travel log day 1 - changi airport, singapore
for the next ten days, my team and i are on our way to germany, attending Gamescom 2025. this morning, that meant dragging several of our loved ones out of bed at 5:30 in the morning to drive us to the airport by 7.
our first stop was a layover in singapore for the afternoon and evening; the same stop we have scheduled for the way home, the same stop we made on the way to gamescom and back last year. my travelling companions seemed surprised by how much of this airport i remembered. i was a little surprised by how much of it they had been able to forget.
at some point flying over the north coast of australia, my thoughts started wandering. i thought about the friends i wouldn't get to see for a week and already missed terribly. i thought back to one friend's documenting of her own travels that i watched several months ago, and not for the first time i regretted still not having really talked to her about it, or any of her other work.
i realised, at some point, that the way i think about travelling has shifted in the past year. that i have never really gone anywhere just for the place itself; travel is always wrapped tightly around some event or purpose or group of people, diluting the destination itself by stretching it to conform to the imposed context of why.
i don't mean to sound ungrateful, of course. i've traveled overseas more than most people i know, i recognise what a privilege it is, especially since we have once again received external support to even make it possible. but somehow that almost makes it worse, i think.
on every singapore airlines flight that i've been on, the safety demonstration before takeoff was replaced by a video presenting all of the usual information while showing off some of singapore's major attractions as backdrops. as we came in to land at changi airport, i thought about that video, and i looked out over singapore. it felt like such a shame that this would be our third time landing in this city, and our third time leaving without ever stepping more than a hundred metres or so from the front door of the airport.
i don't quite know how i feel about changi airport - i find myself swinging between a kind of love and a kind of hatred. changi is several shopping malls with plane terminals attached, a bustling illusion of wealth, a sprawling advertisement for singapore built from steel and glass and millions upon millions of lights. i think this is the source of my two moods about the place; a kind of awe when i let myself fall into the vision the airport is trying to build, a kind of distaste when i step back and look at myself.
changi has three distinct terminals, arranged in a U shape. in the middle sits the Jewel, the secret fourth shopping mall, set free from the constraints of having airport parts attached. the centrepiece of the jewel, of the airport itself really, is a multi-storey water feature like a thundering waterfall curved back on itself.
the airport has a train system that runs between the terminals; one of them, between terminals 2 and 3, pierces through the jewel, carving a tunnel between shops and windows then running across a bridge passing in front of the waterfall. this is wholly unnecessary and i adore it. transport infrastructure running through and interacting with buildings is a particular joy of mine, and there's something about the way this train plays with boundaries and space that feels particularly cute. the train can't have a stop inside the jewel, because it's part of the airport transit zone - if you could leave then the train would need a whole security and immigration gate, but because it's sealed it's allowed to exist as a little bubble of international space, passing through the physical reality of singapore like a droplet of oil floating through water.
the airport as a whole uses space heavily to build itself - high ceilings and lots of mezzanine levels give the environment a sense of grand scale, at times giving the impression of walking along the floor of a tiered canyon with several layers of space watching over you. in parts, multifloor stores or other buildings are housed entirely within the terminal itself, turning the entire building into a complete environment that things exist within, rather than being part of. i tried to take photos, but my 85mm lens wasn't really the right tool for it - the whole place demands a wider lens, demands that you capture more, that you capture the scale of everything around you.
applying to enter singapore short-term while in transit is a shockingly easy process - just a five minute online form, for us. so we went outside for dinner, following my half-remembered directions to a food court in the basement of the jewel that i mostly recalled had a place that did good drinks. it was the closest thing to feeling like a real place on the whole stopover, even though i know it was still part of the construct of changi.
i was hoping that by writing more about the place, i would better figure out what i think of changi airport. but it hasn't led to much, and i fear this post has outstayed its welcome in the process (in that i am now writing it when i should be looking out the window of a train in germany)
i feel like i need to see more of the context of this airport to make any real judgements. our stop in singapore on the way home next week will be similarly short, but at some point i want to visit singapore proper. maybe next year.