My flight out of Singapore is at 4:40 am from Changi Airport Terminal 4 tomorrow. There is a 24-hour lounge airside in Terminal 4 which my Scotiabank card seems to give free access to (6 lounge accesses per year, this will be #2), so my plan was to check out at 10 pm or so, train over to the airport, deposit my bags, and get past security, spend a couple hours in the lounge for “dinner”, and then catch my plane.

Now, this might sound a little weird to seasoned travellers — generally, the checked bag counter doesn’t open until 2.5-3 hours before the flight, which would be 1:40-2:10 am, and boarding is usually half an hour before, so 4:10 am. My specific flight has an exception which Gemini alerted me to though, and when asked for a source, it did indeed produce this link (local) which seems accurate — T4 Row 4 opens at midnight “only for HU448 / HU7910 (STD 04:40)” passengers. Hey, that’s me. Ok great. So that’s worth a try at least.

Anyway, all this was to say that this last day in Singapore wasn’t a “full” day for me, since it meant that I needed to shower and pack and get ready to leave from at least the evening onwards. I wouldn’t be able to just be out until 10 pm and then pop into the hotel and grab my stuff and then leave. I mean, I could, but I would be dreadfully stinky and uncomfortable for the next 24h as well, not to mention my blog and work would suffer. Plus I still needed time to plan out the China leg of my trip.

So I gave myself another light day in terms of activity. I just had two outside-related goals for the day, one was to meet Allen for lunch, and the second was to try to find some belinjo crackers for Dad.

The rest of my day, both before and after my adventure outside, was spent finalizing some dates and booking a couple of train tickets and hotel reservations for my first two cities in China. I’ve also booked my exit flight from China, this will see me going back to Japan on Mar 19, four days ahead of my early morning flight home on the 23rd. Everything’s finally beginning to fall into place.

For my sole venture outdoors today, I had contacted Allen a couple of days ago, while in the throes of being sad after the Kaiting meetup ended, asking him if he were interested in perhaps grabbing lunch together. He stayed in Vancouver for a while but we never did meet up there, even though we tried a couple times. The most awkward time was when he was coming to Edmonton coincidentally right when I was leaving for Japan, and we weren’t able to meet up at that time. Doh. I then reached out to him last year before I went to Vancouver as part of my Jilted Jaunts diary series, only to find that at that point he and his wife had already moved back to Singapore. Double doh. We’re the worst, aren’t we?

Anyway, this time the both of us were detemined to finally meet. He lives out by Tampines now, and that area is very dear to my heart as well, so I didn’t mind hopping onto a train and going out east one last time. I met him at the food court in Tampines 1, one of the new malls that did not exist when I left Singapore, and after some excited greetings he immediately offered to buy me lunch. Too many people have been so nice to me this trip like this, but it is also a sign of friendship that one should gracefully accept this sort of offer, as long as they let me reciprocate if they ever come by my place. So my lunch, sponsored by Allen, was Fried Kway Teow from the Jason Penang Cuisine store in Hawkers’ Street in Tampines 1.

We spent quite some time catching up, talking about our life paths over the past 25 years and the mutual friends we had, and, since we both had spent time living in Canada, a lot of back and forth about life under the maple leaf versus life under the five stars and moon. Tigey was also “overjoyed” to meet his progenitor again after all these years, and posed for a picture or two with us, the first one being here:

I then told Allen about my second quest of the day, to find some belinjo crackers for Dad, and Allen suggested that we go take a walk around the Tampines heartlands-style shopping street not far from the malls. It was terribly hot outside, but I was happy to spend time with an old friend like this, plus I figure I’d have a much higher chance of finding them with his help, so off we went! And indeed, we found multiple shops selling some version of them, although Dad only likes cooked ones and I wasn’t sure which of them fit his criteria and which did not. He had also gone to bed already and wasn’t answering his WhatsApp chats, so in the end I had to turn to Jon and Kel and send them a few photos to see if they could tell whether it would be something he would like.

In the end, though it was a bit bulkier, I got a couple plastic cans of it, with the hope that it would survive another month being jostled around between thick books and papers. And hopefully it doesn’t get confiscated along the way or something. Will the belinjo make it home in intact cracker form and not crumb form? Will Dad like them? Stay tuned to find out! The cans I ended up getting looked like this on the shelf:

For future reference, never mind the Indonesian mom and pop stores, if these work then the best place to find belinjo crackers seems to be Sheng Siong Supermarket, which I had seen a couple of on my journeys but never did actually go into until today. I’m glad Allen was savvy enough to know of them as a good source!

While chatting, I also told him about the nearby Sunplaza Park/Sun Plaza Park, which was located a street or so away from the shopping street. To my surprise, Allen said that he actually lived in a HDB flat very close to the park, and that he would walk through it on the way home. What a coincidence. Of all the places in Singapore to live, he happens to live right by the park that contains such a strong core memory for me and that I’ve specifically pilgrimmaged to every trip back to Singapore, including this one. That’s crazy. Crazy enough that we decided to go to the park together and take some pictures there, adding even further meaning to the park for me.

Just like I did with Kaiting, I also got that one last shot of him walking away at the end, hehe.

On the way to the park, I had also noted to him that I had not seen a single stray cat this trip to Singapore thus far, although there had been plenty of chickens and some other animals as well. He noted a chicken hiding in the bush and staring at us as we chatted about this, and that was a moment that I really should have captured, but oh well. More importantly though, right after we had split up, and on my way back from Sun Plaza Park to the shopping street to go buy that belinjo since my siblings had responded to my request for assistance in the interim, I finally saw my first stray cat of the trip!

Take care of yourself, feral warrior. Allen told me that the Singapore government, as of a couple of years ago, had finally made it legal for people living in HDB flats to own cats, although unofficially people had been doing that for ages already. I mean, Ah Ma and Dad used to have a cat when they lived together in an old flat on Ganges Avenue (that no longer exists) before Dad married Mom and moved out to Clementi. Anyway we surmised that the change in rules meant there were less cats being abandoned and more cats being adopted, and together this meant a decline in the number of stray cats overall. This was just our hypothesis though.

Anyway, it was nice to see Allen again, and finally, after our multiple failures to hook up in the past. I cherish and treasure all these moments that I get to meet up with my old friends again, because who knows how long more in the future these meetings will be possible. They’re precious, definitely the highlights of my trip.

Nothing else of note happened on the way to the supermarket and then back home, except that I saw this umbrella initiative thing that I thought was a good idea — but then the actual rack itself was empty even though it was a bright, shiny day.

Umbrellas aren’t that pricey though, and for such a rainy place like Singapore, I thought this was a genius initiative, it just needed to be constantly backed up with enough umbrellas that people lose the urge to take them when not needed because they know several will always be there.

Fast forward to my return to the hotel, and the front desk waved me down as I entered and asked me to return the weighing scale as someone else needed them. I was actually quite impressed that they knew who requested it, as my initial request had been made over WhatsApp (so that would have connected it to a room number that they could look up) and was resolved by an attendant coming to the door the previous day and handing me the weighing scale, but I didn’t think they knew my room number by just looking at me or anything. Anyway I returned it to the staff member who followed me up the elevator and to my door, then drowned a few more drain flies in the shower before having one last soak there, before settling down to do some writing until it was time to check out.

i left the service apartment where I had spent the last week and a half (and murdered an entire village of drain flies) at about 10:20 pm. I reached Somerset MRT with my heavy bag in tow at about 10:30 pm, and comfortably caught the trains to the airport, including two line transfers along the way. When I got to the airport, the train that I was on was announced to be the last train going back the other way that would allow one to catch the east-west line going west, and multiple announcements were made as stragglers rushed to make it onto the train..

But that was no longer my concern, as I was headed the other way. I took the shuttle bus from Terminal 2 to Terminal 4, and then found a weighing scale while waiting for the midnight checkin counter to open. I was 1.5 kg overweight on my large bag, so I removed a few things and put them into my carryons until the check-in bag read 19.98 kg. Giri giri safe, as they say. My other two bags are 6.98 kg and 6.34 kg though, though that includes things like my brick of a phone which I can just slip into my pocket, along with probably a couple of power banks if need be. Some airlines say you can carry on 7 kg and some say 10, and I’m definitely well over the 7 and depending on how they measure it the 10 is pretty close once I remove and wear my jacket and the phone and maybe hide the power banks somewhere. Oh well, the important one, the big luggage bag, got on fine.

After depositing my bag, I crossed immigration without issue and went looking for the Terminal 4 lounge called Blossom. Ronnie happened to send me a text around that time, so we started a Google Meet call to check in with each other regarding work before I plunge behind the Great Firewall. I then took some pictures of the terminal, which surprisingly stil had a few stores open and a number of people milling around, even at 12:42 am.

I found my target soon enough, the 24-hour Terminal 4 airside lounge, Blossom – SATS & Plaza Premium Lounge.

I used up my second of six free lounge passes for the calendar year here, and was given two hours of access to the lounge, although in practice they didn’t chase me out after the two hours was up so I stayed closer to three. The lounge was huge, with tons of seating, though not every seat had power sockets. Many did, though. Here are some shots showing just some of the myriad seating options available.

And a look down from the second storey mezzanine where we were, to the ground floor below:

There were tons of food options, starting with a salad bar and snacks:

Pancakes:

Toastable bread:

And uh, Udders Ice Cream:

There was a cabinet of free drinks as well, some alcoholic and some not, though they stopped serving alcohol at 1:45 am and it was forbidden to drink it after 2 am and before 6 am, which I guess is when they have minimal staff on site:

There was a kitchen you could ring a bell and order small bowls of specific dishes from:

And most importantly, various hot plates of food. Two off to the side provided Chef’s Pasta and Chicken Sausage, these two were static through the night:

And another one was a pot of Plain Porridge, I believe that this was static as well.

There were four pots that rotated though. Two of them initially had Vegetable Ratatouille and Fried Fish:

While the other two had Fried Chicken and Turmeric Fried Rice:

At about 1:15 am though, I saw them removing those pots, and by 1:30 am or so they were bringing out new pots. The four new items consisted of Popcorn Chicken and Fried Rice:

And hash browns and scrambled eggs:

I had had no breakfast, a decent lunch, no dinner, and this was meant to be at least my breakfast as well. And lounge access is basically a free buffet that I had been looking forward to for most of the day. So let’s count my gluttony.

One, with that turmeric rice and a sampling of the other three rotating hot bowls:

Two, with pasta, a sausage, the ratatouille, some fish, and chicken:

Three, pretty much the same except I dropped the chicken:

Four, at this point they had removed the four rotating hot bowls so I had pasta with salad instead:

Five, trying the new stuff once they brought out the four new hot pots:

And then some porridge to wash it down, plus a glass of orange juice much later on:

Yum. The ratatouille was fantastic. Wish I could have had more of that. I definitely ate a ton, perhaps a little too much, but hey, it was “free” and this counts as tomorrow’s breakfast too. Might even push back lunch until late. Who knows what sort of mess I’ll get myself into trying to get to the hotel and checking in using Chinese apps instead of Google Maps and Google Translate.

For now though, it’s 3:36 am on Feb 24, with boarding in 24 minutes, so this blog post ends here. Hopefully I’ll get onto the plane without being challenged for baggage weight, and the plane ride will be uneventful, and the next blog post will be all about how nice my new hotel room is or something like that!

Signing off one final time from outside the Great Firewall!