Flew to Singapore last Friday the 24th and was there until early morning of Tuesday the 28th. This was the first time I was travelling by air since the pandemic broke out, so I was curious to see for myself how air travel has changed.
The trip was mainly to visit and spend time with the wife and ten-year-old son of a friend who had passed away last year. Most of the time was spent hanging out with them. We spent a lot of time at the ArtScience Musem, the Aquarium at Sentosa, VivoCity and Funan City Center.
Also managed to sneak in a dinner with HS friends, people I haven't seen in person in decades! Lots of great stories and banter. Quite interesting how we are still learning new things and stories about the good old days even up to now.
Overall a fun trip, and probably worth all my dread and anxiety over travelling again.
Travel Notes
I kept a running note of various observations in Google Keep:
- Citibank credit card can be used overseas without any prep. BPI I needed to notify them about my travel ahead of time.
- Trip to airport super fast due to skyway. Used to be I would need to allot 2-3 hours for travel time to the airport, but the new Skyway cuts that to just under an hour. There's a P299 toll to be paid though.
- You can pay travel tax before checkin. Handy when you arrive at the airport way too early!
- Maybe i should have one of those nice rigid luggages instead of this old softy I still use
- I have eaten at the tapa king at NAIA T3 more than once before
- NAIA free wifi only lasts 2hrs @_@
- No more arrival cards! Both SG entry and PH re-entry now require you to fill up entry forms digitally, so no more trying to find a pen on the plane when they hand you the forms to fill up
- Singapore MTR will never accept nonlocal credit cards for reloading EZLink cards, need bills
- I still really appreciate having good public transpo
- If i turn off my phone while it has no internet connection and turn it on again later, fhe clock will be off until i have data again. Lol I understand why this works logically, it's just that while conserving battery on the trip home I was wondering why time was passing by so slowly.
- I got sat in an exit row for the first time on the way back, and wow, so much legroom! I actually got some sleep!
- People keep asking me if I ran into any troubles at NAIA because of the recent problems. No issues either coming or going. Actually, it feels like in general the processes are more streamlined now than I remember from before, so kudos to the airport people I supppose.
Locations and Other Photos
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(@NAIA Terminal 3 International Departures Area)
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(@Pizzakaya VivoCity)
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(@Tiong Bahru Bakery Diner 107 North Bridge Rd)
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Some friends wanted to watch this in the cinema so I went with them. I hadn't seen a lot of Makoto Shinkai before. I've seen 5cms/second and know a bit about Your name by reputation, so I was expecting something similar to either of those, which I am willing to sit through, but not really the sort of thing I'm super into.
My expectations were broken. I ended up greatly enjoying this film. It had a lot more action than I expected, the animation was fantastic, and the script and plot were very clever and had the sort of timey-wimey shenanigans I always enjoy.
Lol that chair!
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(@Artscience Museum 10 Bayfront Av)
We attended the FutureWorld: Where Art Meets Science show. It was pretty neat, lots of pretty interactive light displays. There was a thing that was like a lot of single-tile suspension bridges strung together (I dared not attempt it!). Fun activities for kids as well.
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(@Afuri VivoCity)
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(@SEA Aquarium 8 Sentosa Gateway Resorts World Sentosa)
We were originally planning to go to Adventure Cove, but the weather did not agree with those plans, so we went to the aquarium instead. (My record of never having gone to a water park remains unscathed.)
This is only the second aquarium I've ever been to, first one was in Houston. This one was much better, it had a lot more stuff and interesting displays. The ten-year-old's review: "10/10 would visit again!"
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(@Gochi-So Shukudo Chinatown Point)
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We played Get Lucky, which is apparently a card game version of a board game called Kill Doctor Lucky. Fun game, but the way it's designed seems to make it always boil down to attrition in the end. I won the first game of the two we played.
A couple of other games we tried to play:
- Fight Your Friends: The ten-year old had been wanting to play this all weekend now that he had more people to play with, as he was thinking it was a group game. Turns out it was a one-vs-one game so he kind of lost interest.
- The Great Dalmuti: An old favorite among our playgroup. We managed to finish one round before discovering the deck was actually missing a card, and we quit afterwards.
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My friends asked me how this movie was and I was like "It meets expectations. You kind of imagine what a new John Wick movie would be like, and this is exactly that." Great action sequences as usual. One of the characters I had no idea why he was in the script at all, didn't seem like he added anything of interest.
While I did enjoy the film, I do think the whole John Wick saga went on a bit too long, and each additional entry, while entertaining, will just never have as much bang as the previous entries, so I'm glad this film concluded the way it did.
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(@Changi Terminal 4)
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Travelling by air again means an inordinate amount of time waiting at airports, so I passed the time with some sketching/doodling. I didn't have an actual sketchbook handy, so a ruled notebook had to do.
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Updated 2023-04-02 with more trip details.
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