South East Asia - Singapore Chinatown aka Our coronavirus vacation

We are off on a 2 week vacation to South East Asia.  Starting in Singapore for 4 nights, then 11 day cruise to Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam ending in Hong Kong.  So excited to see this part of the world.  We would not normally do this by cruise, but loved the itinerary and think this will give us a good idea of where we would like to visit again one day.

Flights are Moncton - Toronto, Toronto - Manila, Manila - Singapore.  From Toronto on we are on Philippine Airlines.  A 3 hours stop in Toronto, and a 5 hour stop in Manila, its going to be a long flying day, approx. 22 hours of flights, plus stops.  We paid extra for the 16.5 hour flight from Toronto to Manila to get bulk head seats, the rest we will just have to deal with the cramped quarters.

Marc picked us up at home and dropped us off at the airport, thanks again Marc!  Uneventful trip to Toronto, everything is on time so lots of time to kill.

Most wheelchairs boarding I have ever seen.  This is only about half. They were also weighting our carry on luggage.   We had to rebalance our carry on.

Next stop Manila.  I did not count how many movies I partially watched, but you can watch a lot in 16.5 hours.  We seemed to keep being fed, I think we had 3 dinners, and all were surprisingly good.  Bulkhead seating was worth every penny, we were the only 2 in our row, and tons of space around us.  This is the weirdest immigration process we have ever gone through.  There is an attendant when we get off the plane that escorts those that are just transferring to this other part of the airport.  They take our passports from us and disappear.  We are then taken to a bus, where we are delivered to our gate and given our passports back.  I think we went through security 3 times, it was so unusual but we had been warned that it was unusual so knew a little about what was coming.

Finally on to Singapore.  This is when we should have known this trip was going to go a little off the wall.  Waited and waited for luggage, ours did not come out.  Found someone to help us, all was off the plane.  Off we go to lost luggage, found out our luggage was still in Toronto, our connections were too tight they told us, what 3 hours and it couldn't connect?  It will be here tomorrow and they will ship it to the hotel.  Off to find our driver that is arranged to pick us up at the airport.  He is really upset because he has been waiting for 1 hour and parking is really expensive and he has to pay it.  We called the emergency number in our documents to say we were late, but he never got the message.  So, no time to explore the airport, and we are off with our 2 pieces of carry on luggage to the hotel.  Driver punched in the ticket for parking $2.70 Singapore dollars, which is pretty much equivalent to the Canadian dollar, not sure why he was so upset.

On the drive to the hotel we saw signs that one of the streets in Chinatown was closed due to festivities for Chinese New Year, as you can guess now we know what we will be doing this afternoon, off to find Chinatown.

The Singapore airport is one of the nicest airports in the world. No time to visit it now as we are behind schedule because of the lost luggage. Oh well!

Our drive from airport to hotel, so much green, Singapore is beautiful right from landing. Anyone noticed what side the driver is on?

Our view from the hotel room.

From our hotel bottom floor we connect to a small mall which has one of the MRT stops in it.  Here we are trying to figure out how to buy tickets.  Thankfully all instructions and all announcements are made in English.  We want to get to a stop that we can buy a tourist ticket.  For $30 you can buy unlimited 3 day pass, and when you turn the pass back in you get $10 back.  A no brainer.  The MRT is fantastic here, so easy to use and exceptionally clean, as all of Singapore is.

Diagrams on the floor to show you where to queue up for the trains.  We pretty much travelled on non peak hours, I only remember one big queue that you had to wait for the second train

Made it to Chinatown, it is the Year of the Rat, lots of symbols around.  Was going to write lots of rats around, but didn't sound right.

That's a lot of dumplings being delivered somewhere.  We will for sure be sampling some over the next couple of weeks

Floats getting ready for later tonight

Rats!

We visited a number of temples, most of them we were allowed to enter, just always had to take our shoes off 

We mostly ate at Hawker stalls the entire time in Singapore.  They ranged from tiny mom and pop places, to more fancy like the ones below.  Very inexpensive and great food.

Mango juice for me please

Loved the benches at this spot

The murals in Chinatown were amazing, had to remind ourselves to keep looking on the sides of buildings to find them

We have now been in the same clothes for about 48 hours, find a department store, off for some new undies at least.  I find the ladies department, size large in Singapore is about equivalate to our tiny.  A woman comes to help me, I know I am not tiny, but this did not make me feel good, I'm size 3X in Singapore, that was the largest they had.  What on earth do obese women do in Singapore? Andre did better than me, they showed actual waist sizes on his, but no size 12 socks to be found.  2 cheap Singapore souvenir tshirts to wear tomorrow and we are good to go.

We stayed in Chinatown through to dark to see the floats lit up.  Again we should have had an idea of what was to come.  Before we could walk beside the floats we had our temperatures taken, but just outside the rope no temperatures taken, it was very strange.  Maybe 10% of the people here are wearing masks.  Signs posted around to only wear masks if you have a cold.

These girls were flipping the plate upside down and back up without dropping what was on top.  It was really amazing to watch, dancing and flipping the plate back and forth, beautiful

Dinner tonight from the mall that is underground with the MRT and the connected with the hotel, we both love noodles, will have lots of these the next couple of weeks we are sure.