It's Christmas!

Spending Christmas or the December holidays away from my family has not been a strange thing for me. This is already the sixth year I've been away from home for the holidays but this is the first time that I have been the farthest. This is the first time I'm celebrating Christmas and New Year festivities in another country.

Manila--After celebrating Noche Buena in Cainta with some of my most awesome friends from high school, I dashed my way back to the condo at 3AM to get my baggage and headed to NAIA Terminal 1, which beeteedubz still does not look like an airport you'd want our foreign visitors to come through, but the restrooms look nicer than before.

We arrived at Singapore near noon but only got to leave the airport past 1PM because *drumroll* we wanted to exchange our money but we didn't ask around for directions/too oblivious from the signage. We trusted our instincts and it led us into having a tour of the Changi Airport terminals. Who gets lost while looking for money changers!! Haha the only consolation is that at least we got to see this:


Then, we finally checked in to our hostels, yes hostels with an 's' because we booked separate hostels for the prime reason that I didn't want to spend more cash for a bed I'll only sleep on at night. Most of the time, admittedly, I'm a cheapskate. Because hey, the price difference WILL add up especially in a trip like ours that has 10 days in it.




After settling in, we met up with plans of going to Lau Pa Sat, as suggested by my internet friend Malen. Unfortunately, it was closed that day. We walked to Marina Bay Sands to look for food. We knew it was gonna be tough to find inexpensive food around the area so we opted to look for Makansutra instead, ONLY to find out that it was on the other side.

Makansutra isn't also exactly cheap and there are fewer choices here but we haven't had lunch and it's Christmas so we decided that that was the time to splurge on food. And even with differences, at least we had a common ground: seafood!

We ordered food from this stall. It was beside the Gerry's Grill stall. Yes, there is a Gerry's Grill stall!

Chili Crab. The photo couldn't do this crab justice. It was HUMONGOUS. See how it took over the frame of my lens?

Cereal Prawns. It was o-kay. Haha maybe I'm just not a fan of prawns being deep fried in oil. That or because I have cooked fresher, and not to mention, BIG ASS prawns.

Fried Rice. Good for 2 persons. It was very filling.

Lime with Sour Plum Juice. The official beverage for this trip b/c yum!

In case anyone's interested to know, here are our expenses in Makansutra.

Chili Crab - 30
Cereal Prawns - 18
Fried Rice - 10
Calamansi Plum - 1.70 * 2
Total Amount: 61.40

And the day did not end there! When we were looking for the nearest MRT station, we found out that it was the last day to contribute wishing white beach balls to the floating display in Marina Bay.

Those white floating things, yes, those are the white wishing beach balls I was referring to!

We went ahead and asked for a ball we can doodle and write our wishes on.

I'm not exactly an artist (I bribed my way out of high school art projects!) but our wishing ball turned out well.

It was very spur-of-the-moment. Then, a choir began singing Christmas songs in front of everyone. Ahhh that was an experience right there when investing money on travel is a lot better than buying material things.


After this, we tried to find Sim Lim Square to fulfill some techie lemmings because in my memory of this mall, it was heaven and things there are a lot cheaper too. But then, by now you've already probably guessed that we got lost, again.

Singapore Day 1 was a success! (despite every misadventure, yes.)

P.S. I'm writing this because I fell asleep on our clubbing night and then woke up because I had a nightmare according to my roommie. Then I found a lot of missed calls and texts on my phone, which I know costed a lot! Thanks Tonix and Santy for the concern and sorry for flaking!