Hello from Singapore
Thursday morning – July 6 , 2017 (Second post of this travelogue)
Well, we survived a total of 27 ½ hours from DIA to our hotel in Singapore. We flew to Los Angeles, then to Hong Kong and then here. Most everything went smoothly. Our last flight was about an hour late, but that was not a big deal. However, it did put us at the hotel at 3:04 AM!
It was a strange day of travel and meals. As we noted in the last post, we had a nice sit-down breakfast at DIA. We then ate lunch in the International terminal at LAX food court. Then on the flight to Hong Kong they served us both lunch and dinner. To end the day, they served dinner on the flight to Singapore!
I had loaded an Uber app on my phone when we were in Europe last year. It worked like a charm here. The driver was prompt, spoke pretty good English and the car was very modern and clean. It took a minute to get used to the right hand drive system here, but the ride was great and the cost was less than $10 (charged to your card when you are picked up – fixed charge by Uber for the route.
Our hotel is the Holiday Inn Express Katong (Link to hotel Google Map locaton in Singapore). It is a beautiful new facility. In order to check in, you have to take an elevator to the seventh floor. It is located between the airport and the main downtown area. Our room is very unique, but quite pleasant (see pictures). One picture shows the bed area, while the second shows the unique wall next to the bed that has the shower glass as part of the wall.
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We tried to sleep in Wednesday morning until 9:30 but woke up about 8:00 and just relaxed for a time. The breakfast (included as is typical with HI Express) was different but very good.
I made the observation about Uber and our phone. We chose an international phone plan for AT&T that makes our use the same as in the State. It is a bit costly, but we have unlimited text and calling and access to the data in our plan – that is important with all the stuff going on back home. It makes me recall our trips to Europe where I had to walk to a computer café and pay for very slow connection speeds. Now we get everything we want on our phones and can even tether the computer to our phones if we are not in the hotel. I guess if you go far enough back (not all that many years) we did not even have the internet or had to beg to get on the hotel fax line to do a quick dial up. The young folks of today have no horror stories to tell {grin}.
Yesterday we decided to take an Uber to roughly downtown (not too far) and then buy passes to hop on –hop off to see some of the sights of the city. We had planned to make two of the loops (yellow and red), but traffic was terrible and it took over two hours to make one loop. On top of that, it rained hard and the lower enclosed area became very crowded. We decided to only do the one loop.
Singapore architecture is very modern and there are hundreds of high rise apartment buildings – each with very distinct building designs. The business towers are also very designed with amazing architecture variations. We were disappointed that we did not see any historic buildings.
We are at the airport as I finish this post up. We are heading to Krabi Thailand for our pre-trip (arranged by Stampin’ Up! but not included in the paid part of the trip).
It just dawned on me that I had not explained why we are taking this trip. Pat earned the trip through her sales at Stampin’ Up!. They pay all expenses for both of us for the planned week long trip. Thailand would not have been high on our bucket list, but we are excited to make this trip.
That is all of now.