”, which had the tallest indoor waterfall in the world. Our bags were heavy, but we made the hike over to the Jewel, and were amazed by the spectacle. We happened to catch the waterfall just as it was getting dark, so we got to see the water sparkle with changing lights against the sunset. The room it was in was also a huge greenhouse, with thousands of real plants resembling an indoor jungle. It was extraordinarily humid, but beautiful.
After enjoying the sights, we headed over to the train and caught the rail into the city. We got off at the wrong stop, but ended up in the right area fairly quickly. Walking to the hotel, it was like New Orleans in summer: 90 degrees and 99% humidity. We were both dripping, but we made it to the hotel without any issues.
The front desk was extremely nice: they all seemed excited it was our honeymoon and gave us great recommendations for nightclubs to go to. Also, it turned out that all the drinks/snacks in the minibar were complementary, including beer and candy bars. It probably wasn’t because we were on our honeymoon, but we like to think it was.
Since we hadn’t eaten, we stopped over by the food stands near the hotel and got some late-night bites. Many of the stands were closed for the night, so we had to select from only a couple they were open.
Eric got chicken and rice, some char siew, and we both got chicken satay on skewers—all washed down with a complementary beer from the minibar. All the food was good, though Eric tried to return his tray to the chicken store owner who looked at him like “dumb tourist” and pointed him to the stand-wide disposal racks.
We mostly ate for the novelty of it, but were both exhausted from all the travel and walking around with our bags. So we headed back to the hotel for some showers and a good night’s rest.
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