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
Vacation
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
Taiwan 2024 (7/7) – Haircut
This final post from our Taiwan trip is all about me… Because this happened: The Why For weeks, people asked the question. I really didn’t have a great answer aside from it felt like time. The long hair made life difficult in many ways, but I did treasure it dearly. While I had usually attributed