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It’s only 9 am here but I’m back at good ol’ Changi Airport. My feet are blistering pretty bad so it feels good to sit. I walked all over Singapore through the night. I didn’t realize that 1:30 am to 9 am is a long time to stroll. So I’ve stuck a couple pieces of duct tape on my feet to thwart two extra painful spots.
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Before I get to the Singapore stuff, I’ll start from the beginning. Yesterday sometime, let’s just say 11:45 am Wednesday the 27th in Portland, I boarded the Portland Max train to get to the airport. There are a couple of transfers from Jon’s house but no big deal. On entering the 2nd train there was a lady talking and gesturing a bunch… to the wall of the train. Then there was this one girl who could barely take her eyes off me for some reason, maybe a large green booger, but she smiled once and all four top front teeth were missing. Cha-ching.
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Two interesting observations at the PDX. First, I could not find a single clock in the walkways. Is that normal? I remember Salt Lake City having one like every 10 feet. Second, my gate was at the very end of a terminal that had lost power. So there was no air conditioning and since there was no power to the terminal there was no power to the airplane, so it was at least 107 degrees inside. They wouldn’t let us on the plane with it that hot, which was fine, but it delayed the flight for an hour. Surprisingly, we still seemed to arrive in Tokyo on time.
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If you’ve read my previous blogs, you may recall my lengthy discussion regarding my seating assignment. Well, I ended up sitting in a completely different seat, 31A instead of 13J, because I met Sovathana, a Cambodian girl who’s lived most of her life near Portland. She’s going to Cambodia to work for an organization, the name escapes my mind right now, that is working to remove landmines and improve living conditions and stuff like that. She also gets to visit some of her family who still live in Cambodia; I don’t think Danica and I will run into her but you never know. The reason I started talking to her in the first place is because she asked me how far along I was in the new Harry Potter book, which I was clutching in my hand as I walked by. I had just bought it at the airport and had only read a chapter but I told her I was going to try and read it all before I got to Singapore and then ditch it somewhere. By the time we were nearing Tokyo, however, I decided I should sleep from Tokyo to Singapore instead of read so I let her have it (because she was only 1/3 through it). It’s cool because I’ll probably get it back now once she gets back to Portland and it will have had a bunch of adventures! She has 10 days in Hawaii after she’s done working too so the book will have its own stories to tell, probably not any pictures though…
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Unfortunately, I didn’t have any time in Tokyo at all, I had to just walk straight to the gate of the connecting flight. At the gate, they loaded us up in a bus and trucked us out to the plane. I think they ended up putting us right back on the same plane we just got off of. Not Sovathana though, she was headed straight to Bangkok from Tokyo. It was awesome flying in to Tokyo. There are tons and tons of rice fields. They’re very defined and green and pretty. In fact, the whole area seemed really green and pretty. I swear I saw like 5 amazing golf courses within miles of each other. The weird thing about Tokyo is how fast it got dark. When we arrived it was totally sunny and nice out and by the time I got to the gate and back on the plane it was gloomy and dark.
Here’s the scoop on drug trafficking in Singapore. The announcement over the speaker was fairly friendly and said drug trafficking is a “serious offence” and will result in “serious penalties.” But then they handed out these pieces of paper (kind of the shape and size of Scantrons) that foreigners have to fill out to get your temporary Visa. The information was really basic, like name and passport number and stuff like that. But in the lower left corner in bright red and caps it says:
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The last thing I have to say before I get to the Singapore stuff is that the NWA on-demand movie/music/info screen thing is run on Linux. Something happened to it and they rebooted it and it showed Linux starting up doing it’s thing. Heh, that’s a paragraph for us computie-types.