Good Morning Singapore

28 hours door to door from the Gershon household (our very accommodating friends in Austin, TX) to the Marina Bay Sands lobby with 17 total pieces of luggage.  One awesome piece of borrowed luggage from V which looks like a body bag that belongs in a Quentin Tarantino movie.  Trip wasn't too bad...Kara and kids enjoyed the business class upgrades.  The service is really so much better up there.  My intention in upgrading wasn't to spoil anyone, but rather take another possible stressful variable out of the equation as I uprooted the family to go the other side of the world.  I kept reminding the kids..."don't get used to this....next time we'll be flying back there" and would motion towards the back of the plane.  Well, we'll see how many frequent flyer miles I have in the bank next time.  It will be tough to go back into coach after being able to sleep fully reclined.
After landing, we took our 4 carts of luggage over to the shuttle bus terminal and caught the 2 am shuttle to the hotel.  That sure beats the 3 cabs we would have had to take to carry our luggage over.  I think the shuttle driver was thinking...."why the hell do these people have so much friggin' luggage??!! and what is with the bodybag", but he had such a great attitude and cheerfully loaded them up.  On the way to the hotel, got the first traumatic email you get when you move to the other side of the world.  Our little dog Max has 4 large kidney stones and they need to do emergency surgery on him....sigh.  Got on the phone and authorized the vet to do whatever it takes to fix him up.  Dakota (our other dog) had this surgery in NY so I'm not too worried about him making it through.  Both dogs are going to be behind us by about a month or so due to typical animal import requirements (shots, bloodwork, quarantine).


Saw some interesting stuff during checkin:


1. Drunk woman with her wheelchair bound companion trying to convince the front desk that the room key she has is legit and she got it from a "friend" whose phone number she doesn't have.  Yeah, right.  Front desk personnel were patiently (almost too patiently) handling her.  She forgot her "friend's" name and the front desk wouldn't tell her what room any of the names she gave were in.  Meanwhile, her companion in the wheelchair is completely passed out.  I'm sure this situation would have been handled in the US with a quick call to the police, probably after the first 2 minutes.


2. Two females checking in who complained like crazy about getting a king size bed plus pullout instead of 2 twin/full size beds.  Its 2 am...take the room and go to sleep....file your complaint in the morning.  Also, they didn't understand why they had to pay for the room on July 6th since it was 2 AM on July 7th.  The front desk personnel politely said they could pay only for the 7th, but that checkin was 14 hours from now....classic deadpan.


Clearly, the US doesn't have the market on "strange" or "obnoxious ignorance" and man are the people polite over here.
Got up to our room which rocks and it took only two bellhops bring our entourage of luggage up.
My inner geek took over and I was frantically plugging in iphones, ipads, laptops, etc to get them all charged up.  Unfortunately I forgot that the power strip I brought over was surge protected....zap. Blew the breaker to the room (mental note: 230V doesn't equal 120V).  Maintenance call at 3 AM (I'm sure they are thinking we are a bunch of lunatics...yes, the Americans with the body bag and 16 other pieces of luggage.


Thank God there are plenty of outlets behind the desk.


Well, I've let the wife and kids sleep until 11:30 am...time to start the adventure.