Day One: Singapore

Late arrival

We berthed at 10 am and I took the laptop, iPad, and iPhone to find good WiFi.

Immigration and disembarkation

You must have your passport, cruise card, and the immigration forms in hand. First you pass through ship security who checks you out. Then the ship’s photographer (in this instance, Uros) takes your photo. We tried to spice it up a little this time.

Next you wander this labyrinth that has nothing on a hamster’s wheel. Eventually you reach an already long line of fellow passengers. There is a separate and quicker line for the crew (I’m glad for them). And a separate line for “impaired mobility.” Also a nice idea.

But the rest of us wait patiently and catch up on ship’s gossip. Eventually it’s my turn and they look at you long and hard, scan your passport and your immigration form, have you took into a screen and put your two fingers on it simultaneously and they have you in their system permanently. Eventually they stamp your passport and your immigration form tearing off one half for themselves. You guard all of this with your life.

So walking a few more blocks in this huge ship’s terminal, I eventually find it to the baggage claim area (ghostly silent), find a chair, and find no WiFi. So eventually I ask staff. They tell me to keep going further.

So now I’m at customs where everything, including yourself, goes through a scanner. They looked quizzically at my sleeve. I asked if they wanted to swab it or wand me. They told me to go on.

Now I’m outside customs and there is some WiFi. But it’s signal is pathetic. I know because I wandered through several more areas of the terminal to check this out. It was a gigantic waste of time.

By this time, Ed had caught up with me (he runs on a slow time clock) and so he remained with the back packs while I returned the route to deliver the laptop (it’s really heavy) to the room and make my way, again, through the maze that is disembarkation, and immigration.

MRT

So now we are off to hit the subway. We were told it was nearby. They fibbed. It’s probably over a mile away and the route is not marked so all of us were wandering like ants until finally we found ourselves in front of two nondescript buildings and opted for (fortunately for us) the one on the left which was indeed the MRT station.  There’s nothing between here and the ship!

So we now have to try to purchase tickets. We wanted 2 day passes. No can do here. The “lady” who was in passenger services had a definite attitude. No credit cards work but we had Singapore money and eventually bought two one way tickets that only take us one stop to the place where you can actually purchase the two day pass. (cost for two for this is $3 SD; exchange rate is 1.4 SD to 1 USD we think).

Purchasing two day pass

Finding the ticket office is the major challenge after the short ride, on this wide, clean, neat, well lit, subway. Eventually we make it across the obstacle course of folks who DO know where they are going and how to get there and if you’re smart you won’t get in their way. Think trying to dash across a busy street.

The equipment seems to be exceptionally slow so it takes a while to get to the window. We note a sign reminding people to treat the people selling the tickets with respect.

And then we are on our way.

Ed asked and found out that we have to make a few changes to get to the Harbor Front Cruise Mall where we want to have our hair cut. He called and made a 1 pm appt saying we had plenty of time. Yeah right. We took the red line to the green line and eventually to the purple line. By the time we get to the right mall, it’s already after 1 pm. BUT they greeted us cheerfully and brought us to a chair. They are all terribly young.

The hair cut experience

Are you listening Amy?

You are seated and a menu for coffee or tea is presented to you. Ed got coffee but my tea was a delight (sorry I didn’t pay attention to the name). It had a lychee and a ball of tea leaves in it.

Then you are escorted to a semi-lying down chair/couch where the process begins with wetting your hair and using the most wonderful smelling products. But along the way, you get a wonderful head and neck massage with shiatsu maneuvers too. The fingers of these folks could break iron and they find every trigger point. This seems to last forever and then a hot towel is put around the back of your neck. Nest one laid on your forehead, and finally wrapped around the sides of your face. Marvelous.

When this is over (sigh) you are escorted to your chair and the hair cut begins. They do a lot of razor cutting and shaping. Just a wonderful outcome. All of this takes about an hour. The price was less than $80 USD for the two of us.

We then found a place to get a pedicure (neither of us can manage this by ourselves at this point: I can’t see and Ed is diabetic and needs someone to check his feet carefully). We found a place recommended by the hair cut place, make an appointment to return in an hour and go in search of food, eventually stopping into Burma Express (but the menus said Thai express.) I had vegetarian Pod Thai with a Coke Light: Ed had something exotic including some mango smoothie type drink.

Pedicures

The chairs look like elevated recliners. You feel like a grand poobah riding an elephant. Again hot tea is brought for you. They pull out the bottom where they have a small  for your feet and put something into the water. I noticed that their equipment was all in autoclave envelopes and they wore masks for the process.

They start with some lotions and then a device that whirs and takes off all the dead skin. The pedicure proceeds with many steps and repeats of previous steps such as cleaning under the nails. I didn’t get polish on my nails so she buffed them to such a sheen it looks like natural nail polish.

Then begins the leg and foot massage. They folks are strong. They found muscles I last knew only in anatomy classes. My leg skin has never felt so marvelous. I thought she was going to break one of my toe bones during the massage but it was marvelous.

And then all too soon (1 hr later) it was over. We paid and left. Again the cost was much less than expected.

We walked around this shopping center for the longest time. It seems to go on forever. Just when you think you’ve reached the end, you find more shops.

Back to ship

We retraced our purple, to green, to red line back to the station nearest the ship. There was another couple from the ship also and we all walked the distance.

Humidity

We found ourselves dripping sweat many times today even in the mall. We do drink fluids when out but you don’t realize how much you lose as we both drank two full glasses of water upon our return.

Open seating

For dinner but we went to our usual table to keep our servers company.

Back in the room

We realized how tired we are. We looked outside and it began to rain, first little drops, and then enough that it drove us back off the balcony.

Tomorrow we’ll do more exploring with our two day pass!