So far we spent the first day entirely on traveling. We arrived at the Singapore KTM station at around 8:00 in the morning. Now we had to get to our hotel on Beach Road. No, it’s not the Raffles Hotel (which is at #1 Beach Road). Fat chance.

We took a cab that had a flag down rate of S$2.40. We found out soon enough that Singapore has a tax for nearly everything. Because we passed through the central business district, we had to pay an extra dollar. Taxis also charge one dollar if it’s rush hour. Honey, there’s nothing rush about their rush hour. We breezed through and were at our destination in less than 10 minutes.

We were staying at the Beach Hotel at the corner of Beach Road and Liang Seah Street. The room was clean and so was the bathroom. We booked through the website. If you look through it, you’ll see a page that lists budget hotels in the country you are going. If I remember correctly, our room cost Php900++ per person per night. It costs less if you’re four in a room, Php800++ per person per night.

As soon as we unloaded our bags in the room, we got out to have breakfast, at where else, but McDonald’s? I forgot how much the Big Breakfast costs but to be sure, it’s much more expensive than I expected. Well upon exploring a bit we found that we were very near Bugis Junction where there are several malls and tempting opportunities for shopping.

According to my guidebook, Bugis street was once like our Ermita but the government decided to take all the scandalous fun away and sanitized it with gleaming malls and a tiangge area a few years ago. However, the area looked promising and we couldn’t wait for a free day where we could explore more.

After breakfast we headed back to the hotel to take that much-needed shower. Spending the entire day snoozing would have been great but we were in Singapore to work. And work we did until about 6:00 p.m. Then we went back to the hotel, freshened up, took a longing look at our comfy beds and headed back out.

We were scheduled to have dinner with our subject’s husband and two Singaporean filmmakers at 8:00 p.m. our directions were for us to take bus number 100 to the Harbour Front City Center bus stop, and take a cab into Temenggong Road.

Easier said than done. Harbour Front is an area right across the famous Sentosa island. From where we alighted we could see the cable cars coming from Mt. Faber making its way to Sentosa. It was hard to get a cab on a Friday night. I remembered y_slaybelle’s observation about taxi drivers in Singapore. One guy even tried to charge us S$25 which he said was a flat rate. Well, taxi drivers after all, are human, either that, or that guy’s a Filipino. Temenggong Road turned out to be very near the Harbour Front but walking on it at night was not recommended because the road is very dark and goes uphill.

Our host took pity on us and picked us up about halfway up the hill. We arrived at the house at 9:00 p.m. By that time, all three of us were hungry, sleepy and very, very tired. The dinner was excellent but about 10 minutes into it I felt really woozy and not quite there. I had been drinking chardonnay – not a very good idea. I drank copious amounts of water after that so I was able to hold a perfectly intelligent conversation with the people at the dinner.

It was my first time to be in such a dinner (wine, chocolates, and dates, and an offer of barley or coffee afterwards) and I’m glad I’ve had excellent education that did not fail me at that moment.

We had to tell our host how arduous our train ride from KL had been so they told us to take the bus instead. Not only is it cheaper, they said, it is also faster and more convenient. We promised to look into it. Actually, anything else looks good after that train ride. Though it is an experience worth having, it’s not worth repeating. Take the plane straight to Singapore if you can!

At around midnight we had to admit defeat to our exhaustion. We called a cab (an additional S$3.60 on the meter if you do so, plus a surcharge for the late hour) that took us right to our hotel’s doorstep. We declined to take up our host’s recommendation to go and experience the night life in Boat Quay which they said was “jumping” at that hour. Never mind, we’d like to do a different kind of jumping ourselves, from the shower and straight into our beds.