Indonesia Trip 2019: Traveling There (July 18th-20th)

The first step in traveling to places is...well, traveling to said place. (Well, if you want to get technical, it's booking and planning everything, then packing, but that stuff is boring.) And for this trip, we were going to be traveling for almost two days.

Our itinerary for our stay in Indonesia included going to Jakarta, as well as Medan, and we didn't want to fly to Jakarta, to Medan, and back to Jakarta (which, in hindsight is probably the easiest route to go), so instead of booking a flight from Denver to Jakarta, we booked a flight from Denver to Singapore. Which wasn't bad because Singapore is a very cool country. Considering how much of their economy revolves around tourism, they have a lot of intriguing tourist-y landmarks. I'll get more into that later.

Going back to my main topic, our flight path going to Indonesia involved going from Denver, to Seattle, to Tokyo (Narita), then to Singapore. We then used a different airline to go from Singapore to Jakarta. It was unusual for me to not go through LAX (the Los Angeles Airport), since I seemed to always go through there, but I wasn't complaining. I am still scarred from the experience three years ago. (I made a blog post about it here.) We used Delta for the big part from Denver to Singapore, and JetStar from Singapore to Jakarta. I don't have any complaints against them, flights were on time, no drama, no heart-stopping moments of fear. Overall a good experience. Also, Delta has a ton of in-flight entertainment.

Now that I've given a brief overview, I'm going to go more into the details that happened over the trip.

It started 2 am in the morning on July 18th. It's a thing in my family to procrastinate on packing (partially because of work), but the night before we didn't finish packing until around midnight. I learned in my psychology class that a sleep cycle is around one and a half hours, so guess how much sleep I got that night. If you guessed one and a half hours, you are correct! But excitement was keeping me going. I'm not sure when the sleep debt from this hit me, if I were to guess, it was probably during a day in the middle of the trip where I got a chance to sleep and ended up sleeping for around 15 hours.

So we head out the door after making sure our water boiler is turned down, our appliances unplugged, and our air conditioner set so it wouldn't run. Colorado has a snazzy RTD light rail system, and because parking at the airport is expensive, we decided to park our car in a park and ride, and use the light rail to get to the station.

We get to the airport, and try to check in by ourselves. It...didn't work very well. Without going into too much personal details, I've noticed at some airports, if you're going international, you need to check in with the people at the check in desk. Either to get a stamp, or confirm your passport, so please be aware of that! It's a good thing we allotted a lot of buffer time! (Also, it didn't help that the desks weren't open when we arrived, so there was just a crowd of people from waiting there for who knows how long. I feel bad for the people who need to go to work at 3am in the morning.)

Luckily, we get everything sorted out, and we're on our way to security.

Also, one more funny thing about DIA/DEN. Currently they're under construction, but they're making an amazing joke out of it. Search up #DENFILES, there is a bunch of funny things that they're doing to make the construction less painful.
Like....this

Credit: https://www.flydenver.com/great_hall/denfiles

 I've only seen the gargoyle once, and we were in a hurry, so sadly, I didn't get a chance to interact with it.

Another thing, can anybody tell me why there are birds inside the waiting room? I've seen this in two different airports now. How do they get in? Why do they get in?

Next stop is Seattle, which, I didn't remember much of. It's a 3 hour flight from Denver to Seattle, and we had a 3 hour layover there. According to my sister (who remembered this a whole lot better than me, it was all a lost memory to me), we ate some ramen and that was about it. The rest was presumably spent trying to catch up on sleep.

From Seattle, we flew all the way across the ocean to Tokyo, Japan. It's a 10 hour flight that was mostly spent sitting in my seat and watching movies. I finally got to watch the Princess Bride, but other than that, nothing really happened.

When we arrived in Narita we had a 4 hour layover. We bought a box of unique grape flavored kit-kats, and just walked around. A cool thing that happened, was right before we began to board, we found out that my cousin was also in Narita. It was my grandmother's 90th birthday, so to celebrate, all of the grandchildren were coming over, which was why my cousin was at the airport at the same time. He arrived in Jakarta earlier though, because he went straight to Jakarta from Narita, instead of going to Singapore first. We almost met up, but his gate was a significant walk from our gate, so we decided it wasn't worth it.

    

Here are some pictures from the plane rides from Denver to Singapore.

However, I do remember stuff from Singapore. It was a 7 hour flight down to Singapore, but I think I slept on that flight. I don't remember much from the flight itself. When we arrived, we had to go through immigration because we were switching companies and so we needed to claim our baggage. The line was awfully long. We spent a good half hour in there, but I used the time to chat with a friend who lives in Malaysia. It took us so long to get through immigration, the conveyor belt had stopped running and they had taken the luggages off of it. Whoops.

Anyhow, our attention was then taken by an autonomous floor Zamboni. As someone who has worked with robotics for six years, and has participated in the local Autonomous Vehicle Challenge, this was pretty awesome. Also, even if you're not a robotics person, it's still pretty funny to see a zamboni with a face vrooming around happily. The sensors it uses are pretty good. My dad tried to antagonize it by stepping right in front of it, and it stopped without hitting him.

We also went to check out the Jewel. A new addition to the Singapore Changi Airport, and let me just put it out there, it's crazy. It's a literal waterfall in the middle of a building. When we arrived it was past midnight, so the waterfall wasn't on, but the surrounding area was crazy. There were plants and lights everywhere. It was very, very cool.

My dad had some friends who lived in Singapore, so they were kind enough to come join us and say "hi." We ate some Singaporean food, and drank some Singaporean drinks. The only thing I can remember is the water chestnut drink, which was quite delicious. It's sweet, which you wouldn't expect from a chestnut. I learned that because Singapore is such a small country, that able-bodied (and male) civilians get called for a sort of "boot camp" every so often. Just to make sure that the country has an army if the time calls for it. I also realized that Singapore is basically a city. For some reason I had the image that Singapore was a bigger country, but no, it's a tiny country on the same island as Malaysia.

After a while of chatting and hanging out, we decided to check our bags in and find a place to sleep. Unfortunately, checking in our bags was surprisingly hard. JetStar doesn't count it by piece, but by weight. So when they weighed all our carry-ons (the rolling carry ons as well as backpacks), we were way over. So we had to check in a few of the rolling carry ons. Which wasn't too bad, as it was just one flight. With that settled, we passed through immigration and looked for a seat to curl up and sleep in for a few hours.

As we walked through the airport, we wondered, when was the security going to happen? Because with many airports, security is one of the first thing that happens. Not in Changi. The security happened right before the waiting room in front of the gate. This meant that every gate had an x-ray machine. Not only that, but the waiting room doesn't open until a little before boarding time. So security is something that comes pretty late in the process.

And with that, we boarded the plane and were on our way to Indonesia to see family!