Long Weekend in Singapore

Week 22

Day 141

Kelapa Gading Indonesia

6.1614° S, 106.9045° E

While cruising Tiket.com for cheap flights during a sale they had in December, I found one way tickets from Jakarta to Singapore for 90000rp (or less than $9) with return tickets for about $35 a piece so it was a no brainer to add Singapore to the trip and get another visa stamp to the passport!

Besides, Indonesian Visas are only good for 30 days so we would have had to go to the airport to get a new Visa around that time anyways.

We flew out Sunday the 12th for a long weekend which just so happened to coincide with our Visas expiring and my birthday.

We landed in Singapore an hour and a half late and so happy to be off the plane!

We flew Tigerair which I’ve since learned is a Asian Budget Airlines (the reason for the cheap tickets) who is known for arriving late and canceling flights unexpectedly and without notification.  Luckily we only experienced the former.

Here is our run down on the experience with Tigerair, both coming and going:

• 

  Colorful Singapore

  At the time our plane was scheduled to board, there was no plane at the gate.

• At scheduled departure time the plane arrived.
• 30 min past scheduled departure we board.
• We sat on the tarmac waiting to depart for another 30-45 min.
• Close to arriving the pilot announces we should be landing soon only an hour late for circumstances outside his control.
• 10 min later the pilot comes on again to say we will be circling for 30 min because there is a line to land.  Once again for circumstances outside his control.
• We finally landed about an hour and a half late both coming and going…for circumstances outside the pilot’s control.

I’m sure circumstances were outside the pilot’s control, but given that this seems to be a regular occurrence I’m confused on why they don’t just change the flight times….not 100% sure if this is an Indonesian/Singaporean problem or a Tigerair one.

If anyone knows the answer to this please leave a comment as Tom and I are both curious!

Anyways, luckily for us we had all the time in the world!  The delay actually made us right on time to check into The Footprints, a hostel I had booked off of hostel.com right on the outskirts of Little India.  

 

I’m super glad that I made the effort to book a hostel ahead of time, as it saved us $16 a night (which makes a huge difference when the room is only $13 a person!)

We were actually super impressed with Footprints!  So far in our travels we haven’t been too impressed by hostels and are happy when we can avoid them, but Footprints was very clean, super affordable, the aircon actually worked (during the hours promised from 9pm-9:30am), and there were 3 fans (until Tom broke one turning it on high) in our room for the times we couldn’t use the aircon.

Claiming our beds in the dorm we had rented we set off on foot to explore Singapore!

Our first order of business was to get food.  We walked a couple block through Little India and unfortunately couldn’t find anything decent for under $12 a person.  While this would be decent in the states, Tom and I have become spoiled in SE Asia and were convinced that while we expected things to be more expensive in Singapore we could do better than that!

We were correct and shortly later we found a large food court that had meals galore for about $3 a pop, expensive for our tastes, but much better than the $12 ones in Little India.  (BTW I may be wrong, there may be deals in Little India, but we never found them.)

 

Travelers Tip:  The Singapore Dollar is much closer in value to the US dollar than most other SE Asian countries.  When we traveled there in Jan 2014 it was on the downswing with an exchange ratio of $1 SGD to $.79 (USD)

Continuing on we bought some Chang’s beers 3 for $9 and headed on to explore.  Singapore like Indonesia has no laws about open containers, but always best to ask.  (As we were leaving, I saw a flyer in our Hostel showing that open containers had been outlawed from Little India due to riots before we’d been there.  Luckily we never walked around in that area!)

We were headed to Clarke Quay which I’d read was a hip area where you could get a good beer, when we spotted a ship flying in the sky between 2 large skyscrapers!

Having spotted the Marina Bay Sands, we changed our course and headed that way.

The first stop was the park above filled with friends and families having picnics and enjoying the weather with the large ship sailing overhead.

From there we decided to head closer to the bay.

We got closer and saw we had a beautiful view of the city, but specifically of Marina Bay Sands as the sun was beginning to set and a light show was beginning from the top of the hotel.

We headed to a sushi restaurant and order some happy hour Sapporos as we enjoyed the show.

Following our drinks, we headed back to the edge of the bay to watch the lights.

Sitting near the bay we met two girls visiting from Denmark, Stine and Rikke.  The two were traveling through Singapore killing time on a layover they had in Malaysia before heading for a 2 month exploration of Australia.

Not knowing what else to do in Singapore, we headed to the lights to explore some more!

Singapore is definitely a flashy city as there are lights everywhere from motorcyclists to buildings to even trees!

Happy with our exploration, we headed back to the hostel to get some sleep.

The next day we took off to explore and actually made it to Clarke Quay which turned out to be an awesome area to go out!

Travelers Tip:  If you are looking to Party in Singapore, check out Clarke Quay!

There were all kinds of trendy restaurants with great drink specials all day long.

The Clarke Quay has an interesting pricing structure in that prices are continually changing all day long depending on the time.  (For example 12-3pm $5 3-6 $7 6-9 $10 9-close $7)

We weren’t necessarily looking to party, but we were interested in some good microbrew and we found it at our favorite spot, Brewerkz.

Brewerkz is an ACTUAL microbrewery based out of Singapore and the beer there is top notch probably because they import their ingredients from all over the world, including brewery equipment, hops, and grains coming from the PNW (pacific northwest–hometown pride!!)

Brewerkz also had free WIFI!  Crazy how the places that satisfy one need tend to please us travelers in every aspect!

Later that evening, we met up with a former Pole Vault buddy of mine, Andy.

Andy and I used to vault together in Bellingham when I was in high school and college and we were reconnected a couple years ago as he got his MBA in the same program as one of my best friends from college Judy.

Anyways, Andy also happens to be a member of the Resistance so the three of us had a blast catching up.

Tuesday was my birthday!  We started off the day browsing through the countless malls Singapore has to offer.

Travelers Tip:  If you are headed to Singapore to Shop check out Orchard Road for it’s $2 Billion Dollar Ion Orchard mall, but if you are looking for bargains hit up other areas of town.  Malls aren’t hard to find.  Bugis Junction by Little India had a ton of Bargains and street finds.  

We didn’t find anything we had to have, but we did have fun people watching and checking things out.  The outrageous t-shirt slogans were my personal favorite.

Feeling hungry (and thirsty 😉 ) we headed back to Brewerkz for round 2 as well as to meet up with Coralie, another Resistance Member!

Following our meet up with Coralie we enjoyed a leisure afternoon chilling in Clarke Quay and Chinatown meeting up again with Andy for an awesome Sate feast at Lau Pa Sat.  Lau Pa Sat also happened to be conveniently right next to Raffles home of the Singapore Sling, which my mom and dad turned us on to.

Wednesday was our last day in town, but we took advantage of the short time we had before heading to the airport.

Coralie had connected Tom with Bryan Long the head of Singapore’s Lean Startup Mastermind group.  Brian organized his group and a group of conventional publishers interested in Tom’s work in the virtual world to all meet up before we headed to the airport to hear Tom talk about how he used the Lean Startup Methodology to bootstrap Insurgent Publishing.

It went great and was good practice for his next speaking engagements coming up virtually with a group in Texas at the end of Jan and live at The Game Changers Live Conference in Sydney on Feb 8th.  (I knew this was coming up, but Tom just shared the website with me!  Check it out, my handsome husband is the headliner!!  What?! 🙂 )

We finished up with the Mastermind group with just enough time to have a more intimate chat with the publishers which turned out to be very interesting before heading to the airport to catch our flight.

All and all it was a great trip!  We landed in Jakarta and caught a cab to Kelapa Gading where I will be teaching and we will be living until we head back to the Indonesian Islands on Monday to wrap up our stay in SE Asia before heading back to OZ.

We were welcomed back to Jakarta with a 2 1/2 hour cab ride to get 17km.  Luckily we won’t need to venture out much, as our new location has everything you could ever want.  We’re living it up as Mall Ratz at the Mall of Indonesia (MOI) in Kelapa Gading for our last couple days in Jakarta.

 

Mary, Joe, and Dan our apartment is right out of Raid Redemption and Tom has been on guard since we’ve arrived as he’s convinced MOI is the setting for Dead Rising.

 

Today we’re hanging at the mall.  Work was canceled for the day due to flooding in the area.  Luckily there is a J.CO with awesome WIFI open at the mall.  I’m currently stocking up on episodes of South Park, Top Chef, and the Bachelor to keep us entertained for the rest of the day as I finish this blog.

Since it’s pouring down rain outside, I’m trying to convince Tommy to go for a run with me around MOI.  I’ll let you know how that goes next week!

P.S.  Mom we’re fine.  The areas surrounding us are super flooded (I’ll have pics next week!) but our apartment is on the 22nd floor (of Raid Redemption).  There is nothing to worry about.

PPS:  Our place is not quite straight out of the Raid Redemption, it is much nicer and cleaner.  It is just as big though with just as many rooms!