First stop after exiting my tour in China: Singapore.
It was possibly the worst red-eye flight I’ve ever taken. Slept only 45 minutes. To make matters worse, I was still viciously beating myself up for losing $600 worth of cameras. I had forgotten my DSLR and underwater camera on the plane during the layover in Shanghai. I knew it was stolen and gone forever even before I complained to the airline and the manager wearily picked up the phone to call the head cleaning lady at the cabin.
The manager called. Called again. He looked at me with dead eyes. “You can sit here and wait for a call back from security about the bag, or you can leave now to try to catch your next flight,” he said in Chinese. He was about to get off his night shift. Too late to trouble himself with more.
My plane was leaving in one hour. I had to abandon my search immediately, or I’d never make it out of China. I scribbled my name on a form with details of 20 other passengers who’d probably also never get their things back, and sprinted up and down escalators through the security check. My turquoise backpack bounced violently as I ran through the airport to my gate. Panic and chaos rattled my brain, the words “I can’t miss my flight!” banged like a gong in my thoughts. Did I remember how to breathe? I told myself to count my breaths. When I skidded up to the gate, sweat flying off my neck, passengers were lazily getting up from their seats and lining up in calm fashion. Made it.
Five hours later, when I got to the hostel in Singapore’s Chinatown, I was so spacey I couldn’t keep my wobbly head still as I drank a cup of black coffee. The lobby music blared an obnoxious blend of club music. “Can you play something calm? Please?” I said to the receptionist, hoping she noticed the look of distress in my crazy eyes.
There ain’t no rest for the wicked. With only three days in the city, I rushed to eat:
- Merci Marcel: I had the most western thing of all, avocado toast.
- Hawker Chan: Soya sauce chicken rice and noodles. The clincher was the dark, syrupy soya sauce luxuriously pooled on the bottom of the plate. Can you believe I ate here three times? Once for fun, second because I was desperately hungry and third, to cure a hangover.
- Telok Ayer: Hawker food stalls. It was the ultimate carb fest. My friend and I gobbled down a mix of hokkien seafood noodles, Hainan chicken rice and fried Kway Teow.
- Fullerton Bay Hotel: Rooftop drinks by the bay, sipping our cocktails as groups of runners below stretched and skipped around in their black tights and tanks.
Back in my hostel, I crawled into my cubbyhole bed, shut my eyes and tried to take a nap.
