Napoli - il giorno sei **Naples - day six**

We barely had 6 hours of sleep before we got up. Like our flight from Singapore, I reckoned we could sleep on the flight back. Our flight to Munich was scheduled to leave at 6:30AM so we were just being typical Singaporeans and wanted to check in 2 hours before departure time. I awoke at 3AM to wash up and pack up all the things one final time, trying desperately to shove all the junk food that we’d bought without crushing the two huge bags of potato chips into our hand carry luggage (we could munch on the plane!). We bid our final farewells to our nice cosy room and headed down noisily (our luggage was damn heavy) to the reception to check out. Within five minutes, our cab to the airport arrived and sent us there in another fifteen since the streets were dead at this time of the morning.

When we arrived, the departure hall was dead quiet, save for one uncle mopping the floor. There were other travelers sleeping on the benches, perhaps in an attempt to save themselves from paying for an extra night at the hotel. My watch read 4:15AM, but yet signs of life were minimal. Being so used to a bustling Changi airport, the least I expected was some airport staff milling around. About an hour later, when my watch read 5:20AM the staff manning the check in counter finally came. We proceeded to check in to get our boarding passes for our flights to Munich and subsequently back to Singapore. Not knowing what else to do in the otherwise activity-deficient airport, we headed towards the departure gate, but even there the staff were just waking up and hadn’t even unlocked the doors yet. It took them another good ten minutes before they woke up, unlocked the doors and got the X-ray machines powered up.

‘What’s up with these people?’ I wondered to myself. Our flight was less than an hour away and these people seemed to care less. As we approached the boarding gates, I realized that the clock hanging from the ceiling read 5:15AM but my watch was already reading 6:15AM, just like the TV clock back at the hotel. I thought my watch had died on me without my knowledge again. Since, according to the clock, we had about an hour to go, we went up one level towards a café for some light breakfast. It was there that Penny learned the time was turned one hour back on Saturday (the day we were in Rome) as it officially marked the beginning of winter. But nobody told us, which meant that we had been living an hour ahead of time all this while. Which suddenly made sense now with the long wait at the check-in counter, the clock at the hotel, the café staff getting mad at us when we went down waaaaay too early for breakfast, etc.

Finally at 6:25AM, the boarding gates opened and we boarded the bus that would take us to the plane. As the plane took off, we could see the sun rise beaming down on Naples to wake the city up. We bid our final farewells to the city that was etched so deeply into our memories for so many different reasons. The in-flight snack came next before we could get some shut eye – it was that same sandwich made with parma ham, but without the accompanying chocolate bar this time round. The bread was so hard that you could probably hijack the plane with it, so I only took two bites of it and went to sleep. Next thing I knew, we were in Munich.

It was drizzling when the plane landed and the cold 10˚C temperature sort of took us by surprise – we expected it to be cold, but we didn’t expect that it’ll be made colder by the rain. As we got into the main building, we headed to clear the immigration and asked the information counter for directions on taking the subway to town. We figured since we had 4 hours to kill, we might as well see some sights in Munich. But the €18 ticket and the thought of scuttling around again made us rethink our plan. Fortunately, the airport had another shopping area attached to the main building so we headed towards there in search of ‘breakfast’ (it was only about 9AM by the time we got out) and hoping to kill some of our 4 hours. We found a little Nordic seafood shop and ordered some hot soup which I’d been craving for since our second day in Naples (contrary to what I thought, minestrone is NOT Italian) along with some tea. We never felt shiok-er (for lack of a better word)! After slurping up every drop of soup and wiping the bowl dry with the piece of bun provided, we proceeded to explore the rest of the shopping centre - stopping by a toy shop to purchase a Playmobil set for Danielle, Grace’s daughter; hanging out at a book shop browsing through comics and cookbooks in German and some German porn (segregated into different categories depending on your fetish!). We ended our shopping at a supermarket to buy even more tidbits (chocolates for me and a Wall-E Pez dispenser for Velouria since we’d promised her a Wall-E toy).

As we reached the boarding gate to our flight, we realized how crowded it was and were quite gloomy with the possibility of the flight home being full – which meant we didn’t have the luxury of spreading ourselves over 4 seats to snooze like our flight from Singapore. How were we going to while away 13 hours of flight time without being able to lie down and sleep?? True enough, it was indeed full and we were shoulder to shoulder with a plane full of Ozzies and Kiwis (they were continuing their journey on a connecting flight in Singapore to Australia and NZ respectively).

The flight was rather uneventful. We couldn’t really sleep as we were seated upright, so we just dozed a little here and there. We couldn’t stomach another meal of meat and potatoes and since we were craving for hot soup, we requested for Nissin cup noodles, which the attendant was nice enough to bring back later (try that on SQ and I’m sure they’ll tell you ‘Sure, we’ll stop the plane and you can go buy your own’). We managed to sit through Meet Dave which was quite hilarious (albeit a little too short to burn a substantial amount of our 13 hour flight) but the rest of the movies we’d already seen on our flight from Singapore.

Funny thing was (perhaps it was my dozing), the flight back was not as painful as I thought it would be since we were seated upright all the time. I didn’t even get out of my seat the entire flight - something I’d never accomplished before on any flight, let alone a 13 hour one! We landed in Singapore at 8:30AM and we couldn’t be happier to be home.

I can’t say this enough, but praise the Lord for this wonderful blessing that He’s given us. We just wanted to head home to sleep, and then probably head to Redhill for a hot, steaming bowl of our favourite fish soup and a nice massage to soothe our aching backs and necks.