Day 00 : Surabaya - Singapore

I'll be documenting my 16-days trip in US in the next few days. But first, let's preserve some interesting link again: TopCoder 2005 Finalists Press Release.

Since I'm a coder, I'll start with 0-based index :). Besides we weren't in US yet on day 0. Here was my complete itinerary:
GA 842L - 08 Oct 2005 - SUB-SIN - 0700 1010
NW 6M - 09 Oct 2005 - SIN-NRT - 0600 1415
NW 28M - 09 Oct 2005 - NRT-SFO - 1610 0930

NW 1M - 25 Oct - LAX-NRT - 1310 1700
NW 5M - 26 Oct - NRT-SIN - 1845 0105
GA 843L - 27 Oct - SIN-SUB - 1810 1925

The round-trip plane ticket cost was USD 915 (it was a low-season). Anyway if you're flying with NorthWest (or any planes), you shouldn't forget to register for the frequent flyer program. I got about 17,231 pts from this trip alone. Another 2,769 pts would earn me a free ticket to any destination in Asia. Wow. Just hope NorthWest will be doing fine, considering they just filed something like a bankruptcy protection program in US. But I'm sure they will be, their planes are very clean, well-equipped, and pretty much comfortable. I'm a happy customer.

We left Surabaya at 08 Oct 2005 07.00 using Garuda Indonesia. The trip to Singapore was about 2 hours and we arrived there at 10.00 local time. Going abroad was my wife's first experience, so I can tell you how excited she was all the time.

Oh, before leaving Juanda (Surabaya), we met our friend, Ruslan, who was also going to Singapore. So we were on the same flight, and thanks to him, we got a free taxi ride from Changi to our hotel.

I had a funny incident at Changi. Somehow, before the immigration clearance, while filling the immigration form, I left my cellphone on top of the table. And I forgot to take it back. I realized it when I was about to enter the taxi, so I quickly rushed back into the terminal. Thank God, it was still there.

We had to stay 1 night in Singapore because the flight to Japan would leave early the next day. We chose the earliest Garuda flight so that we could enjoy Singapore for a whole day. NorthWest is very generous to give us Furama RiverFront hotel. It was a pretty nice hotel. Unfortunately since we came too early, there were no room available yet. Wow, it's definitely not a low season in Singapore. So we had to wait about 1 hour for a room to be cleaned. We were given a welcome-drink voucher to be spent at the hotel's lounge. While waiting, I checked with my laptop and apparently they had wireless internet, but it's not free :(.

The hotel was about 15 minutes of walk from Chinatown, but we decided to go to the famous Orchard first. Besides, the hotel provided a free shuttle bus to Orchard. It was Saturday so it was pretty crowded at Orchard. My wife told me she preferred to do sight-seeing instead of shopping. So we took a quick sweep of malls and plazas around Orchard, and decided to have our lunch at Yoshinoya inside Takashimaya. The food was great. I recommend it to everyone. Unfortunately we forgot to pay a visit to Borders.

I still had my EZ-Link card from my previous visit, so I bought another one for SGD15 for my wife. Armed with this, we were ready to travel all around the city. I planned to take my wife to Sentosa to watch the beautiful musical fountain (the only must-see attraction at Sentosa IMHO); but I thought it was still to early. So we decided to visit Suntec first, which is just next to Orchard.

Crowded Orchard	Fountain wealth @ Suntec

Around 5 PM, we decided to go to Sentosa. The only thing we would like to see was the musical fountain which started at 7.40 PM. Based on my experience, if you would like to get the best view (straight in front of the fountain), you'd need to arrive at least 1 hour before. My guess was right, it was pretty crowded already at around 6.30 PM there; but we managed to find a perfect spot. The show was really spectacular. The last time I saw this was about 7 years ago, and they had "upgraded" the story. 7 years ago, the laser could only draw the outline; but now they could "fill" and draw the complete character. There was also fire burst out occasionally and you could actually feel it's hot.

Took a cable car	Flower clock (about 6.02 PM)

The fountain garden	Musical fountain at 7.00 PM

Amazing laser	Drawing a woman

With fire	Me with Merlion @ Sentosa

After that, we took the cable car back, had dinner (some Vietnamese meal), went back to the hotel to get a rest as we had to wake up early morning for the flight to the US the next day.