to singapore and back
After ten hectic days in Singapore, we arrived back in Geneva yesterday afternoon. I didn't write at all while we were away because it was practically impossible to find any time to do so when almost every waking moment was packed. Even after the kids went to bed at night I was usually too tired to write anything, and I didn't bring my laptop along either so it wouldn't have been easy for me to write. Anyway, our entire trip back passed in a blink of an eye. J and I didn't get to eat or do even half of what we had planned, but we still managed to spend quality time with friends and family, eat A LOT, and shop enough to fill an entire extra suitcase for the journey back.
Speaking of the journey, we flew Emirates for this trip and they were excellent. Since the children came along, J and I have mostly used Singapore Airlines for flights with them, but since we were paying for our own tickets for this visit, Emirates was about 2000CHF (!) cheaper so J booked with them instead. This turned out to be one of the best travel decisions, primarily because breaking up our journey in Dubai really helped with the jet lag and improved everyone's overall flight experience. Also, Emirates flies in and out of Geneva directly, which saved us a trip to Zurich, the only Swiss airport Singapore Airlines flies to.
From Geneva to Dubai it is just over six hours, which is pretty decent if still a little too long for a restless toddler like Bao, who cried and fussed before she fell asleep on the plane. From Dubai to Singapore it is about seven hours. We had a long layover in Dubai so J booked a room in the airport transit hotel for us, and after landing at 11pm, I was so thankful that the hotel was minutes away and all of us could just roll into the shower and then straight into bed, where nobody stirred for twelve hours.
We woke refreshed, had breakfast in the room, and then headed out to the Dubai Mall, which is about fifteen minutes away by taxi from the airport. This mall is supposedly the world's largest mall, with 1,200 shops, an actual dipolodocus skeleton, a huge fountain, a massive indoor aquarium, an ice-skating rink, and plenty more. After spending a year in a country that is very uninterested in consumerism and shopping, walking around the mall came with some culture shock. Such country bumpkins we were, walking around with our mouths hanging open. Every imaginable brand name was there, but I didn't buy anything apart from meals, snacks, a funny slimy toy for The Bun, and some Hello Kitty cutlery for Bao. I was looking for winter coats for the kids but unsurprisingly there weren't much on offer.
The mall has complimentary strollers for loan (our own stroller had been through-checked to Singapore), so we got one for each kid, which made exploring the vastness much easier with jet-lagged children. The Bun has no qualms about riding in strollers; I would say he loves being in one more than his sister and would sit in one all the time if we'd let him! We had lunch at the Shake Shack, where the burgers tasted the same as they did in NYC, visited the aquarium and underwater zoo, and browsed the shops. When the kids fell asleep in their strollers, we wheeled them into the fancy French cafe Angelina's and enjoyed a rare hour sipping tea and nibbling macaroons without batting grimy hands away or fielding nonsensical interruptions. That definitely made for a good start to our holiday.
We got back to the airport in time for a quick, easy dinner and a shower in our room before boarding the plane for our next flight. This bit made me nervous, because seven hours isn't much time for the kids to settle down to sleep (if at all) before landing and being 'up' for the day in Singapore. All the time changes had messed all of us up so I could only hope for the best. As it turns out, all of us slept very little. The Bun was too preoccupied watching TV in his seat for a bit until I forced him to take a nap - he managed three hours. Bao was overtired and screamed because she simply couldn't settle properly to fall asleep and we couldn't even do the Screaming Baby Walk of Shame down the aisle because the seat-belt sign was turned on, so eventually she just screamed herself to sleep but even so she would wake periodically whimpering. Worst of all the people in the row in front of us kept turning their overhead lights on and off in the darkened cabin (one of the women wasn't used to flying and didn't know her knee kept pushing on the light button) which kept waking all of us. J constructed a small tent (!) out of the blankets to hang over Bao so that she wouldn't wake and scream more, but that had limited effect. In the end I think she also slept about three hours. Me and J? Maybe thirty minutes.
So as you can tell I was a bit apprehensive about the return flights but they went really well. We left Singapore at 1030am and I expected Bao to scream herself to sleep as usual, but instead she asked for her pacifier and duckie and then fell asleep quietly in her seat. I wedged blankets and pillows around her to support her head and happily watched a Korean movie ('Miss Granny', which was really good) while eating my lunch - a first for a long long time. Bao woke after an hour but she was pretty chill and the rest of the flight passed quite uneventfully. The Bun was pretty much left to his own devices, not that he noticed since he was hooked into the inflight entertainment system. He hardly watches TV at home so to have so much at his disposal for hours on end was bliss to him.
Our return jaunt at Dubai Mall was much shorter this time round, since everyone was tired after the flight. It was mid-afternoon there but we still had an early dinner at IHOP, bought some milk for the kids, and then headed back to the airport hotel for an early night's sleep. The next morning we boarded the plane back to Geneva, and again, it was quite uneventful and Bao actually managed to nap for two hours without any screaming or coddling. Miraculously I got to watch two movies - another Korean movie as well as Frozen. I like to watch foreign movies on flights because I can still follow the plot using the subtitles even if I'm not wearing headphones. I picked Frozen because I wanted to see what the hype was all about, being one of the last few people who have never heard 'Let It Go', but I wish I hadn't because I didn't like it (both the song and the movie) much at all.
Now that we've flown to Singapore and back, I think I'm now a convert to this Emirates route from here on out. The service is very good - on one flight there was a steward who took Polaroid photos of us and the kids and stuck them in cardboard frames for us - and more importantly, the timings work best for combatting jet lag. For weeks before our trip I often woke up in the middle of the night wondering how we were going to handle a long-haul journey like this, specifically with someone like Bao. In the end it all worked out quite well, which is why I'm recording it for posterity. The end.
(Can you tell I'm still jet-lagged, even if the children aren't?)
Speaking of the journey, we flew Emirates for this trip and they were excellent. Since the children came along, J and I have mostly used Singapore Airlines for flights with them, but since we were paying for our own tickets for this visit, Emirates was about 2000CHF (!) cheaper so J booked with them instead. This turned out to be one of the best travel decisions, primarily because breaking up our journey in Dubai really helped with the jet lag and improved everyone's overall flight experience. Also, Emirates flies in and out of Geneva directly, which saved us a trip to Zurich, the only Swiss airport Singapore Airlines flies to.
From Geneva to Dubai it is just over six hours, which is pretty decent if still a little too long for a restless toddler like Bao, who cried and fussed before she fell asleep on the plane. From Dubai to Singapore it is about seven hours. We had a long layover in Dubai so J booked a room in the airport transit hotel for us, and after landing at 11pm, I was so thankful that the hotel was minutes away and all of us could just roll into the shower and then straight into bed, where nobody stirred for twelve hours.
We woke refreshed, had breakfast in the room, and then headed out to the Dubai Mall, which is about fifteen minutes away by taxi from the airport. This mall is supposedly the world's largest mall, with 1,200 shops, an actual dipolodocus skeleton, a huge fountain, a massive indoor aquarium, an ice-skating rink, and plenty more. After spending a year in a country that is very uninterested in consumerism and shopping, walking around the mall came with some culture shock. Such country bumpkins we were, walking around with our mouths hanging open. Every imaginable brand name was there, but I didn't buy anything apart from meals, snacks, a funny slimy toy for The Bun, and some Hello Kitty cutlery for Bao. I was looking for winter coats for the kids but unsurprisingly there weren't much on offer.
The mall has complimentary strollers for loan (our own stroller had been through-checked to Singapore), so we got one for each kid, which made exploring the vastness much easier with jet-lagged children. The Bun has no qualms about riding in strollers; I would say he loves being in one more than his sister and would sit in one all the time if we'd let him! We had lunch at the Shake Shack, where the burgers tasted the same as they did in NYC, visited the aquarium and underwater zoo, and browsed the shops. When the kids fell asleep in their strollers, we wheeled them into the fancy French cafe Angelina's and enjoyed a rare hour sipping tea and nibbling macaroons without batting grimy hands away or fielding nonsensical interruptions. That definitely made for a good start to our holiday.
We got back to the airport in time for a quick, easy dinner and a shower in our room before boarding the plane for our next flight. This bit made me nervous, because seven hours isn't much time for the kids to settle down to sleep (if at all) before landing and being 'up' for the day in Singapore. All the time changes had messed all of us up so I could only hope for the best. As it turns out, all of us slept very little. The Bun was too preoccupied watching TV in his seat for a bit until I forced him to take a nap - he managed three hours. Bao was overtired and screamed because she simply couldn't settle properly to fall asleep and we couldn't even do the Screaming Baby Walk of Shame down the aisle because the seat-belt sign was turned on, so eventually she just screamed herself to sleep but even so she would wake periodically whimpering. Worst of all the people in the row in front of us kept turning their overhead lights on and off in the darkened cabin (one of the women wasn't used to flying and didn't know her knee kept pushing on the light button) which kept waking all of us. J constructed a small tent (!) out of the blankets to hang over Bao so that she wouldn't wake and scream more, but that had limited effect. In the end I think she also slept about three hours. Me and J? Maybe thirty minutes.
So as you can tell I was a bit apprehensive about the return flights but they went really well. We left Singapore at 1030am and I expected Bao to scream herself to sleep as usual, but instead she asked for her pacifier and duckie and then fell asleep quietly in her seat. I wedged blankets and pillows around her to support her head and happily watched a Korean movie ('Miss Granny', which was really good) while eating my lunch - a first for a long long time. Bao woke after an hour but she was pretty chill and the rest of the flight passed quite uneventfully. The Bun was pretty much left to his own devices, not that he noticed since he was hooked into the inflight entertainment system. He hardly watches TV at home so to have so much at his disposal for hours on end was bliss to him.
Our return jaunt at Dubai Mall was much shorter this time round, since everyone was tired after the flight. It was mid-afternoon there but we still had an early dinner at IHOP, bought some milk for the kids, and then headed back to the airport hotel for an early night's sleep. The next morning we boarded the plane back to Geneva, and again, it was quite uneventful and Bao actually managed to nap for two hours without any screaming or coddling. Miraculously I got to watch two movies - another Korean movie as well as Frozen. I like to watch foreign movies on flights because I can still follow the plot using the subtitles even if I'm not wearing headphones. I picked Frozen because I wanted to see what the hype was all about, being one of the last few people who have never heard 'Let It Go', but I wish I hadn't because I didn't like it (both the song and the movie) much at all.
Now that we've flown to Singapore and back, I think I'm now a convert to this Emirates route from here on out. The service is very good - on one flight there was a steward who took Polaroid photos of us and the kids and stuck them in cardboard frames for us - and more importantly, the timings work best for combatting jet lag. For weeks before our trip I often woke up in the middle of the night wondering how we were going to handle a long-haul journey like this, specifically with someone like Bao. In the end it all worked out quite well, which is why I'm recording it for posterity. The end.
(Can you tell I'm still jet-lagged, even if the children aren't?)