Why leaving a bag unattended at the airport is not such a great idea

Changi to Jurong: a dummy’s guide to arriving in Singapore

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The very first observation one takes in, when arriving at Changi Airport in a most-empty aeroplane, is the disappearance of blue skies and the sensation of tumbling down into the brownish haze of a tropical thunderstorm.

In Europe, a thunderstorm sky is black. In Singapore, the rain is brown and yellow and the drops fall in higher quantity and density, like when taking a hot shower that you’d hate to get out of lest you catch a cold.

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By all means, Changi airport has that something special. I mean, you’ve seen airports all over the world and airports are airports, right? Not quite. Because here is an airport with vision. And greenery. Such healthy greenery, in fact, that you could be fooled into believing it’s plastic. Not that, as an arriving passenger in Covid times, you’ll see much of anything. If you are a lover of modern architecture, like I am, and star architect Moshe Safdie’s Jewel Changi super majestically fountained glasshouse airport shopping mall¹ is the experience you had been looking forward to being flabbergasted by on arrival in the Lion’s Den², you’re in for a horrigible³ disappointment.

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Instead, you are side-signposted through carpeted corridors immaculately clean, meeting householder robots doing vacuuming jobs, glaring at the lushness of ferns and other tropical gifts of nature growing out of the walls, passing damped windows providing one with glimpses of the outside thunderstorm raging overhead, stepping on travolators⁴ whispering attention, and that for your own safety and comfort these handrails have been disinfected, to which my thirteen-year-old daughter replies with her signature grin and wit:

“Thank you, this is exactly the kind of attention I have been looking for.”

It takes a while, all this going and following fenced-off footpaths, so in-between two of these moving sidewalks you attend to certain parts of your body crying out for yet another kind of attention, and you find shiny bathrooms inviting you to take it easy. Which you do.