Notes on Travel, Part 5
Singapore, 1:00 PM Local Time 8/19/2005
The Singapore airport is one of the swankiest airports I think I've ever seen. It feels like a very high-end mall— think Denver's Cherry Creek— and is simply huge. From the immigration paperwork ("Death For Drug Traffickers is Singapore's Law") I'd been expecting something much less... comfortable-feeling. Instead, we were greeted by a massive indoor fern garden and more free internet kiosks than you can shake a stick at (the connection speed is fast enough to use Skype quite effectively). There are plants everywhere, and all of them are real. Heck, there's even a koi pond. In the airport. A giant freaking koi pond. There's a roof-top sunflower garden, as well. Oh, and I almost forgot- there's a free movie theater, constantly showing a variety of American films (both classic and more recent).
We found some lunch... I got some sort of seafood-noodle-curry thing. It had all sorts of interesting marine wildlife in it... prawns, some unidentifiable fish-type thing, and who-knows-what-all-else, all in a slightly spicy fishy curry sauce. It was a tough call, as there are a ton of amazing-looking restaurants here. So far, I can report that what passes for Indian food in the US is very similar to what passes for Indian food in the Singapore airport.
The icing on the cake, though, is the free tour system. If your layover is more than a couple of hours long (ours is about nine hours), you can register for a free two- or four-hour sightseeing tour of the city. We're still about forty minutes early for ours, so I'm killing some time in a part of the airport that Panasonic has furnished with several dozen flat-panel televisions, each of which is set to a different sporting event somewhere in the world. They also have the largest touch-screen that I've ever seen, running something vaguely like Google Earth, only it only covers a few major world cities.
Basically, the Singapore airport is probably the single best airport that I've ever been in. Killing hours here is amazingly easy.
[Update: The free sightseeing tour was an excellent use of a couple of hours. It basically got us out of the airport, into the town, around a little bit, on a water-taxi ride around the harbor, and back to the airport. More airports ought to have similar things. Imagine how much better a six-hour layover at Chicago O'Hare would be if you could go on a tour of downtown.]
The Singapore airport is one of the swankiest airports I think I've ever seen. It feels like a very high-end mall— think Denver's Cherry Creek— and is simply huge. From the immigration paperwork ("Death For Drug Traffickers is Singapore's Law") I'd been expecting something much less... comfortable-feeling. Instead, we were greeted by a massive indoor fern garden and more free internet kiosks than you can shake a stick at (the connection speed is fast enough to use Skype quite effectively). There are plants everywhere, and all of them are real. Heck, there's even a koi pond. In the airport. A giant freaking koi pond. There's a roof-top sunflower garden, as well. Oh, and I almost forgot- there's a free movie theater, constantly showing a variety of American films (both classic and more recent).
We found some lunch... I got some sort of seafood-noodle-curry thing. It had all sorts of interesting marine wildlife in it... prawns, some unidentifiable fish-type thing, and who-knows-what-all-else, all in a slightly spicy fishy curry sauce. It was a tough call, as there are a ton of amazing-looking restaurants here. So far, I can report that what passes for Indian food in the US is very similar to what passes for Indian food in the Singapore airport.
The icing on the cake, though, is the free tour system. If your layover is more than a couple of hours long (ours is about nine hours), you can register for a free two- or four-hour sightseeing tour of the city. We're still about forty minutes early for ours, so I'm killing some time in a part of the airport that Panasonic has furnished with several dozen flat-panel televisions, each of which is set to a different sporting event somewhere in the world. They also have the largest touch-screen that I've ever seen, running something vaguely like Google Earth, only it only covers a few major world cities.
Basically, the Singapore airport is probably the single best airport that I've ever been in. Killing hours here is amazingly easy.
[Update: The free sightseeing tour was an excellent use of a couple of hours. It basically got us out of the airport, into the town, around a little bit, on a water-taxi ride around the harbor, and back to the airport. More airports ought to have similar things. Imagine how much better a six-hour layover at Chicago O'Hare would be if you could go on a tour of downtown.]
posted by steve | 12:25 AM
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