Singapore Dream: Pay $20 to Queue All Day

It has been said that Singaporeans love to queue. I can now officially claim to have had a taste of this unique Singaporean love, and frankly, it's not all that enjoyable.

Last Sunday I went to the Airshow 2008. Since I heard the performance was scheduled to be from 12.15pm to 1.45pm, I took my family to breakfast and arrived at Pasir Ris MRT station slightly after 11am. I was expecting a queue, but what I saw really made me want to run away and hide. There was a big queue snaking right around the whole station before winding it's way many times on the nearby field.

Everyone was irritable, and lots of people just thought they had the right to walk past others. Surely any problems would have been identified on Saturday by the organizers, when they first opened to public, and Sunday would be a lot smoother. This was not so. There are a lot of bottlenecks which could have been better managed, especially when it came to actually boarding passengers. Needless to say, we missed all but the last few minutes of the show.

With nothing else to do, we bought some mineral water (at $2 per bottle!) and went around the displays. There was nothing very interesting, you couldn't even touch the planes. Taking photos was a hassle as there were just too many people walking up and down. After walking around aimlessly for a bit we just decided to go home... we just didn't have enough energy to go through the displays.

Going back presented yet another problem. We queued another hour or so just to get to the buses. An obvious mistake was letting those willing to pay $5 to take the bus to Expo queue together with those waiting for the shuttle bus. From what I heard, it was total chaos on Saturday. So they thought to solve it by making the queue longer with more guard rails. Did nobody think to just have more queues?

To say we were disappointed would be an understatement. I had wanted my son to see the Black Knights' performance. Not only did we miss the performance, there was additional aggravation and frustration from all that disorderly queuing. All I could think of was "Please don't tell me I PAID $20 for this". Why were so many tickets issued if they were not able to deal with the crowd? Why was there only 1 performance show? Why was no ample warning given?

I think many people will agree with me that it was just too poorly organized and absolutely not worth the time or money. I'm sure the organizers made a lot of money as the papers reported, but to me, the public show was a complete failure. I want my money back, please!