Due to my laziness and inept abilities of time management, it's taking much longer than expected to write these stories. So I'm resorting to the fun technique of magic realism and fast forwarding from highlight to highlight. Time, after all, is a metaphysical concept...
Singapore gleamed in the horizon as the very first ray of the still hidden sun arced through the atmosphere and hit my eye even as the giant fireball slept below the horizon. Well, more accurately, it gleamed because it had so many lights! I've always had a fascination with flying into countries in the dark - just to see all the lights glowing.
...
It is 4:30am. I had 2 hrs of sleep on the plane. I should be tired, by my adrenaline rush from just being in S'pore has me at 100% awakeness. I struggle behind Jimbo with my luggage and board the "MRT" - the local train network. Moments earlier, we were informed that a $7 ticket would be enough to get us from the airport to our station near the hotel. I'm still sceptical.
The trains themselves are very clean. I suppose they would be if you were in a country that could arrest you for littering. Oh, and they're fast and well designed too! In less than 20 mins were half way across the (admittedly small) country. We get off at our station and let our eyes adjust to the twilight around us. The city sounds like it's slowly going through it's morning wake-up schedule: it cleans itself (or at least, the street cleaners do that job) and prepared for the upcoming day by letting the commuters enter. The near darkness makes the scene look like a film noir movie.
...
Right. Time to dump the luggage and explore! Asians here I come! First things first, find the hotel. Jimbo and I follow the map drawn in paint which (surprisingly) was from the official site. Do these guys not know of Google maps? Apart from being not to scale, it is also incorrect. Streets that never meet are touching like newly-formed couples. Others that are actually touching appear like ageing people who no longer find their partners interesting and stay the fuck away. Just to set the records straight - it was a shit map, not my inability to follow directions that made us take 1.5hrs to find a hotel, that was literally less than a km from where we got off the train. The heavy luggage didn't help.
Travel lesson 1: No matter how light your luggage seems when you pack - it is much heavier when you to carry it for any period greater than 10mins. To realistically gauge how much you should be carrying - pack, then walk around your house, after someone has closed all the doors, so you have to balance all the paraphernalia as you try and grasp irritating handles. For added challenge - get your family to bump into you.
...
We walked through the streets of the city - you could tell that this was the first world. Efficient, emotionless and monotonous - just doing what concrete doing what it was meant to do. No potholes, no rubbish, no excrement. Nothing to distinguish one stretch of road from the next. I needed food and luckily, at this time of day, it was very easy to find. Just look any group of people and you've found breakfast. At this hour, only restaurants were open and with food so cheap, even the locals found it more convenient to eat out for breakfast. Or maybe I can't tell tourists apart for shit.
After breakfast (which cost all of $3.40, for the both of us!) we began our explorations... stay tuned!
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