Moving to Singapore Part 3: Quarantine

The Singapore government has imposed some of the strictest Covid regulations in the world. Despite relatively low case numbers in their population, incoming travelers must quarantine for two weeks in a dedicated "SHN" (Stay Home Notice) facility. We are sooooo thankful that HR at Travis' company was able to secure us two connecting rooms at the Ritz Carlton. I lost a lot of sleep in the weeks leading up to our move being worried we'd either all be in one hotel room or split across two separate rooms. If we'd had to split up it would have taken me HOURS to separate the luggage. Not to mention I didn't have a Singapore cell phone number (or any way to get one) which would have made the daily check ins with the government very tricky. Thankfully we had found out a few days before, but it had made the initial packing stressful not knowing for sure if we'd be able to secure connecting rooms.

On the bus. At this point it had been about 39 hours since we left home. As you can see Ellie is over it

On the bus ride in. Gardens by the Bay are the behind the ribbed structures on the left, then you can see the Marina Bay Sands, the Flyer Ferris wheel, the Lotus museum (I don't know what it's actually called but it looks like a lotus flower) and our hotel is the white building on the right.

Did I mention we have a lot of bags? Took this pic after the luggage guys (in full  HazMat gear... in case our luggage is spreading covid?) let Travis' guitar fall on it's face. It's ok but we won't let them handle it again.

Wooooow what a hotel room! Unfortunately once we moved our 25 items in it never looked this nice again

And woooooooooow what a view!

Was AWESOME to have a foyer to store our bags

Kids room. We were absolutely spoiled by this setup.

The night time view was even prettier

Unfortunately, since we literally could not leave the room for two weeks, the view started to seem more like a screensaver. We did keep tabs on the soccer pitch renovation. First they were covering what looked like bare concrete with this black layer.

How it started (Sept 15)

Then the black layer was covered with another white layer, then they'd use the teal strips (sometimes), then one day they carved what looked like a maze in the front by scooping up the green in those weird black squares, then eventually they'd cover the teal with more green. But it wasn't in any particular order that we could discern. Sometimes they'd also put down white where the line should be. 

Sept 20

Sept 24

While they fixed the green parts in the center, the edges looked like a much bigger mess than when they started.

Sept 25

And if that was boring to you, imagine how we felt Maybe someday we'll get to see the finished product. We did enjoy seeing the locals walk and bike along that promenade in front of the pitch. At first look Singapore appears to be an active community!

We found some fun ways to pass the time, however to be honest we just let the kids have mostly unlimited screen time. Travis was working, the girls had virtual school work to do, and my engineering background in no way prepared me for being locked in a room with 4 other opinionated people for two weeks straight. I did enjoy regular peloton workouts thanks to the marriott streaming app on the tv. As we've discussed on FB, the food was AWFUL. I'm not one to complain about food that I'm not paying for, but this was bad. After about 3 days we learned how to order  delivery and that improved our lives a lot.

Decorating pumpkin cookies. Thanks Ms. Patricia!

Max kept falling asleep by 6 pm

An example of "Breakfast". "BBQ Chicken" sandwich with hard boiled eggs (those were fine) and a weird grainy dragonfruit jello.

Not certain if this was the dish that gave Travis food poisoning but it probably did. It definitely looks better than it tasted.

A wonderful, necessary gift from one of Travis' new coworkers

Our first Amazon Fresh delivery--our first taste of freedom!

A rare moment of playtime in between ipad time

Back to virtual violin lessons. Thought we were done with these. But grateful for the option.

That one magical morning where the lighting was perfect, and we all felt rested enough for a nice pic with mugs of hot cocoa

Game night! This particular evening we played Charades. Max caught on and he was ADORABLE. I remember he acted out vacuuming and an airplane.

Making bath bombs. I had brought the popcorn popper to make popcorn but had mistakenly assumed there would be a microwave in the room. Glad we had that to use as a bowl for other various activities.

A fun "local" gift from a new friend. We tried them-- they were pretty good! A little spicy for the kids. Definitely more of a savory flavor. And how funny, I look over at Ellie and she's eating the Hainanese ones right now!

The almost daily Cosmic Kids Yoga (on towels we happened to bring in our suitcase)

I believe this was take out from Hawker Chan, a world renowned restuarant. We actually enjoyed our meal for the first time in a week.

"Beef" stew. This actually had pretty good flavor, but it was a challenge to find any actual meat in those cubes. Definitely instant potatoes. The hash brown thing was weird.

Wrist was healing, but not as quickly as I would have liked. The dermabond fell off the top part a little too early.

We saw some really cool thunderstorms and rainbows from this vantage point

Some sweet friends dropped off a box of magnatiles which infinitely increased our hours of enjoyment

Ellie was thrilled to get another Wellie Wisher for her quarantine birthday!

A friend dropped off this AMAZING chocolate cake for us!

All the birthday festivities put Max to sleep. The girls thought it was funny to pretend to sleep next to him.

Our chocolate cake friend also left some toys, including this "make your own slime kit"!

Take out from Din Tai Fung! DTF is known for their dumplings, but they won't deliver those, so we settled for fried rice, pork chop and noodles, pork buns, and fried dumplings. The fried rice was possibly the best I'd ever had. So good we ordered delivery again a couple nights ago!

I've learned from previous experience that anytime we move I gotta put my two favorite knives in my (carry on) suitcase. We also brought a small thing of dishsoap, some kids cups, a dish brush, and our 30A Tervis mugs. Can't trust that a hotel will have appropriately sized coffee mugs and I proved myself right. I also had a bag of plastic knives which proved to be necessary because the delivered meals only came with spoons and forks.

Another day, another breakfast of muesli, 'eggs', and beans. At least the fruit was usually good.

Luggage in a cart can only mean one thing--RELEASE DAY!!

It was a long two weeks, but honestly I didn't mind it too much (except for the government provided food. SO GROSS). We were grateful for two very comfortable hotel rooms, lots of snacks, great delivery services, and enough activities to keep us going. This would have been REALLY hard without quality internet access though!

Next up: Settling into our serviced apartment

Moving to Singapore Part 2: The 40 hour trip

One nice thing about a lot of our furniture being moved out is that made room for staging suitcases. To pack for this trip we had to think about 1) what we'd need during our two weeks in quarantine 2) what we'd need at our serviced apartment before our air shipment showed up 3) what we didn't trust or couldn't put in the air or sea shipment. Things like alcohol and jewelry aren't allowed in the shipments. Normally I wouldn't put weights and resistance bands in my suitcase but we knew we'd use those during our quarantine. While I probably should have put more clothes in the shipment and instead brought the HEB pharmacy, we did our best. We made sure to bring water bottles and kid lunch boxes since we thought they'd be going to school as soon as we were out of quarantine. We also brought a few favorite kitchen things (popcorn popper, knives, dish brush), several pairs of shoes, important documents, the girls violin and piano music, several games, many bottles of sunscreen (we weren't supposed to put aerosols in the air shipment and I couldn't remember how many I'd bought for the sea shipment), a birthday party box, a few books for the kids to read, oatmeal, snacks, snacks and more snacks, hair products, etc etc. Clearly too much but I wasn't in a state of mind to downsize. 

Well, it started out in neatly organized piles. But when you gotta pack breakable stuff, things that leak, and odd shaped stuff it takes a lot of trial and error.

Almost done, and most of it fit!

And then I slit my wrist on a plate that shattered as I was washing it. It seemed deep. So fleshy. And bloody. Our friends the Hernandez's who were driving us to the airport were literally walking in the door as this happened.

Thank goodness we had planned to leave about an hour earlier than we needed to. We tried to go to urgent care, (while Travis and Matt loaded the vehicles) which of course was not going to be urgent enough for our needs, so Kelly, a FNP, took me to her house where she had sterilizing spray, Dermabond and Steri strips. Thankfully by this time it had stopped bleeding and we could see the cut was just in the top layer. I definitely needed stitches, but this was much faster and worked well. SO grateful for her expertise and care in our time of need! Because if we missed this flight... we would have had to wait WEEKS to fly out. Getting entry approval into Singapore is really difficult right now. This is why we couldn't fly out September 3rd as initially hoped, and once they secured Sept 13th we heard that the next available date was October 3rd. Clearly this would have made Travis' transition to his new job very challenging (maybe he would have had to go ahead and leave without me? Then I would have had to care for 3 kids with one hand. No, that wasn't going to work.) So despite slicing my wrist open onward we pressed.

So. Many. Bags. We maxed out our checked allotment (10), also checked 3 carseats, each person had a carry on (5) each person had a backpack (5) and Ellie and Travis were also carrying their violin and guitar. Thank goodness it's only an 1/8th scale violin.

It took us nearly an hour to check in, this was partly because of the 60+ pages of documents Singapore requires that the airline had to sort through, and partly because they were working hard to figure out how to seat us together. Initially we were spread apart across a large, completely packed business cabin. We're thankful that some nice people must have agreed to move for us!

Couldn't bend my wrist or pull a suitcase, and it hurt when anyone touched it, but it was still capable of holding a glass of wine in the lounge.

Really proud of all my little travelers. They did a great job of keeping track of all their own things. This was a much better way to travel than with baby carriers/strollers/car seats/diapers etc!!!

The first leg was to take off at ~6:15 pm and was scheduled to be about a 14 hour flight. Everything was right on schedule! With the exception of my wrist injury.

Ellie said "Wow!! it's like my own little house!"

The Q suites were SWEET. Those gold buttons are seat adjustments (including a light massage function!) the blanket was very soft and fleecy, and of course I needed that glass of champagne after our adventure getting to the airport. Max enjoyed endless orange juice. Unfortunately we couldn't sit in a 4-person suite on the first leg, but at least we were all reasonably close together.

Max slept great! He fell asleep at approximately 9:30 pm and didn't wake up until 6:00am (Texas time)

Ellie also had a good sleep. I think she was using her mask as an eye mask too. She said she woke up but she didn't tell me until we were all awake! Sweet girl.

A truly enjoyable way to travel. Battery operated candle and all!

We flew just a little south of where we used to live in Saudi! Was a very strange feeling to stop in the Middle East but know we wouldn't be staying.

Our layover in Doha was NINE HOURS. Was great to spread out in the business lounge.

The ubiquitous Middle Eastern "lemon mint" drink! Hadn't had one of these since 2018.

Being silly in the dining room at the lounge

Max and I took a few walks to see the big airplanes

They did in fact get tired of playing iPad for a few minutes.

Odd, but fun playground in the Doha airport. The kids of course don't remember playing here but they did, several times, between 2014-2017!

Off we go to the next plane!

Leg 2 was only an 8 hour flight--and we were able to get the 4 person suite! It was pretty slick how they folded the walls down. We let Lucy have her own seat behind us, she is a brooding pre-teen after all. I didn't sleep particularly well but it was as comfortable as a plane could be. The breakfast pancakes were delicious and I'm still thinking about how good they were.

Q Suite

Ellie getting her beauty rest. She did a much better job than me of sleeping with her mask on! 

Once we landed in Singapore, the customs process was straight forward (though it took awhile), then we followed the signs to take a PCR test (Lucy was deliriously tired and this didn't go well for her, but we all survived). After that was baggage claim, where we weren't allowed to flag down any assistance like we normally would for this many bags. I think Ellie was actually the one who pushed a baggage cart through the rest of the airport since I still didn't feel like I could use my wrist. Poor Travis then had to load all the bags onto the bus, and off we went. 

Check out the next post about our two weeks in quarantine!