On November 8th, 2019 Joanna and I had our wedding. It went off mostly without a hitch (one person fainted), people had a fun time despite that incident and I was relieved the wedding planning was over. For those of you that have had to plan a wedding, I’m sure you can relate to the stress of it all. Also, see below on how good we looked.

What Joanna and I were most excited about with the getting married process was the trip to Japan I had planned to see the cherry blossoms at the end of March 2020. I mean we didn’t have to get married to go back to Japan but this was meant to be our honeymoon and I had a lot of really great stuff planned for it. As you all are aware, covid-19 reared its ugly head soon after. I was obsessively checking the WHO covid global statistics every day thinking “It’s only 16 total cases, how bad could it really be?”

Joanna’s cousin and her husband were actually in New Zealand when lockdown kicked in and they were forced to cut their trip short and rush back to the states. I mean all of us had no idea what we were in for. I chuckle when I remember work told us that we’ll be working from home for 2 weeks and expect to be back in the office after that.

In mid February I had to make the difficult decision to cancel our long awaited trip and made this FB post about it.

We were supposed to head out on March 27th and here are the covid stats for that day:

Japan 1,387 total confirmed cases, 46 total deaths. Last 24 hours had 96 new covid cases and 1 death.

US 68,334 total confirmed cases, 991 total deaths. Last 24 hours had 4764 new covid cases and 107 deaths in the last 24 hours.

I supposed in hindsight, we were probably safer being in Japan than in the states?

As a consolation prize, I ordered take out sushi for us since we weren’t able to head to Japan for it.

Fast forward 3 years and we’re finally getting to go on our trip! Japan announced that they were opening back up for tourism in October 2022. I told Joanna during the pandemic that the moment they announce their reopening, I’m rebooking everything.

This trip is going to be a nice mix of big city stuff and middle of nowhere stuff. This will be my 3rd time and Joanna’s 2nd to Japan.

The places we’re going to be visiting are:

  • Fukuoka
  • Yakushima Island
  • Kyoto
  • Kinosaki
  • Osaka

We were originally intending to travel with my cousin Become and his wife, but last month he found out his dad had some health issues that needed to be addressed right away so they had to make the difficult decision to cancel their trip with us. We’re definitely planning on coming back though as this is our happy place. I have all the more reason to keep this blog up to date so he can follow along.

Our travel day to Fukuoka went really smoothly for the most part. My dad took the dogs and dropped us off at the airport with plenty of time for us to get some gelato at the new Delta lounge.

We had a 13 hour direct flight from MSP to Tokyo. When I originally booked the tickets, I had the opportunity to upgrade our seats to comfort plus for $50 extra which I thought was totally worth it considering the duration of the flight. After boarding and they announced that the cabin doors were closed, we were pleasantly surprised that no one else had booked the row of 4 so we were able to stretch out. It really made the flight feel half as long with the extra space to move around.

We had to go through immigration when we landed in Tokyo. It was total organized chaos with so many people in line to get in. I thought it must be such a change compared to 6 months ago when they were barely letting any foreigners in. We dropped our check in bags off at the ANA ticket counter and got into a super long line to get through airport security with the remaining hour we had in our layover. There were 2 guys in front of us in line who looked really sad. One guy gave the other a kiss and hug and walked away. The guy that stayed in line was wiping tears away quietly for a little bit until I asked him if he was ok. He said that him and his boyfriend came to Tokyo a month ago to do a study abroad together but he needed to head home while his bf stayed through August. We got to chatting a little bit more, he told me that he is actually a Chinese major studying at a small liberal arts college in Asheville, NC. He was interested in doing a study abroad program and this one to Tokyo was the only one he could take up. He’s been studying Mandarin for a year and had no prior Japanese experience but decided to sign up. I told him that Joanna and I did study abroad separately at the Beijing Language Culture University so we could relate with the long distance however there’s way better technology today to stay connected compared to 14 years ago (geeze we’ve been together a long time).

He perked up and said he was actually considering going to the same school in the spring next year. It was at this point where security looked at my boarding pass and said that we were at the wrong terminal. I was disappointed I didn’t catch the guy’s name or properly say goodbye but we had to rush to catch a shuttle for the domestic departure terminal with less than 45 min to doors closing.

We got to our gate with 5 minutes to spare and it turns out the flight was delayed about 20 minutes. I guess the stress was all worth it if I was able to provide a short distraction to the guy in the security line. I seem to meet so many interesting people at the airport!

We got into Fukuoka at 6pm hungry and tired after 16ish hours traveling. This city is the 6th most populated city in Japan with 1.5 million people. I feel like I’m seeing a ton of people on social media going to Tokyo right now so I’m glad I picked a different city to start our trip out in. I do love Tokyo though and could easily live there for a month and not get bored.

Quick ramen trivia: Tonkotsu ramen (豚骨ラーメン) is a ramen dish that originated in Fukuoka, Fukuoka Prefecture on the Kyushu island of Japan, and it is a specialty dish in both Fukuoka and Kyushu. The soup broth is based on pork bones and other ingredients, which are typically boiled for several hours, and the dish is traditionally topped with sliced pork belly and served with ramen noodles that are hard in the center.

Knowing this, I wanted to check out a world famous ramen chain called Ichiran Ramen. What makes them special is that you sit in your own individual booth and you don’t have to talk to or see the person taking your order. You just circle the options on how you want your bowl of ramen and hand it to them from under the screen.

The broth was so creamy and garlicy, noodles chewy, and slices of pork very tender. This was a great first meal to kick off the trip. The cubicle walls were a good way for me to focus on how good the meal was and not get distracted by Joanna.

We got to our hotel room which is an 8 min walk from the train station. It’s pretty small but for $60 a night, I really just need a place to keep my stuff, shower, and sleep.

Speaking of sleep, it’s 4 am and I only managed to get 2 hours before my brain was done with the nap as it’s 2pm at home right now. My sleep cycles have been all out of whack this month. I went to Mumbai 3 weeks ago, it took 5 days to adjust to that time zone, just in time for me to come back home. It took another 5 days to readjust to home time, now I’m again throwing my brain off with a 14 hour time zone difference. Not complaining about all the awesome travel but geeze it gets harder to adjust the older you get.

I’m currently sitting on the bathroom floor typing this blog out because I didn’t want the keyboard or mouse clicks to mess Joanna’s sleep up otherwise we’d have 2 cranky travelers tomorrow.