mutelife

On July 23rd we had but a few hours in Korea. It was time to pack everything because in the afternoon we would be flying out from Busan to Osaka, Japan.

When planning this whole trip we thought “why not just go to Japan since it’s so close anyway?”, and by now you know we use every excuse we can to visit the land of the rising sun. Plus, it had been 10 years since we went to Japan the first time. Yes, a whole decade! That’s certainly worth celebrating with yet another visit. And it would be the first time for little M.

We got on the subway, then switched to a train, and still arrived at the airport way too early. Correction: it’s never too early to arrive to the airport with kids. We waited for the check-in counter to open while having a nice meal and then made our way there.

The person that assisted us was very confused why these Westerners were flying from Korea to Japan on a one-way ticket, and quickly asked us if we had return flights. “Unfortunately, yes” I thought, while handing her the documents. Once that was settled we still had plenty of time to hang around past security.

When we arrived at our gate we immediately noticed a small commotion, and saw the flight was delayed by about 20 minutes. We really couldn’t care less because we were on our way to Japan. And the flight would only take one hour and change. We were all terribly excited!

Almost as soon as we hit 30,000 feet we started to see Japanese islands down below. These soon gave way to more and more land, until eventually we started to descent into the enormous Osaka sprawl.

Already on the ground we made our way through immigration and into the airport. Not-so-quickly got our JR Passes, which I got to say were a disappointment this time around.

They are no longer pretty or unique, and are now regular train tickets. Instead of going through the manned gates you use them on the automated gates, which sounds like a good thing, until they eventually stop working (as mine did) and then you’re back to the manned gate.

Once the Shinkansen ride was done we were in the middle of Osaka looking for our Airbnb. It felt amazing to be in this country again, knowing our Japanese adventure was about to begin!

To celebrate the occasion we had one of our konbini “medley” dinners: a mix of random goodies, old and new items that we found at a 7-Eleven nearby.