Songklan in Singapore

The kids are off of school the week of April 12th, and we are spending most of the week in Singapore. We will be in Thailand on April 13th to celebrate Songklan, but then we fly to Singapore on April 14th for six nights in what probably is Asia's most orderly and clean city.

We ended up booking through Singapore Airlines, which was running a promotion this month. The problem was that I had to go down and pay at their offices in Silom. It was a real pain in the butt.

I was already downtown getting an annual physical, so I took a cab over to the Singapore Airline offices. The cab ride was pretty cheap, less than three dollars with a tip.

When I entered the office, the security guard showed me to a seat, and went and got a queue number. There were three customer service representatives (CSR) who were helping clients, and there was one person ahead of me in line. Twenty minutes later I was sitting in front of a CSR, who after finding my reservation, informed me that she could not process promotions, and that I had to wait for the other CSR.

Fortunately, the other CSR reappeared shortly and began to process my order. Unfortunately, she was extraordinarily slow, printing out dozens of sheets of paper, and meticulously stamping them and making small notations on them. The promotion included a transfer from the airport to the hotel. We had six people going, so she had to print out six forms, stamp each one with three different stamps, and then writing on the stamps. It was excruciating to sit and watch.

Finally, after about forty minutes at this young woman's desk, she finalizes my papers, hand them to me along with three backpacks. The backpacks, while nice looking, were a bit awkward to carry because they had wheels and a handle so that they could be pulled.

I spotted a tuk tuk, an open air taxi, out in front of the building. He quoted me a price of about six dollars to return to the hospital, where I had left me car (free parking there). I said that is too expensive, he just said rot tit (traffic jam) and shrugged. I spent about ten minutes trying to catch a metered cab to no avail.

There was no way I was going to pay the driver six bucks for a two or three dollar tuk tuk ride, so I took the sky train. I wore one of the backpacks, and carried the other two. On about a half a dozen occasions, I almost put the two that I was carrying in the trash. I was just in a really bad mood and every little thing was annoying me.

Of course, when I made it back to the hospital, I had the pleasure of driving in Bangkok's wonderful rot tit. The expressway entrance is probably a kilometer from the hospital. When I rode the sky train back, it let me off at the expressway entrance and I had walked the rest of the way to the hospital. That walk took about half the time that driving to the expressway did. Of course, the drive was a heck of a lot cooler.