Hello to my almost-non-existant readers

It would seem that I have been keeping you folks in the dark for a while. Even though this blog isn't as popular with 200k visitors, I still feel obligated to my irregular little online diary. Anyway first of all, as I probably have mentioned before, I planned to extend my 6hr stopover on my way to Korea and stay 3 nights at pleasant old Singapura. There were many concerns, mine and others alike, that 3 days were more than enough to look around the little island state. This was somewhat true, as I did end up having a fair amount of free time in between schedules. Even still, however, in the end I did not manage to do all the things that I had originally set my mind and budget on.


Day 1 - Wednesday

Unaware of the time difference, I gathered that the flight to Sinapore would only be from 11:50AM till 5:25PM but that was a miscalculation. The unexpected 2hrs + 1hr from daylight savings seem to go more slowly than normal. As Von warned me beforehand, I suffocated from the humidity the moment I stepped out the aircraft and into the jet bridge. Fellow passengers, who seemed to be quite happy with the climate, just stood watching me gasping in shock for a moment or two at the airport gate.

After freshening up, I headed straight to the Tourist Information corner and grabbed practically every brouchers and maps, proceeded to the guided tour companies corners and basically robbed each of their pamphlets respectively. Then came the

"Oh shit!"

moment. I had already booked the hostel but had not written down nor paid much attention to directions to the place. Luckily, the name of the hostel was rather short and unconventional so that it was quite easy to remember : 98SG. Yeah I know it sounds like some Stargate brigade but I am still clueless as to why they named it like that but it was easy to find nonetheless. From then on its was pretty easy for me as I was fortunate enough to be familiar with asian public transport, and I was away and laughing while a couple of Aussies were having the time of their life in front of the ticket vending machine.

Rain was what met me at my destination. And not just ordinary rain, flashfloodomgitstheendoftheworld heavy rain. Trucking thru the streets in my school-shoes and jeans with wet & wild ponytail, I think I would have looked like some crazy ex-commando in the eyes of others.

Then after asking around frantically, and scaring a few locals in the process, I finally got to the bloody hostel... Completely soaked and wasted, I find out that I am to pay a $50 deposit on check in. I was booked in to a 6bed dorm ($8 a night for 3 nights) and I was not previously uninformed of the amount of the deposit I was supposed to pay. Finding this unreasonable, I left my passport with them instead of my deposit. By the way, as I found out, apparently this is a conventional method amongst youth hostels - I thought of it as them safekeeping my passport so it was all good.

The common area of the hostel, with some fellow stayers - this was taken on my last day there, unfortunately the camera battery went flat before I could take a picture of the dorm.

Anyway, the room itself was not much bigger than a standard bedroom, but it still, just, barely managed to accomodate 3 two-storey bunks and a decent sized locker. And after randomly throwing my stuff on to my bed (mind you, this was potentially hazardous as my allocated bed was the top bunk) I zombie-walked into the showers straight away.

Feeling a little revived, I zoomed down to the Seven-Eleven down the street and helped myself to a blatantly overfilled, extra large apple flavoured slurpie for the first time in years. With frozen happiness in one hand, and a can of eclipse on the other, I retreated back to the hostel to study the travel brouchers and set plans for tomorrow...