On Friday morning, we headed to the airport to catch our flight to Singapore. After checking in, we found a small cafe to get some breakfast, what a mistake. We saw a KFC, but ironically, it wasn’t open. When we finally boarded the plane, we realized that our flight would be stopping over in Kuching, a minor disappointment since I thought we had a direct flight, good thing it was only a 45 minute stopover.
Once we got into Singapore, we took an airport taxi straight to our hotel. After checking in, we went looking for food, and discovered that there was a food court in the small mall connecting to our hotel. We got our first laksa of the trip:
[trip photostream]
We then headed into the office which is only a couple of blocks away from the hotel for some meetings. Afterwards, we went to check out Singapore’s latest mall VIVO City. Our manager kept telling us that it was really big, but after walking through it a couple of times, we felt it had nice wide corridors, but wasn’t that big compared to malls in SoCal. The mall did have one nice feature, the top floor was covered with a grassy park and a wading pool in the middle. Oh, and another nice feature was their food court called Food Republic (there’s another one on Orchard Road). Our cousin Leong stopped by after work to join us for some dinner and dessert:
After dinner, Elijah hung out at the hotel, while I headed out for a late night meeting with one of our leaders and a doctor from one of the leading hospitals in Singapore. It proved to be a rather informative and encouraging meeting, but it sure was tiring. Finally got back to the hotel around 11:30pm.
On Saturday morning, we got woken up by our hotel telephone ringing. When I went to pick it up, it was our Auntie Mary calling with a ‘wake-up’ call. She found out from our cousin that we were in town and wanted to bring by another cousin from Kuala Lumpur who happened to be in town as well. They joined us for breakfast in the hotel, which was unplanned but a nice surprise and welcome time of catching up.
In the afternoon, we had a bunch of meetings including taking out some of our Singapore office staff to lunch. And finished off by giving our last speeches in the afternoon. What a relief to be done with that.
We then headed over to Holland Village at the suggestion of another cousin living in Singapore. We went to check out some electronics, but didn’t find anything that we couldn’t get at home for the same price. Turns out, Holland Village is a nice outdoor shopping and eating area where a lot of expats hang out. They even had a Coffee Bean (which are all over Singapore, what a wonderful city).
For dinner, our Co cousins took us to meet up with their parents at Singapore Island Country Club for some delicious chili crab which they had ordered ahead of time just for us. They made us finish every last piece, which was quite a bit of work, but worth every bite.
On Sunday morning, we had one last bit of business. We took the MRT (first time, very convenient) to Raffles City Convention Center to visit a cardiologist conference which we were sponsoring. Didn’t take too long and we headed back to the hotel to check-out.
For brunch, our cousin Phebe picked us up and took us to her current favorite restaurant Brown Sugar. Not exactly sure how to describe the food, kind of like modern casual gourmet. The omelettes we had were pretty good, but what really stood out was the wagyu hamburger topped with foie gras and the two pastry desserts, one made from dates and another from peaches.
We finally headed over to the airport, where we checked-in and did some last minute duty-free shopping. We then boarded the plane for a 4 hour flight to Taipei, a 4 hour layover, and a 12 hour flight back to LA. Fortunately, the business class lounge in Taipei is quite nice and we got to take showers while we were waiting. The flight back to LA wasn’t too bad, slept a few hours and watched some average flicks.
When we got to LAX, the airport was totally packed with a bunch of incoming international flights. We got through immigration after a bit of a wait, grabbed our luggage and joined the customs green line to get out. What we didn’t realize was that we accidentally picked up some first class guy’s luggage by accident, and I didn’t see it until after getting all the way back home. We called the airline but the office was closed by then, so we called them in the morning and ended up having to take the luggage back to LAX and exchange it for our luggage. That is a good lesson to always check our tags before you head out of the airport.