Wednesday 5 October
At the crazy hour of 2:30am, we woke up and checked out of the Citygate Hotel, Hong Kong.
The gentleman at reception was quite surprised to see us, but he was veryhelpful and called a cab for us.
The taxi ride was fast; the driver was going at least 110km on the 30min trip. It cost us close to hk$200 only.
Ant and I marvelled at how there were still so many people out on the streets and in restaurants at 3am. Crazy.
HK airport is a maze; we had to check-in at T2 and then board at T1. Our flight was at 6:05am so we had to be at the boarding gate by 5:45am. The problem is, security at Passport Control would not let us enter because the secure area did not officially open until 6am. We didn't really care but some passengers kicked up a fuss which saw us going through to our boarding gate on time.
We managed to get quite a bit of sleep on the plane; well I know I did. We touched down at Changi Airport at around 11am and went through the motions of clearing Customs who didn't seem concerned that we had food and just waved us through. After exchanging our money (we were sad that the Singapore dollar is almost on par with the Australian - sg$1 = au$1.2), buying a sim card and visiting the Information Centre, we sat down to eat and was introduced to our first cup of yummy Singaporean tea.
Tea is called teh here. It's brewed and made with both evaporated milk and condensed milk. It's absolutely delicious.
We also discovered food in Singapore is very cheap. My bowl of laksa only cost sg$3.90. Admittedly it only had noodles, 4 slices of fish cake, and three big cubes of tofu.
While at the food shop, the money exchange guy came running up to us and heaved a big sigh of relief. Apparantly he had charged us the Malaysian exchange rate for the conversion of our HK dollars to Singaporean. This meant we had to give back about sg$150. Bummer!
The humidity hit us when we exited the airport. We caught the taxi to our hotel, Hotel 81 Lavender, which only cost sg$13.90.
Check-in at Hotel 81 is at 2pm but we got here at about 12pm. The clerk was nice enough to let us check in early without us having to even ask. Both Ant and I were curious about our room. Would it be nice? Or would it be terrible like the reviews on trip advisor had stated? The lobby was quite nice, despite it being small. Perhaps the room would be nice too?
The room was small; it fits a double bed with very threadbare sheets. The sheets also have little rips in them strangely. The mattress is wrapped in leather which is great in terms of cleanliness. Not great when you're trying to sleep though because the sheets tend to slide over the leather. The towels are also very thin and threadbare. There are no hand or face towels. There was also dust and hair everywhere; it looked like this room hadn't been occupied in a while.
The bathroom is just one big space with a sink, toilet and hand-held shower head. There is no curtain separating the shower head from the toilet which means the whole bathroom will get soaked after a shower. Personally I don't mind this too much but it does get annoying having to step on a wet floor when I need to pop into the bathroom to wash my hands after one of us has had a shower and there's water everywhere.
There isn't much space in the room. Besides a double bed, there is a little table with mirror on the wall. There is no wardrobe but four hooks on the wall. We booked the superior room so luckily we have a big window and window ledge where our suitcases immediately went. There isn't enough space on the floor to walk through otherwise. The standard room actually does not have a window. Lucky we were very thorough with our research and paid the extra sg$10!
After a quick tour of the room, we went out to discover our neighbourhood. We went to City Square Mall which is an eco mall.
We also went to Mustafa Centre which Ant came to when he was in Singapore with his family. It's a big department store with at least 4 levels selling everything and anything. We bought some snacks like kit kat for Ant and booja for me. Unfortunatley the hotel room does not have a hotel room so we couldn't get juice and milk like we did at City View.
We also went to the markets which sold lots of sari's and coconuts. It cost me sg$2 for a coconut and tasted quite different from the Fiji ones. Weird different.
Lunch was at Mohammads; a restaurant that Ant and his family ate at when they were here. He was incredibly excited that it was still standing. The food was ok.
We came back to our room before it got dark and hung around setting up our stuff.
Dinner was downstairs; next to the hotel is a Food court called Rendezvous Food Court. There are about 5 food shops in a big cafeteria-style indoor building. We had fried chicken wings, mango salad, tea and
Despite us being awake since 2:30am that morning, we stayed up until almost midnight. Because Ant asked about internet at reception and was told we had free access so naturally he was online all night.
No comments:
Post a Comment