July 1st Amusement Parks, zoos and the library opened up. I was able to restrain myself for a total of one whole day before we found ourselves in Universal Studios.

Thankfully our annual passes have been extended by the amount of time the park was closed due to COVID-19, so we're good till almost Christmas. Unfortunately, the purchase of Annual/Season passes is currently suspended so we can't buy our Helper a Season Pass to match up with ours.

Universal did have a good Resident's Rate on that we used for her though. It was so nice to have another adult with me and the three girls. We split up a number of times to let MsC ride the scary rides. She was thrilled to learn that she is tall enough for all the rides in Universal and made good use of that fact. She even went on Battlestar Galactica - which really is a true roller coaster. She went on the Human side, which in her words is "Horrifying, but didn't go upside down".

An empty Hollywood Boulevard (park entrance)

The park is capped at 25% capacity, so I figured that would be pretty quiet and it was. It was also a Thursday afternoon, but we didn't leave until almost 6 pm and it was still just as quiet. Park hours have been reduced drastically to 2 - 9 pm, and they're only open Thursdays to Sundays currently.

We always went in the morning before, so that was a change for us, but everyone did great. It's easier now that MsI has completly given up naps. After waiting in the (very short) and socially distanced lines, as a group of 5 we were we mostly loaded on rides without any other parties. They skip a row when loading even if it's all just your party

Empty Madagascar Ride.
Empty row in the middle of our party.

I have never found the loading of rides to be an efficient process in Universal Studios Singapore and the added restrictions have made it even less so. I found in particular that occasionally rows which were marked for use were being left empty despite people in line. .

MsE and Aunty Hazel in the next car.

Some of the logic I just couldn't figure out. Take the Madagascar Carousel: I'm guessing they were letting on 25% of the riders they could, but it actually seemed significantly less than that. None of the seating was blocked out so the 15 or so people they let on at one time got on the first seats they saw with most people leaving some space between themselves and other parties.

This meant that about 1/4 of the circle had people grouped together on it and then the remaining 3/4 of the circle was empty. On the other hand there was only 1 staff member working the ride and he had to wipe off each seat that someone had ridden on before he let the next group of riders on. Maybe this approach was intentional so that he could keep track of which seats had actually been ridden on to avoid a lot of unnecessary cleaning.

The empty Carousel

Universal was also trying out Boarding Times for The Mummy. You went to the ride entrance and they gave you a slip of paper and you had a 20 minute window to come back and ride the ride in. If you had Express, then you didn't have to get a Boarding Time and could just go right in. Our Helper was given a Boarding Time for in 30 minutes, but MsC and I went right on the ride at that time while she waited with our little ones for her boarding time. There were only 2 other people on our ride. In other words, there was no one in line. I like the idea of the Boarding times, but it's ridiculous for them to be enforcing them when there is no line. I imagine staff hadn't been given any instruction about what to do in that scenario.  

You could still get your picture taken with characters - statue and/or live. For the live characters, you stood about 6 feet in front of the character, so the character was in the background of your picture. No hugs.