Well, it's never good when you have to hang around in the airport for four hours until your plane can leave, but free Internet access in the terminal and the genius that is Changi Airport sorted that out.

Why genius?

Well, you know all the messing about you have at airports - the check in, the passport waving and (worst of all) the ENDLESS DELAYS caused by funneling the entire airport through those stupid X-Ray scanners and pat-me-downs and all the rest of it?

Not here.

You go to the "leave here" bit, show your passport and you are INSTANTLY in duty free.

But wait, I hear you cry, how can you be in duty free without the security checks? Surely you could just take any old thing onto the planes, security hazard etc etc.

Well, no. See, if you want to buy something and take it on the plane (like a bottle or whatever), you simply ask at the counter and they put it in special "airport approved" bags.

So, where are the security checks?

Oh, easy. You just hang around wherever you like until an hour before your flight leaves, and then go to the glass-encased departure lounge for your flight. They have the pat-down, the X-Ray machine and the security scanner inside your departure lounge, so you only go through the checks with the other people from your flight INSTEAD of the entire airport.

Which is, you know, genius.

I love this place.

Anyway, enough from me. You can see (most) of my photographs from the Singapore trip here. For the purposes of this blog entry, I'm now going to pretend I'm just getting on the plane instead of having already been home for something like a week and a half. Decompression, you gotta' love it.