Changi T3

(Am recycling yet another post from a while back...once again in anticipation of an upcoming trip)

The only good thing coming out of the 14-hour waiting time at Changi is that I got to watch a live FA Cup match between Liverpool and Luton. Nice to know that even at 5am, fans still raise their fists (I guess I would, too, if my team scored five goals and conceded none).

Changi's Terminal 3 (or T3 as it's quite affectionately addressed in posters) is very clean (even for a Singaporean venue), super-spacious (you could easily have two trucks racing along the entire corridor), bright and full of shops which don't close. CT3 isn't just an airport - it's a statement. 

But is anything substantially new? Only the toilet attendant, who keeps the urinals and sinks spotless and dry. And oh the Free Internet terminals have sprouted up like mushrooms in a wet forest; there must be something like a hundred computers available now.

Maybe I should feel glad: I get to spend half a day (literally) in the world's classiest airport. But here's a quasi-paradox: It really is the place I'd want to be if I was in transit. It really is not the place I want to be other than if I was in transit. And this is not about being in transit.

Go figure.

At T3, I discovered that C.I.P. stands for Commercially Important Person - I'm obviously a C.U.P. A plastic bag for your goods, which used to be called a plastic bag - is now called a carrier set.

Singaporean airport terminology is getting complex. Like the society itself, I suppose.

My Ausssie co-passenger was saying how he felt that this richest country in ASEAN was getting too stiff, square - over-efficient. I told him what my Socio professor once said about Singapore more than a decade ago: It's the most socially engineered country in the world. There are systematic places/channels for everything and everyone. It all works. Nothing is allowed to 'go wrong'.

Just like an airport.

Is this good or bad? Hmm, what can I say - opinions vary.