As the US government bought my ticket to Jakarta, they applied their US government criteria to the ticket purchase.  Which means that flights were chosen based on nationality of the carrier, not based on which flight was the cheapest or the most direct.  So United was chosen and my routing went from San Francisco to Hong Kong to Singapore to Jakarta.  While you may think I would say frickin’ frack, when I heard that was the routing, I actually jumped up and down and asked if I could get off the plane for 24 hours in Singapore.  Kindly, the answer was yes.

So it was with great bouncing happiness that, as I descended in the glass elevator of the Changi Village Hotel in Singpore, I saw Yen sitting in the lobby.   Last time I saw Yen was at Rusty’s funeral and now that he lives back in Singapore, it’s not every day that I get to hang out with the always fabulous Yen.  

Yen was an awesome tour guide of Singapore.  And we did my kind of tourism.   We sat in the hotel lobby.  We sat in the sailing club restaurant by the ocean.  We sat at a street market stand selling the best local chicken.   I don’t think we ever left a five block radius of the Changi Village Hotel, located on the outskirts of Singapore, chosen by the US government as it was close to the airport and would minimize taxi charges.

Instead, we did tourism of the heart and soul.  We covered where our hearts wanted to go, what made our souls sing and cry.  We laughed.  At different points we cried.  The waiters still served us drinks.