New Year Trauma

the new year is supposed to be a time of good tidings and cheer. this new year turned out to be a bit off tangent by those standards. actually it was way off tangent. and thats the reason why i took this long to blog about it – i needed to recover first!

like many others – make that a whole lot of others –  i was in clarke quay to welcome the turn of the new year with out-of-town friends. it was all very fun until the time came when we had to go back home. tired from all the dancing in our heeled sandals and with pretty much nothing else to do, we hobbled over the swissotel’s lobby and sat around pretending to wait for a friend who was staying in the hotel. it seemed to work well until the hotel staff chased us out at closing time in the wee hours of the morning (about 3-am plus).

we stepped outside and waited in the line for a taxi outside the hotel – i think that is the point when the nightmare officially began. 

it soon became clear that there were not many cabs whizzing around this side of town. after waiting and getting nowhere with calling the cab hotline, we took the brave (and rather foolish) decision to walk out and try flagging a cab.

we soon realised how foolish we were.

the road was lined with drunk and semi-hungover party goers who were desperately trying to flag a cab. those who werent engaged in the attempt were lying on the pavement trying to keep down the nausea (some even fell asleep right there). the cab line was apparently suffering from a severe overload of callers, so it just refused to connect. what was most infuriating was the number of apparently empty cabs who sped past, ignoring our outstreched hands.

“Cant they atleast drop us somewhere – just for being nice! its new year after all!” wailed my friend while the rest of us swallowed our curses.

so it was that we walked – in the hope that somewhere, some cab would magically stop in front of us and give us the ride home. but it wasnt to be – we walked, and walked, and walked. until we covered the horrendous distance from clarke quay to amara hotel at tanjong pagar where my friends were staying. suffice to say that we felt that our knees and back were suffering from some very severe damage.

and even at 5am-plus – when atleast some of those people should have gone home – there were still no cabs around. unable to move another step, i decided to crash in my friends’ room (while feeling guilty about taking up some of their space), the hotel called and said they had a private cab i could take home.

thanks to the fact that half my senses had already shut down, i didnt grasp the word ‘private’. what it meant was that the cab was a limo that wanted to charge me a whopping $40!! i refused, fought and forced him to switch on the meter – even with its $10 booking rate. and paid $24 to get home – which is probably thrice what i would pay on a normal day.

what a way to start a new year.

and when i did mention this to my close friend, she laughed and said, “but didn’t you know that this would be the case? i mean, havent you been living here for 10-odd years now?”

never again.