Prologue: Okay, so I'm stuck writing about my trip to Melbourne. Despite my attempts to outsource blog writing to EU, I'm left carrying the baton to chronograph our trip. So, here goes Part 1.

I had wanted to go Melbourne for almost 4 years, since my best friend YT went studying there. After working for 1.5 years, I finally saved enough to go. To make things even more fun, I dragged EU along.

13 Dec 2008, Sat 3pm - Singapore

I had lunch with my family at Changi Airport. Told them we are going in at 3pm, to explore the mysterious visitor transit area. Yeap, we went in 4 hours early, and roamed through Terminal 1, 2 and 3. It's like a giant shopping mall!

Some photos:

There's a giant Christmas display at Terminal 3, with real Christmas trees and red flowers. Cool!

A rooftop garden. Think it's more of a smoking corner though.

[More photos on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jmarki/tags/changiairport/]

14 Dec 2008, Sun, 7am - Sydney

We transited through Sydney at 7am the next day. My first impression of Australia -- they are loud like Cantonese (I'm Cantonese, I can say that. ). They are also paranoid, with sniffer dogs sniffing everyone, X-Ray machines scanning everything, and Custom officers asking tons of questions. Makes me wonder what exactly did the Singapore Customs checks do...

Something to note: transiting through Australia requires going through Immigration and Customs first, before transiting to a domestic flight. I had thought I will clear these at Melbourne.

Transiting from International to Domestic terminals was fast. I guess the trouble-saving part is mainly because we bought Qantas flights for both international and domestic. That gave us free airport shuttle services, and a quick check-in of our bags directly from the International terminal.

We got to the Domestic terminal with 2 hours to spare. Nothing much to do there except eating breakfast. No internet surfing either -- wireless cost AU$5/hr.