Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast on Friday the 18th of November,

the last of the week. And the day when I am set to leave Singapore. And I really wanted to,

first of all, find somewhere with more birds on than traffic noise.

Secondly, to give you my thoughts about Singapore as a destination,

whether you're travelling on leisure or as many people are on business.

I talked yesterday about the way that British Airways keeps a couple of flights coming here because they are getting lots of business travellers. So here's the situation as far as I see it.

Everything about Singapore, more or less in terms of the mechanics of getting into the country which you can do by

just registering online then your passport is scanned and you're through the

airport in a matter of moments that everything is very efficient there are

though some issues with, I guess, a sense of people not wanting necessarily to make decisions themselves.

I've been filming mostly this week, and of course, filming, as I'm sure you are aware, tends to not quite work out as planned and things get shifted around and you might want to start three hours early or an hour late and you seek your location's cooperation in this and very often they will just say no we've

got an appointment for two o'clock and two o'clock is when we will see you and that is

absolutely fair enough it's very very business-like and it doesn't really whereas in perhaps

in Europe you'd be kind of more relaxed and you'd more expect people to

work around things in Singapore it seems to be their culture that you make an

arrangement and then you stick to it and that seems entirely fair although not always

ideal indeed on my flight back tonight I want to

try to make an adjustment and I'm only 30% confident it will happen we shall see

in terms of the mechanics of getting around well you've got the extremely

efficient MRT that's the

underground system they just opened a whole bunch of new stations a new line which is serving gardens

in the by the bay which is a whole new area with amazing stuff and that takes you

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