It has been a long time between trips but finally after 2.5 years – international travel. This trip was booked 6 months earlier in the year, at a time when it was still hard to predict how the world would open up. So we chose to do an “easy’ trip so if things were difficult, we knew should be able to deal with any disruptions. The destination was back to Portugal and adding on Southern Spain.
About 4 weeks before we were due to depart Andrew crashed off his skis and did some muscular damage his leg/buttock. 2 weeks before departure he looked a doubtful starter as he was still limping around on 2 crutches. Then he was on one crutch. Only one week before departure did he progress to just a walking stick and declared himself “fit” and Thunderbirds are go!
To keep things easy we decided to stopover in Singapore for a couple of nights. What didn’t work so well was that Andrew’s bag stayed in Sydney and didn’t catch up with us until the day we departed Singapore. Andrew was very happy to see the bag and be able to change some clothes. But spoiler alert – the bag was about to do it’s own thing again. Transiting in London, we could see via Airtags that one bag was still in Terminal 3 but we were in Terminal 5 waiting for the Lisbon flight. BA airport staff confirmed that bag hadn’t been sent over from Tterminal 3 but they weren’t interested in getting involved. Outcome: Andrew’s bag was “lost” again.
Singapore was a familiar destination and it was good to spend a short time doing relatively un-taxing things. We had a Korean chicken meal in a mall including fries served with…whipped cream. I do not rate the combo, Andrew thought it was delish and devoured the creamy potato combo.
The highlight of the stay was a visit to the Tiger Beer factory. The factory is located as far east as you can go without heading into Malaysia. We travelled there on the MRT and Bus. On the tour we had a token 10 walk around the factory learning about the brewing process and watching the bottling lines.
After the video presentation the guide demonstrated the “correct” technique for pouring a Tiger beer and picked ‘volunteers’ to try. Of course Andrew looked like a man who knew his way around a beer so she picked him. Sadly, he didn’t listen to the technique and did it his way. She gave up trying to correct him and was rather surprised when the outcome was a beer with the the appropriate head. For his efforts Andrew got a free beer. Andrew was happy.
Then we finished in the tasting room were we had 10 vouchers for beers. Given the tour cost $23 each, and we had a number of beers – these were the cheapest beers in town!