Flight to Singapore

After my overnight in London, I boarded one of those huge, new Airbus 380 planes, the ones with the upper deck for First Class and Business Class passengers. The rest of us in Cattle Class were on the normal deck below. The plane holds nearly 500 passengers and was one of the nicest I’ve flown on. I was especially impressed with the fact that they had plenty of leg room, which is important for a long-legged fellow like me :) Nevertheless, I took several opportunities to walk around. Even with a comfortable seat and plenty of leg room, a 13-hour flight is a rather long time to sit in one place!

I had some reading to do for the meetings (a 105-page document!), but also managed to find time to watch several movies on the nice, big, individual screen they have built in to the back of the seat ahead of me.

We left London just after noon on Sunday, and arrived in Singapore just before 9 in the morning on Monday. Joining up with a colleague who was also going to the meetings, we hired a taxi and headed through the city to where we were staying at the YWCA. As in Britain, drivers in Singapore (a former British colony) have their steering wheels on the right hand side of the car and drive on the left side of the road. The taxi we were in had an unbelievable amount of stuff on, in, and around the dashboard!

We were looking forward to catching a quick nap at the Y (our bodies were telling us it was 2 a.m. by now), but unfortunately, our rooms were not yet ready. So we headed out in search of something to eat. On the way, I changed some Euros into Singapore dollars. Then we came across a Starbucks and our search for food was temporarily sidelined while we ingested sufficient caffeine to keep us awake for just a few more hours until our rooms were ready.

It took us a while, but we finally found a food court in one of the nearby, multi-level malls. Then it was back to the Y, get hooked up to the Internet, and check e-mails. I was really starting to have a hard time staying awake when we were finally told we could go to our rooms. It was only 2 p.m. local time, but after a few minutes of chatting with my roommate, I was out like a light.