Working Vacation in Singapore

School got out for summer break on June 25th, and the next day I headed to Singapore with 24 of my classmates for a week-long working holiday. We spent one full week visiting with companies who could be future employers and exploring what it would be like to work in Singapore. We paid for our own airfare and hotels, but the company visits, dinners, and mass transportation were arranged by my school, IMD. About half the people who went were people who were from Asia or who had already worked in Asia, and the other half were people who had never had any experiences in Asia and wanted to discover if it was something they wanted to pursue. I fell into the second category, and it was the first time I had even been to Asia. Before that, the farthest east I had traveled was to Budapest.

I got up early, at 6am, on the Saturday we were leaving, and was on a train to the Zurich airport at 7:20. After the 2.5 hr ride we checked in and were told that it would take 40 minutes just to walk to our gate because Zurich is such a huge airport. There were a total of 15 of us traveling together, so were a loud group as we made our way on to the plane and found our seats.

We were booked with Singapore Airlines on the massive A380 jumbo jet, the largest passenger plane in the world, with over 5,000 square feet of floor space, a range of 8,200 miles (it can fly from New York to Hong Kong without stopping), and a double decker configuration with a capacity of about 475-525 people, assuming a 3 class system. If an airline wanted to use one of these planes for only economy class they could fit over 800 passengers, although my aerospace engineer classmate told me no airline would do that because it would take nearly 3 hours just to get everyone on and off during boarding. 

When I first saw the A380 from the terminal it didn't seem as big as I had pictured, and when we boarded I realized that it was about the same width as other long-haul planes like the 747, with a 3-4-3 seat configuration. The big difference I suppose was that it was taller than other planes, with the upper deck adding the extra space that made it so big. I was in row 34, which relatively speaking was very near the front. The bottom deck had somewhere around 80 rows and the upper deck another 30.

My first wonderful surprise was to discover that the stewardesses really did wear the fanciful embroidered dresses that are shown in the advertisements, and that they were even more beautiful in real life than I had imagined. The captain came on to wish us a pleasant flight and informed us that our travel route would take us over Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, among other countries. These were countries that for all due purposes only existed as concepts in my mind and the thought of flying over them made them much more real and tangible.

The flight left at noon and lasted 12 hours, with a 6 hour time change forward, which meant we would arrive in Singapore at 6am Sunday morning. I wasn't very tired and during the whole flight was only able to sleep a little bit, since for our bodies it was the middle of the afternoon, so to pass the time I watched 4 movies (Alice in Wonderland, This Is It, Avatar, and Surf's Up) and took a tour of the plane. My favorite part was the spiral staircase that led to the upper deck.

We arrived in Singapore tired but excited.

The Singapore group.

Seeing how much time we have to get to the gate.

The A380!

Examining the plane design.

The plane is wider than it is long.

 

Each wing is nearly 90 feet long.

The flight path.

The flight passed over Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

The view from my seat. There was an entire other section behind mine.

You had to go up a spiral staircase to get to the upper deck.

The upper deck.

Heading back down.

Arriving in Singapore!