Return Flight To smoothly wrap up the trip, I was initially hoping to fly home on JAL from Haneda Airport. Award availability in economy was abundant through early July, but entirely disappeared for the rest of the summer. Cash prices looked ridiculous, too. After months of stalking different options, we ended up flying ZIPAir home
Articles for August 2024
Korea & Japan 2024 (9/10) – City #5 – Tokyo
Another Shinkansen train ride later, we arrived at Tokyo. We pulled a pro move hopping off at Shinagawa rather than going all the way to Tokyo Station, saving a few minutes of travel time. Conrad Tokyo The family stayed at this awesome hotel for five nights. With Hilton’s fifth-night free, I was able to book
Korea & Japan 2024 (8/10) – City #4 – Kyoto
From Fukuoka’s Hakata Station, we took a Shinkansen train to Kyoto. It traveled the 661-kilometer distance in 2 hours and 14 minutes. Meanwhile, Bah and Mah flew from Taiwan into Kaisai Airport, and then took a hour-long train to meet up with us. Thus began our 3-day visit in Kyoto. Kyoto’s Top Attractions Hong and
Korea & Japan 2024 (7/10) – Gundam
Gundam is a lot like Marvel. I’ve never considered myself a fan and can’t tell you much about its lore. All I could do was name a few of the more iconic characters… like 3 of them. However, I did grow up with the franchise permeating the pop culture, and love similar media and products
Korea & Japan 2024 (6/10) – City #3 – Fukuoka
On Thursday morning, we stepped into the ferry port, cleared immigration, and officially entered Japan. We hailed a cab (our very first car ride in this country) to the hotel. The city center was only 1.5 miles away and I knew the path was fairly walkable. However, the sun was already scorching at 8am and
Korea & Japan 2024 (5/10) – Overnight Ferry – Camellia Line Busan to Fukuoka
Every other person we know had visited Japan this year or was planning to go soon. As such, our trip would be rather un-special if we also flew there like everybody else. Nah. We entered the country by boat instead. As a result of extra zooming into Google Maps during our trip research, I came
Korea & Japan 2024 (4/10) – City #2 – Busan
Our next stop was Busan, one of the world’s busiest sea ports situated at the southeast corner of the Korean Peninsula. This city is quite similar to Chongqing for a couple reasons: We had originally hoped to spend 2-3 days here, but scheduling constraints squeezed our time to just under 1.5. Stormy weather further prevented
Korea & Japan 2024 (3/10) – City #1 – Seoul
The flight of my dreams came to an end when it landed in Incheon at 4am. It was raining. We took a deep breath in anticipation for a long day of fighting both jet lag and weather. Immigration, airport train, two snack breaks, and a long walk later, we arrived at 7:30 to drop bags
Korea & Japan 2024 (2/10) – Korean Airlines Prestige Class A380-800 LAX to ICN
A key anchor to our itinerary was the outbound flight to Korea. Because it took off from LAX, we had to take a positioning flight to and hang out all day in Los Angeles first. A couple people had expressed confusion when I mentioned this route, wondering out loud if there was no flight to
Korea & Japan 2024 (1/10) – A Smiley Face Vacation
This summer, we traveled the entire width of South Korea and Japan. The route looks like a smiley face. This vacation was booked shortly after we returned from Thailand last summer, where we grew a taste for trying different modes of transportation. The initially simple trip idea got more cities added to it just so