Nath's Blog

In my last post we were still on our way to the Philippines.  I’ve been here for a few days now, and I’m starting to get used to the randomness and inefficiencies that the Philippine culture consists of.

But back to Singapore. After breakfast, we wandered around the airport.  We caught the skytrain to the other two terminals, had a wander around, continued our search for headphone adaptors, and eventually found a nice coffee place.  Over a coffee we did the readings, and had a nice long discussion about them, before heading back to Terminal 2 in preparation for catching our flight.

The flight to Manila was a little more turbulent than our flight to Singapore, but otherwise uneventful. Customs at Manila was more a formality than a thorough examination of what we were bringing in to the country, so in short order we were outside the airport, and catching a taxi to the Shalom centre.  This turned out to be an extraordinarily long taxi ride, taking around 1.5 hours to get to the Shalom center.  Traffic was bumper-to-bumper, and in typical Filipino style, appeared to be completely chaotic.  Apparently the traffic was worse than usual, because a film festival had closed one of the major roads.

The Shalom center was quite close to a major shopping centre, Robbinsons. It was there that we bought SIM cards for our phones, had dinner, and admired a pianist, saxophonist and bass guitarist ensemble ripping up some Christmas carols, before heading back for an early night.  We enquired about currency exchange, but unfortunately they were unable to help us.

The next day was Sunday, Christmas day.  This mean that a lot of the shops didn’t open till late.  We had a light breakfast at Starbucks, and by the time we got back, the van that would take us to Uncle Rudi’s place had arrived.

It took a few hours to get to Uncle Rudi’s place, and we arrived just after the afternoon bible study started, so we walked across the rice fields to get to the hall.  It was here that Phil, in his over-confidence about where we were going, managed to walk into a big patch of mud.  He got stuck, and with a bit of help, got out of the mud, minus his shoes.  His shoes were completely encased in mud – he had sunk almost a foot deep in the mud!  So we went back and he changed into some thongs before we tried again.

That night we enjoyed Aunty Leah’s cooking, and stayed up late talking with Dan and Uncle Des, before finally going to bed.  The youth conference was only around 30 minutes away, and we would leave the next morning after breakfast.

Two days ago, I loaded the backpack and suitcase I would be living out of for the next two weeks into the car, and headed off for Phil’s place.  Once I got there, I found Phil slightly agitated that the Children of the Promise CDs still hadn’t arrived.  We had planned on taking 50 with us to the Philippines, so it was a bit of a worry.

After some youtube watching and collecting of various PDFs for use in the Philippines, it was lunch time.  The CDs still hadn’t arrived, so it looked like we would be leaving without them.  But then, during lunch, they arrived! Two massive boxes.  Timon’s suitcase was frantically rearranged to accommodate the 50 CDs – quite a bulky addition.

There was quite a bit of traffic on the way to the airport, but fortunately most of it was heading the other direction. so we arrived in plenty of time.  It turned out we got out of the car at the opposite end of the airport to the Singapore Airlines check-in counters, we had a nice long walk.  There was almost no queue at check-in, so it didn’t take long to get that all sorted, fill out our departure cards (which I had to do twice, due to inadvertently declaring greater than $10k on the first one), and go through customs.

Then we had about two hours to kill, wandering around the duty free shops, looking for headphone adaptors for the aircraft plug, and at prices of various other items available for inflated prices.  Some drinks and food were also consumed while we waited to board the A380 that would take us to Singapore.

The eight hour flight to Singapore was relatively uneventful.  A meal, a snack, various beverage choices, and plenty of movies or tv shows to watch.  I elected mainly to read and sleep – I wasn’t too interested in the selection available.  But it turned out there was an interesting documentary on the Bugatti Veyron, which I watched between Singapore and Manila.

While waiting to disembark and Singapore, we wondered how many people would fit on the plane.  The economy row numbers went up to 62 (we were in row 60 and 61), and at 10 seats wide, that made for a lot of passengers.  So on the way out, Timon asked one of the cabin crew.  He told us around 400, plus first and business. Then he offered to give us a tour of the plane, which we gladly accepted.  We saw the capsule-like seating of first class, and the enormous armchairs that were the seats in business class.

Our first order of business once we got into the airport was to locate the transit hotel.  We had tried to book a room in advance, but were told that it was booked out.  Fortunately there was a cancellation when we inquired, so we booked it until 8am, and went to find something to eat.

While looking for something to eat, we noticed a giant Angry Birds stand in the airport.  It turned out that, with a receipt of greater than $120 SGD and a boarding pass, we could get a free stuffed Angry Birds toy.  Unfortunately they had no pigs left, so we got one of the red birds.

In the morning, after our wake up call, we showered and packed, then searched for a place to have breakfast.  We made enquiries about changing Australian cash into Philippine Pesos, but discovered that we would lose out on the intermediary change to SGD, so we elected not to change any cash there.