tell me about it

I went for the Singapore Airshow.

Since work starts tomorrow and I am eager to sleep, it will be brief.

We drove past Pasir Ris, goggled eyes at the queue stretching round the bus interchange AND around White Sands, and promptly took a U-turn to go to Expo. Paying $5 each for a crappy bus ride was definitely preferable to standing in THAT particular queue.

At the Expo however, another queue (albeit much shorter one) awaited. We queued. We waited. For twenty minutes no bus arrived, and then three came in a row. Shouldn’t they have staggered the buses to come maybe five minutes apart instead, to keep people happy and waiting time at a minimum? Because it meant that there was a jam of buses at the Airshow as well.

We ended up having to stand, despite paying the exorbitant amount of $5. Still, anything to get away from the Pasir Ris queue. We waited for 20 minutes for a bus - I heard that people lined up for THREE HOURS at Pasir Ris.

$5 is not exorbitant when you think about it that way.

At the Airshow entrance, we had to wait in yet ANOTHER line - because we were carrying one small little bag. Everyone with a bag was shunted into a long queue to get zapped through the metal detector. Could they not have listed this little bit of information on the website or on the ticket so that more people would have decided to leave their bags at home or in the car and let everyone get processed faster?! And what really annoyed me is that they then realized how inefficient it was and let some people with small bags like the one we were carrying go to the shorter, faster, no-bag queue. While we had waited patiently in the long queue. Urgh.

The Airshow itself was all right - nice planes etcetera - but it was just so much hassle going in and out that I couldn’t appreciate it fully. We caught maybe five minutes of the air display. Nuts.

On the way out, it transpired we had chosen to leave at the same time as everyone else - and thus we joined a huge snaking river of people pushing and shoving to get on the bus. Policemen were shunting people along and everyone shuffled quite patiently, joining the crush to wait for shuttle buses, which obviously were not arriving in sufficient number in adequate time to deal with the crowd. It was hot, people were sweating in copious amounts and giving off all sorts of odors. Children were crying. Old people were muttering. It wasn’t pleasant.

We ambled along quite peacefully to the front of the huge crowd, not noticing any sort of discernible queue or line and assuming we were all just here to squeeze. Not long after though, three buses arrived, and people started boarding from the front-ish end of the crowd. Thinking to hasten the process, policemen allowed people from the middle to get on the second bus.

Uh-oh.

Singaporeans, with their strict sense of justice and equality for all, began raising their fists in the air and yelling at the policemen and at the people eagerly boarding the second bus. People were actually screaming angrily, saying they had been lining up for a long time and were at the front of the “queue”.

“HOW CAN! HOW CAN!? POLICEMAN KAYU!” one man shouted.

“Welcome to Singapore, welcome to the queue,” another said sardonically to his girlfriend, managing to sound angry and amused and frustrated and disgusted all at the same time.

One man begged the policemen to let his family up first because someone in his group was ill. The policemen acquiesced and to be fair, people in the crowd began agreeing noisily that sick people should be among the precious few allowed to jump the queue.

“Sick ones can go. Sick, let them go,” an old man called out. A teen behind me snorted and rolled his eyes. “Like war like that,” he laughed to his friends. “Old and sick first! Next, women and children! Aiyoh, only in Singapore I tell you.”

The atmosphere was awful. Those closest to the policemen wasted no time in telling them just what they thought of their organization and (lack of) preparation, chewing their ears off while the policemen stared back blandly and employed the strategy most taxi passengers use to avoid conversation (mm, uh-huh, I understand, yes, sorry, mm-hmm, okay, nothing I can do, sorry). Poor policemen anyway. They really didn’t seem to have anyone in charge and every decision they made was just roundly decried by the mobs.

Finally we got on the bus (noting that actually we had sort of cut queue also, because we didn’t even realize there was a queue - we had moved to the front because all the other queues were labelled for various Orchard hotels and we were trying to move to the queue for the shuttle to Expo). We couldn’t even get on an Expo bus (despite being perfectly willing to shell out another $5 apiece to escape the hellish crowd) as none seemed to be arriving. We got on a Pasir Ris free shuttle and took a train back to Expo to our car.

All this while the carparks at the Airshow location were virtually empty.

And the highlight of the show, really, was the lone eagle I saw taking off from the grassland and soaring majestically into the air, just as we pulled away in the shuttle bus.

ALSO: We paid $15 for each ticket (we bought from someone trying to get rid of his tix online, $5 less than cost price). BUT AT NO POINT IN TIME AT ANY PART OF THE AIRSHOW WERE WE ASKED TO SHOW OUR TICKETS. Did they assume that anyone stupid enough to actually want to come to the airshow must have had tickets? I could have not paid anything and just turned up and I would have seen the exact same things. At which point in time when they were planning their long-ass queues did they decide to do away with the ticketing?

*facepalm*

And they want to add a million people to our sunny shores, AND host the Youth Olympics.

Heaven preserve us.

(I guess it wasn’t brief :/)