Just in case anyone is interested and can learn something from our experience flying here, this post is about getting to where we were going. We flew Auckland to Singapore with Air NZ on their new Dreamliner. Pretty nice plane, and we both got some sleep on the overnight flight so that was very good!
Singapore airport was SO efficient, the best I’ve ever been in. We arrived at 6.30am and we were in a taxi before 7am after collecting our checked in baggage and clearing immigration. No need to wait for a taxi, they had them all lined up with boots/trunk open ready. Very impressive!
When we returned to the airport it was just as efficient. We only had one thing that we weren’t quite expecting. We decided we’d go to The Green Market airport lounge and relax for a bit and let me catch up on this blog. But we could NOT find the lounge! We followed directions from 3 different people and still couldn’t find it! Finally, after we had passed it a couple of times, we figured this Korean restaurant must be what people were directing us to, but it wasn’t called The Green Market, and it certainly wasn’t what we were expecting after the very nice Emperor Lounge in Auckland. Instead of desks, sofas, buffet, WIFI, showers etc., this was an ordinary looking restaurant called: TGM – The Green Market! 🙂 And there was nothing green to be seen. No market either. Nor any airport lounge to speak of. Ha!
Anyway, the lady confirmed that this was the temporary “lounge”, seated us, and brought us menus. The meals were pretty amazing:
Just not what was expected but sometimes the unexpected is good too! 🙂
We didn’t linger there as it wasn’t that comfortable, but what did look comfortable was the sleeping lounges they had in the terminal:
The little red button at the bottom of the photo is for setting an alarm to wake you up! 🙂
We boarded Lufthansa for our 12 and a half hour flight. We flew on their largest passenger plane, the double decker A380. I had gone online and selected our seats a week before we left, choosing seats on the upper deck at the back, just behind business class. This turned out to be a brilliant selection, as it was very quiet, and with only 20 or so passengers (normally seats 35 but it wasn’t full) with one stewardess, it meant that our meals etc. were all over and done with very quickly. Nice. No babies or small children up there either! Regardless of all that, we didn’t get very much sleep although the seats were comfortable, but it was quite a bumpy turbulent flight.
We arrived in Frankfurt ten minutes late at 6.30am, knowing that we had a very tight connection with only an hour to get our next flight.
Again, our selection of seats served us well because we disembarked with the business class passengers before the economy class. So we got to immigration quickly and made it to our gate just before the first boarding call! Yay!
And our next flight was not too full…!
Since it was early morning there was a lot of cloud around still, but we did catch glimpses of the Bavarian and Swiss Alps a few times!