Sunday, January 13th, 3:00pm - before boarding in Vancouver, we stopped at the duty free. With the purchase of 2 gifts & some reading materials, we managed, without even having left yet, to exceed our intended budget of max $20/day…  Official trip begins!

The flight from Vancouver to Frankfurt was uneventful, I was sitting in the middle of the middle of the plane, which while not the most stellar in terms of comfortability was nice in the sense that I was served by the server in whichever aisle was being served first.  Yay food!

On the flight from Frankfurt to Singapore the only thing I remember besides sleeping is having troubles avoiding looking ahead.  The gentleman seated directly in front of me was balding, but rather than a comb-over over the top of his head he had a comb-over over the biggest tumour I have ever seen.  I realize I sound horrible and this was not a good situation for him to be in but somehow the large apple-sized mass filled with hamburger meat looking material on the side of his head was completely repellent (in that ‘car crash, a horrible thing’s happened but I can’t help keep looking’ kind of way).  Especially because it was approx. two feet in front of me - very hard to look elsewhere, rather like the mole-guy in Austin Powers, except times 1000….

Arrived in Singapore at 6:55am Tuesday, January 15th, having effectually missed Monday January 14th altogether.  Weird.  In the Singapore Changi Airport we were waved through customs -my camera/computer/ipod/dvx100 carrying backpack, now known as 007, was apparently backpacker-looking enough that they didn’t want to even bother sending it through the scanner.  Yay camouflage!

So far, no attempted muggings, but we’ll be going out into town shortly…