Day 1 - Melbourne to Singapore

Our first flight was from Melbourne to Darwin where we had a 1 hour stopover before continuing on to Singapore. Both flights were about 4 hours long.
They say you need to be at the departure gate at Darwin half an hour before the flight, but by the time we got lunch and got through the series of queues, we were cutting it a bit fine.

After the second flight we arrived in Singapore and managed to get through customs and pick up our bags fairly quickly.
Just outside the luggage carousel we saw Sarma waiting for us and he kindly showed us how to get out of the fairly big airport and to our hotel.

We took a short train from our terminal (T1) to another terminal (T2) and from there we took another train (MRT) towards the city.

MRT Train terminal in the airport

The inside of the MRT trains

Sarma - our personal tour guide!

The MRT reminded us all of the Metro system in Japan, except here people weren't quite as courteous or orderly. They had markings on the floor to allow people to get off the train before the next lot get on, but unlike Japan, no one seemed to care about them.

People ignoring the markings on the ground

When we got off the train, the hotel was only a short walk from the station and we got to admire some of the interesting architecture of the city.

Cool gothic looking building

Our hotel looked pretty fancy! We weren't actually staying in the hotel side of things, but in the "serviced suites" which is sort of around the back, but it seems they share facilities like the pool etc. Our apartment is on the 22 floor with a pretty nice view (pictures to come).

We each checked in and got settled in our room before heading out to get some food.
The first strip of restaurants we found was on "Arab Street" which had plenty of Lebanese, Turkish, etc. style places with Shisha pipes at every door step.

The Arab Quarter

We picked the restaurant with the most locals eating there and took a seat.
Meals at these sort of restaurants are cheap! I got a Nasi Goreng Daging (Lamb and Rice) dish with a Mango juice for $7 Singapore Dollars (about $5.30 Aussie Dollars) while Sarma's meal was a bit more basic and only cost $3 Singapore Dollars!

Nasi Goreng Dagin

From there we went to a 7eleven to get SIM cards, train passes and some snacks for the appartment and headed back to get some sleep for a big sight-seeing day tomorrow.