Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Honeymoon Part 1: Singapore Day 1

This is the first post of two part series that will contain our (me and my wife) journey during our honeymoon in Singapore and Bali. We will focus on Singapore first and i will continue with other post in Bali later on.

We started our journey at October 3 by leaving to Adisucipto International Airport of Yogyakarta at 6 AM in the morning. Since it was early in the morning, we had no traffic jam during the trip. When we got there, we directly went to the check in station and leave our baggages since we have already checked-in using the web check-in on AirAsia's website (You will have to pay IDR 30000 if you do a local check-in in the counter Nodance). Next, we moved on to the imigration counter and again, since it's early in the morning, we didn't have to wait too long. I only had one person in front of me, so it would take us only 3-4 minutes to complete the imigration process. Our plane goes directly to Singapore and we departed at 7.40 AM.

We arrived in Singapore around 11 AM (there was 1 hour difference between Yogyakarta and Singapore's time) and we were picked up by Mr. Salim, our local guide and driver. He had to wait for an hour since the baggage claim process was a bit late and i had to register for a username/password for WiFI in the information center. Later, i just found out that that username/password was only valid for 4 hours Doh

Mr. Salim is a nice person. Even though he's Singaporean, he could talk Indonesian a bit since he could speak Melayu. We had no problem communicating with him. We stayed at OAsia Hotel, near Novena Square. It's very close to MRT station in Novena since it's under Novena Square, so it's very easy for us to go anywhere in Singapore using MRT station.

In Singapore, we didn't use any local tour since we have been there, so Mr. Salim only acted as our driver. He picked us from the airport of Changi and dropped us at the hotel and we go on our own.

In the first day, we only went to Orchard to take a walk and also to Chinatown to buy dinner using MRT. Something funny happened when i tried to use Google Maps in Singapore on my iPad. It gave me the opposite direction so i had some argument with my wife over this technologylmao. I posted on Twitter and someone replied to me that i should try Street Directory instead of Google Maps. Unfortunately, i haven't had time to test this feature as i only used Street Directory to find information about places, not direction to that place.

Since my wife didn't bring her EZ-Link card, she had to buy a new one in Singapore and it costs her SGD 12 and she got SGD 7 as the balance, cheaper than previous card which cost me SGD 15 (but i got SGD 10 balance) last year. The card was different with what i got. Later on, i found out that EZ-Link produced new card and they are going to replace the old card with the new one. The old EZ-Link card will still be usable until the end of this year and if you do have one, it's time to refund the old one and buy the new one. Luckily, mine is still considered new (mine is still the blue version, but it has longer serial number compared to the six digit in the old one).

That's all for day one in Singapore. We will continue with day 2 tomorrow Goodluck

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