Singapore 2018

Back in November, I took my first big trip in years to visit extended family in Singapore. I was out of the office for over three weeks and to make up for the vacation time, worked through Christmas and New Year after I returned to Ann Arbor. A large part of the trip was seeing (and meeting) family, but since it was my first time back in Singapore in close to fifteen years, we also did a lot of the touristy things. The goal is to get everything written and posted before summer.

I started my journey to the other side of the world by flying home to New England for a couple days. We had just gotten new music for concert band, so I ran through it before leaving. I ended up missing three rehearsals and didn’t have a chance to practice while I was in Singapore, but managed to catch up before the concert because we happened to have ten rehearsals between our first and second concerts of the season. We’re preparing for our third concert and started out with six rehearsals, but the first got cancelled by snow, so we’re down to five weeks to prepare.

Hong Kong airport

The first leg of our flight was fifteen and a half hours in the air to Hong Kong. The only way to describe this is long. Everyone boards, they make the safety announcements, the plane taxis, takes off, you settle in, they feed you a meal, you take a nap, see a couple movies, and check your watch. You’re only eight hours into the flight and you still have that long to go. But overall, the flight was fine. The food was edible, though the eggs were not quite right. I watched Ready Player One and the Shaun the Sheep movie and rewatched Big Hero 6. Ready Player One was okay. They changed basically all the details and only used the general plot, but it made sense in the context of reading vs. watching.

We landed in Hong Kong in the morning with enough time to eat before catching our connecting flight. After our snack(?)/breakfast(?)/dinner(?), we found our gate and boarded the plane for the last three and a half hours to Singapore. We were fed second breakfast at lunch time (more questionable eggs) and I rewatched Zootopia. And then we landed in Singapore, went through immigration, claimed our baggage, and were greeted by family. Before we left the airport, we had another undefined meal (the first of many), then we stepped out into the hot, humid embraces of the Singapore weather. We had arrived.