Monday, March 28, 2011

Who is going to Japan soon?

Who is going to Japan soon? Me. For a holiday.

When I walked into the Japanese embassy at 3.00 pm this afternoon, I was astonished to see only two people applying for visas. One was a Malaysian Chinese man holding three passports. The second person was a guy filling up a form in Japanese. There were no runners from travel agencies carrying dozens of passports unlike in December 2009 when I had to wait 3 hours for my turn to hand over my documents, today it only took 5 minutes.

My flight will to Tokyo will be on Saturday, 2 April. I am expecting an near empty airplane.

I will spend one week in Japan in Tokyo and Kanazawa. I wanted to visit Kanazawa back in Dec. 2009 when I spent three weeks in Japan. The main attraction is the well preserved houses and other buildings from the old Edo period. However I could not find the time as I was traveling and spending time in five cities (Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Hiroshima and Osaka) and Kanazawa is not in the bullet train (Shinkansen) routes.

From Kanazawa, I will fly directly to the second leg of my trip to Seoul . I plan to spend about 16 days in South Korea.

I have bought some essentials for my trip :
  1. Face mask ; 1 pair in case the level of radiation increases in Tokyo or Kanazawa.

  2. Six AAA batteries for the blackouts

  3. Two small LED flash lights

  4. Two packs of Panadol each with 8 tablets
A few more things that I plan to buy and bring along:
  1. Rubber gloves

  2. Possibly ; 2 x 1.5L bottle of water

  3. A whistle.

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