June 2
Leaving
After a month of planning, it was time to leave. My flight to Singapore was supposed to leave at 7PM from Sea-Tac and connect in Vancouver, BC. The day before, I vowed to stay up as late as possible and try to get myself on SE Asia time, so that’s what I did. Or at least attempted to do. Throwing in the towel around midnight, I was in bed around 1AM. That’s about 3PM SE Asia time, so not exactly the 9-10PM I had been hoping.
The day of departure turned out to be rainy and gray. There were last minute errands and tasks to accomplished but that all turned out fine. Getting to the airport, I already had a notion that something wasn’t quite right with my flight reservation because I was refused online check-in.
As it turned out, the issue was that the return leg of my ticket from Singapore was outside the 90-day visa-free period that Singapore allows for US Citizens.
That created a huge mess for Air Canada. The check-in agent was very understanding but in the end he couldn’t do anything, and calling his supervisor didn’t help at all. She actually implied that I might be trying to break Singaporean immigration law. In the end, I had to call the 1-800 number for Air Canada, be on hold for 45 minutes, and change my return flight to an earlier departure out of Singapore. Which cost $350 for the privilege.
All this happened despite all the documentation that I had that I wouldn’t be staying in Singapore, like my outbound flight printouts, dated Visas for Indonesia, Cambodia, and Laos. There’s also the rhetorical question about why there wasn’t pre-warning about this when booking the flight a month previously. In the end, there really wasn’t much choice so I had acquiesce to Air Canada’s arcane rules.
Finally, with one minute to go in the check-in window, the Air Canada system updated and I was finally allowed to check in for my flight. This allowed me just enough time to get to the gate, get on the bus, and be driven out to the plane bound for Vancouver.
