Weekend Engagement - A Trip That Was More Eventful Than Expected

What's the best or most enjoyable thing about your weekend and why?

Contrary to most weekends, where I could spend the majority of the time relaxing and sipping coffee at a cafe, I actually had an overseas trip planned in advance!

For those who are familiar, Malaysia (or more specifically Johor Bahru) is just an 1 km causeway/bridge away from the northern tip of Singapore. There are various modes of transport to travel to Johor Bahru, either by car, bus, or even by train. To avoid the potential jams, my friend and I travelled by train.

We travelled after lunch because we wanted to take things easy. First up on the itinerary was shopping! Due to the difference in cost in living between two cities, the same stuff in Johor can be significant cheaper. For example, the same box of eye drops can cost 24 SGD (around 17 USD) in Singapore but I managed to bought buy it at 28.90 MYR (around 6 USD) over in Johor. I helped my parents buy some items too, I was told it cost around 6 SGD (around 4 USD) in Singapore, and no surprise, it was selling at 8 MYR (less than 2 USD) in Johor.

After buying some of the daily necessities, we headed for a massage. Even though the prices were significantly lower, I didn't quite enjoy the massage because I felt it was below par. Maybe it's just my bad luck to get an inexperienced masseur.

Thereafter, we headed for dinner. The restaurants in the mall were pretty crowded so we settled on some local food along the streets, and ended the day trip with some desserts, before heading back to the train station for our journey back to Singapore.

And our eventful trip didn't just end there!

On our way back, I received news from my friends that there was a bomb scare in one of the malls in the vicinity and people were frantically evacuating from the mall!!! You can read more about the news here.

Suddenly it all made sense...

The streets on our way back did look more crowded than the usual...

The traffic was really bad and it was much harder to get a Grab compared to our previous trips...

Fortunately, my friend and I were back safe and sound, and we were just lucky that we didn't plan to visit that specific mall this trip. And I quickly texted my loved ones to let them know I was fine as soon as I was back on Singapore soil.

So that summed up my trip on Saturday, which was more eventful than I expected. Extremely thankful for sure. Hope you enjoyed reading and let me know if you have any comments! Have a pleasant week ahead and stay safe!