First Trip Aboard
P.S. It's a throwback story again since I take forever to post something.
I have a dream of many that I've wanted to accomplish, it's as simple as having a passport. After waiting for my whole life, finally, I got my own passport in 2018. Before that, I checked on the internet about all the requirements needed and immediately I booked "the date" to apply for a passport through WhatsApp of the immigration office. Previously, I had almost managed to apply in another town, but oh well, it was not approved (by the universe) because I still didn't have some of the requirements. Indeed, no matter how much our effort is, if it is not yet permitted by the universe, it won't happen, right? 😂
But really, there was no intention from the beginning to have my own passport, it was just for fun, who knows someday I will need it, I thought. If not, maybe it can motivate me to go abroad, as a friend said to me in the past. Surprisingly one or two months since I got the passport, there were AirAsia flight ticket promos on the internet. Lucky me, I have close friends who like to travel as well, so right after we discussed, we booked the promo tickets. It's actually kind of a crazy idea, why? Because it's flight tickets to go back to Indonesia from Penang, Malaysia!!! It was very cheap so we couldn't resist it haha. Hmm but what about fly out from Indonesia? That's another problem. At least we secured the tickets and it's already in our hands hahaha.
Long short story, we decided to look for other tickets from the same promo. We found the right price, but it's for Singapore. Well, no problem, anyways we could "crossed" from Singapore to Malaysia later. The problem was we had a very long gap time between leave and go back home, it's around 14 days. Wow, what are we going to do? Okay, we have to make a long list of plans on how to survive for 2 weeks with limited money haha. When the date of our trip getting closer, sadly we could not manage to fly, because at that time we were still busy as volunteers for the Asian Games.
We submitted a refund for our "failed" tickets and agreed to leave on the next week. We just found the tickets from a different airline several days before our flight haha (insane people). A bit more expensive than the previous ones indeed, but at least it's still affordable. Finally, in September 2018, I was allowed to experience going abroad for the first time in my life and my blank passport was stamped. Hurray! I was so excited and couldn't believe it at the same time.
This is my first experience of going abroad. I know this is just an ordinary trip like everyone else's, but for me, this is something big because one of my dreams to see another country finally came true.
Day 0: What an Airport!
My friends and I landed around 20:00 local time and decided to not check-in at the hostel to save money, read: backpacker style haha. So we decided to wander around Changi airport which is the best airport in the world (so we're curious as hell!). We got off at Terminal 1 at that time, but we were hungry and we've heard that Terminal 2 had more complete facilities and restaurants, so we went there. We were confused about the immigration check if we should go for it now or later. We asked for direction from an information booth. Haha, stupidly we didn't pay attention (hey it's my first time asking abroad so don't judge me haha), and then one of my travel buddies asked the immigration authorities. Yup, with Malay language cause they knew we were confused as heck and if they explain it with English, maybe we will never get it. We were directed to take the Skytrain to Terminal 2. The first impression, the train was amazingly clean. The train seems to has been set up so that it can run automatically. How cool!
Arriving at Terminal 2, we looked around the area. Terminal 2 is very wide, it is basically a mall with branded stuff and also various interesting spots, one of which is a flower garden. Ok, nice spot to take some pictures. The airport was designed/built not only as a place for people to travel but also as a tourist place. Hmm we had the intention to just eat instant cup noodles but unfortunately, we didn't find any hot water, so we bought a sandwich and divided it up because the price was pretty expensive 😂 Then we found a place to sleep. There are plenty of lounge chairs for the passengers (mostly for the ones in transit) but all of them were full. Geez, finally after circling around we found an interesting area. This area is located in the corner of the terminal. It's "Sunflower Garden", but before we reached it, there is room to play video games with a lot of chairs and dim lights, perfect!
After taking pictures and enjoying the sunflower garden in late-night, we decided to rest on these chairs, and we saw some people also sleeping there haha. Some people even slept on the floor (I immediately thought they were Indonesians hahaha). Honestly, we were not too comfortable to sleep there because I read from the internet usually they have random checking in the middle of the night by the police/authorities, specifically to get rid of people who want to sleep for free in the airport. For those who are in transit and have a boarding pass for the next flights are allowed to stay at the airport. Since we couldn't really fall asleep, around 2:00 a.m. we decided to leave the transit area and head for the immigration section. I was a little worried because it was my first time abroad and my passport was still "innocent", afraid of being asked a lot of questions. We were only asked why we're in Terminal 2 instead of in Terminal 1, but we replied that we met a friend here and had dinner together haha (A little white lie!). The immigration officer I met turned out to speak Malay and also asked if this was my first time in Singapore and I said yes. Then I saw my passport got stamped, yippie! We went back to looking for a place to sleep and luckily there were plenty of chairs, hmm not bad. We fell asleep for a while before sunrise.
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