On arrival, we walked through a silent Changi airport, with a few temp screening stations set up along the way. An immigration officer gestured at a bunch of plastic chairs in a corner of the arrival hall. "Kuching sit there." We sat.
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Singapore requires all arriving passengers to fill in a health declaration form on paper, and a digital declaration form online. You have to show the latter to the immigration officer. Processing was slow, because a few people on my flight had no idea about the eform.
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When I finally got to one of the desks, before the immigration counter, an officer briefed me on my stay home notice (SHN) requirements. The gov would send me to a designated facility (a hotel). I had to submit to daily check-ins to ensure I hadn't left the hotel.
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There were strict penalties for breaching the SHN. I signed on the dotted line to indicate I understood. (I did; I had read up on as much as I could before I arrived).
What hotel was I going to be sent to? No idea. Protocol indicated that we wouldn't be told until on the bus.
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Remember those strict penalties? Later, I went through the docs they handed me. The penalties ranged from 'we take away your hotel room WiFi' to 'we revoke your Singapore visa' to 'we kick your kids out of any school in Singapore they happen to attend.'
Very serious stuff.
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(My friends mostly agreed that revoking hotel room WiFi was the worst penalty imaginable).
Anyway.
We went through immigration, collected our baggage, and then waited near the baggage carousels for our bus to arrive. Everyone from the flight sat together.
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For some inexplicable reason I had picked the longest queues at every step of the way, so I was last out of immigration. My group was waiting for me. When I arrived, a staff member counted us, announced "I have all 11!" and then told us our bus was on the way.
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We waited a long time. Probably 30 mins, but it felt longer. Lots of babies crying in the arrival hall. It was roughly 1am at this point.
Then our bus arrived, and our officer led us out.
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"Where you going?" asked the bus driver.
"Ritz Carlton."
"Serious?"
"Ya."
The bus driver sticks his head out the window, yelling at another driver "eh I got Ritz Carlton!" and grins.
Note: we are still social distancing, and everyone is wearing a mask.
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