Thursday, January 06, 2005
On the Road Again
I decided a while back that I wanted to try to get out of town for a while here at the end of the year. At first, I was going to go to Vietnam again. A couple of years ago, I went there but only spent three days, one of which was a day-trip to the Mekong Delta. That was great and all but I wasn't able to see the rest of what is a really interesting and unusual country.
So I decided to check into airplane tickets to Vietnam and found that if I flew through Bangkok I would pay $90 roundtrip. (Only BKK-SGN.) If I flew through Hong Kong to Hanoi and back from Ho Chi Minh (Saigon), it would be $400. That was unacceptable for two reasons:
1) I hate Bangkok and never want to go back and
2) $400 is too much to go to a country like that since the flight from Osaka to Hong Kong itself was $500.
Vietnam was nixed.
I looked at my options. I wanted to take a month off from work but not spend all of it in another country. I thought maybe almost three weeks would do it. Dec 15 to Jan 1 would be perfect. So I called up my travel agent, Rumiko, at GS Travel in Osaka and we went to work skulling what would be the most cost-efficient, best way. It turned out that the airlines charge you a fee to fly back to Japan from Dec 30 to Jan 4. The fee is $700 ON TOP OF the fare you're already paying. I think that has to be some kind of scam and the World Trade Organization would frown on such a thing but apparently nobody has told them about it.
Rumiko and I came up with Jan 5 as a good day to come back because of the fee. However, she said the flight (as in one that day after the HK-Seoul connector arrived) was waitlisted. This conversation happened in mid November. I just decided not to worry about it and try to think about better ways to do this. I remembered my ex-roommate and fellow Southerner Aaron Brown, who had moved to southern China a couple of years ago. Maybe he would be home around the time I was thinking about visiting.
The email went out and I waited for a response. There was none. So I emailed again. And nothing. I was getting worried. It was mid-November and I had to decide if I wanted to stay in Hong Kong the whole time or not. Finally, a reply. He'd been trekking around Malaysia for three months and hadn't had access to his email.
I was impressed. I like Malaysia a lot and to get three months off to do something like that is pretty amazing. Maybe I needed to look into where he worked. But he said that staying with him would be no problem around the time I was interested in doing so. So that was covered.
I told Rumiko to do whatever she had to if I was coming back the 5th or later. She said okay.
Over the next few weeks, I checked online for hotels and found that the gulf in prices was mostly exactly what it looked like. The more you pay, the quality is up... here. The less you pay, there is no quality. [shrug] I should have expected that but I'm a kind of Pollyanna with travel I guess.
I made an initial reservation at the Wesley Hotel on HK Island at a "discount rate" of US$70 per night for the first four nights. I would be in China at Aaron's for the next eight days. I would return to HK Island, to Causeway Bay and stay at a place called Sun Kong Hostel, which I found on www.hostelsclub.com, for a rate of 25 Euros per night for four nights. On New Year's Eve, I would move to Rent-a-Room in Jordan in Kowloon at a rate of 33 Euros per night with a HK$200 extra fee for the nights of New Year's Eve and New Year's. (http://rentaroomhk.com)
Then I decided I didn't want to bother with the Wesley; I could stay at Sun Kong for the first four days as much as a day and a half at the Wesley. So I cancelled my reservations there.
Of course there's much more planning I do before going somewhere. I study websites and maps, currency converters, films sometimes, books, all kinds of things. But most of that would just bore you. Ha. Ha ha.
So the day arrived, Dec 15. I got up at 7:20 to catch my 1 p.m. flight from Kansai on Korean Air. I went to Shinsaibashi in downtown Osaka, convenient to pick up my plane tickets at GS and close to UFJ (my bank) to get travelers checks. I picked the 15th to leave for two reasons:
1) it was payday and
2) the next day the cost for flights, like, doubled.
I figured the bank would be a safe bet to get the checks since they opened at 9. BZZZZZ! Try again. The check-issuing machine doesn't "start" until 10. Which is to say that some joker sitting behind a desk whips out his key and turns it on at 10. Needless to say, I had to try something else so I got some cash from the machine and made my way toward GS, less than a five-minute walk away. On the way was a convenience store so I paid my months bills before I left. (I paid my rent due at the end of December with my other rent at the end of November so that was taken care of.)
At GS, no problem, in 'n' out with the ticket in no time. So back to UFJ where everyone in the upstarirs exchange office had to ask if they could help me. I tried to be as polite as I could but wanton politeness breeds revulsion and annoyance. Maybe they thought I was a traveler staying in Japan only for a short time. I don't know. Even when I used my UFJ Card to get the checks there wasn't much change to "Oh, he's a local" or anything. Guess that's okay.
After getting [$xxxx] in traveler's checks (you don't think I'm going to tell you now, do you?), I went down to the Midosuji subway line. My plan was to go to Tennoji by subway where I would catch the Airport Express train, a 30-minute trip, a substantial time saving effort. What I didn't know was that there were 2 trains: the Super Express, constituted of two cars at the front of a train -- with no real markings to tell you thats what it was until the doors opened -- with "coach" class behind, and the Regular train. I got to Tennoji station's platform as the Regular train was pulling out. The next train was a half-hour later. So I waited and hopped on the doubly expensive car by accident. It was an express -- which the conductor couldn't explain to myself or the Chinese gentleman who made the same mistake -- so even if I wanted to I couldn't change to another car later on. I had to pay an additional 730 yen on top of the 1030 yen it had already cost. I was not impressed.
I got to the airport in plenty of time and offered my Northwest card to the girl at the counter who said my ticket wouldn't let me have any miles. I was surprised. Every other time I had spent at least 50000 yen on a ticket, I got miles. Okay, I said. I couldn't force her to because the Northwest computers make the ultimate decision.
If you don't know, I lived in Korea for a short time in 1996. I liked my boss there at the school I was working at and a few of my co-workers but I really hated the country. It's a discussion for another time. I'd been there for transit once before, the first time I came to Japan in 2001, flying from Moscow. It was the infamous suitcase incident.
I had to go there for transit again. I like the airport in Incheon pretty well. Nice, modern (it opened in 2000, I think). But on Dec 15, it was rainy and not so good, like I would expect. The food was too pricey for me and I was a bit hungry. So I had to wait for my flight to go. I went to the gate where my flight was supposed to be and found a Korean Air flight ready to board heading to... Moscow. Imagine that. The last time I had been in that airport, I came off the opposite flight as this one. Amazing!
Lots of really cute but somehow young Russian girls were waiting and getting on the plane. Hopefully they didn't have to spend any more time in Korean than their transit. As they boarded, a man in a leather coat approached the gate attendants and said that one of his party wasn't there (he used English). He also said that if they made an anouncement, he wouldn't understand it as he only spoke Russian. So the gate attendant let the man make the announcement. TO THE ENTIRE AIRPORT! I was agog! If he tried to do that in the U.S., I'm sure they would find a translator and get the translator to do it, even though this method was faster and, to me, better. The missing man still didn't show up... and... the plane left!
Five minutes later, the missing guy showed up, a medium height brush-cut blond guy who looked way too relaxed to have just missed his flight. Suddenly, there were eight Korean Airline/airport personnel around him at the gate, one a translator and one a gate attendant. The translator subsequently shouldered the gate attendant out of the way and went to work rerouting the unfortunate genetleman onto another flight. The other six (seven) people just stood there, doing absolutely nothing. Two of them in suits with what I am calling brushed back hair helmets, sat at the end of the bench of shairs from me, drinking like three bottles of tea and talking to each other while they probably should have been doing something. Anything. They sat there for at least half an hour doing nothing, apparently unafraid that they would be caught by anybody.
If I did that at my job, I really don't know what would happen. I have no desire to push anyone into action for my back decision.
The translator got it all figured out and the Russian guy was really cool and nice and accommodating under what I would think might be very stressful circumstances. They all left, including the hair-helmet guys.
I was left to my own devices for another hour or so, writing down what I saw, reading a few pages of "Victory" by Joseph Conrad and nodding off a few times before boarding the plane.
My meal was a beef concoction of some kind. Not bad. It was an uneventful flight, two-and-a-half hours to Chep Lap Kok in Hong Kong, the new airport. We arrived late though.
My first impression in HK this time was a 10 minute walk from the gate to Immigration. No joke. Maybe we arrived at the farthest gate but it was horrible. No people movers, nothing. At the Immigration "counter," it was another 30 minute wait. Thirty minutes! You think I'm making this up but I'm not! I was at the bus stop waiting for my airbus (A21 or 22) ONE HOUR after landing. Which is to say it was 11:30 p.m. And the buses were still running. Unbelievable.
To make the rest of this a little shorter, the bus ride was 40 minutes to Causeway Bay. I got off on the stop the hostel recommended and turned the wrong direction and walked five minutes before deciding I wasn't in Causeway Bay. I went back and found the place on the first try.
Inside, it smelled like food, old food -- but not particularly bad food. But neither of the middle-aged Southeast Asian women sleeping on the futon on the floor could speak English so they had to call a Chinese guy to come talk to me. He said they didn't have the room I had a confirmed reservation for so could I take a slightly lesser room, with no en suite bathroom? I guess so, I said, if you drop the price. Did he? Of course not. Was the room in that building? Of course not. It was another five-minute walk down the block, into "Fashion Walk" at Causeway Bay. I was in my room after 1 a.m. And boy was that room bad...
Next time:
The room. Exchanging. A haircut. And maybe the next day too.
So I decided to check into airplane tickets to Vietnam and found that if I flew through Bangkok I would pay $90 roundtrip. (Only BKK-SGN.) If I flew through Hong Kong to Hanoi and back from Ho Chi Minh (Saigon), it would be $400. That was unacceptable for two reasons:
1) I hate Bangkok and never want to go back and
2) $400 is too much to go to a country like that since the flight from Osaka to Hong Kong itself was $500.
Vietnam was nixed.
I looked at my options. I wanted to take a month off from work but not spend all of it in another country. I thought maybe almost three weeks would do it. Dec 15 to Jan 1 would be perfect. So I called up my travel agent, Rumiko, at GS Travel in Osaka and we went to work skulling what would be the most cost-efficient, best way. It turned out that the airlines charge you a fee to fly back to Japan from Dec 30 to Jan 4. The fee is $700 ON TOP OF the fare you're already paying. I think that has to be some kind of scam and the World Trade Organization would frown on such a thing but apparently nobody has told them about it.
Rumiko and I came up with Jan 5 as a good day to come back because of the fee. However, she said the flight (as in one that day after the HK-Seoul connector arrived) was waitlisted. This conversation happened in mid November. I just decided not to worry about it and try to think about better ways to do this. I remembered my ex-roommate and fellow Southerner Aaron Brown, who had moved to southern China a couple of years ago. Maybe he would be home around the time I was thinking about visiting.
The email went out and I waited for a response. There was none. So I emailed again. And nothing. I was getting worried. It was mid-November and I had to decide if I wanted to stay in Hong Kong the whole time or not. Finally, a reply. He'd been trekking around Malaysia for three months and hadn't had access to his email.
I was impressed. I like Malaysia a lot and to get three months off to do something like that is pretty amazing. Maybe I needed to look into where he worked. But he said that staying with him would be no problem around the time I was interested in doing so. So that was covered.
I told Rumiko to do whatever she had to if I was coming back the 5th or later. She said okay.
Over the next few weeks, I checked online for hotels and found that the gulf in prices was mostly exactly what it looked like. The more you pay, the quality is up... here. The less you pay, there is no quality. [shrug] I should have expected that but I'm a kind of Pollyanna with travel I guess.
I made an initial reservation at the Wesley Hotel on HK Island at a "discount rate" of US$70 per night for the first four nights. I would be in China at Aaron's for the next eight days. I would return to HK Island, to Causeway Bay and stay at a place called Sun Kong Hostel, which I found on www.hostelsclub.com, for a rate of 25 Euros per night for four nights. On New Year's Eve, I would move to Rent-a-Room in Jordan in Kowloon at a rate of 33 Euros per night with a HK$200 extra fee for the nights of New Year's Eve and New Year's. (http://rentaroomhk.com)
Then I decided I didn't want to bother with the Wesley; I could stay at Sun Kong for the first four days as much as a day and a half at the Wesley. So I cancelled my reservations there.
Of course there's much more planning I do before going somewhere. I study websites and maps, currency converters, films sometimes, books, all kinds of things. But most of that would just bore you. Ha. Ha ha.
So the day arrived, Dec 15. I got up at 7:20 to catch my 1 p.m. flight from Kansai on Korean Air. I went to Shinsaibashi in downtown Osaka, convenient to pick up my plane tickets at GS and close to UFJ (my bank) to get travelers checks. I picked the 15th to leave for two reasons:
1) it was payday and
2) the next day the cost for flights, like, doubled.
I figured the bank would be a safe bet to get the checks since they opened at 9. BZZZZZ! Try again. The check-issuing machine doesn't "start" until 10. Which is to say that some joker sitting behind a desk whips out his key and turns it on at 10. Needless to say, I had to try something else so I got some cash from the machine and made my way toward GS, less than a five-minute walk away. On the way was a convenience store so I paid my months bills before I left. (I paid my rent due at the end of December with my other rent at the end of November so that was taken care of.)
At GS, no problem, in 'n' out with the ticket in no time. So back to UFJ where everyone in the upstarirs exchange office had to ask if they could help me. I tried to be as polite as I could but wanton politeness breeds revulsion and annoyance. Maybe they thought I was a traveler staying in Japan only for a short time. I don't know. Even when I used my UFJ Card to get the checks there wasn't much change to "Oh, he's a local" or anything. Guess that's okay.
After getting [$xxxx] in traveler's checks (you don't think I'm going to tell you now, do you?), I went down to the Midosuji subway line. My plan was to go to Tennoji by subway where I would catch the Airport Express train, a 30-minute trip, a substantial time saving effort. What I didn't know was that there were 2 trains: the Super Express, constituted of two cars at the front of a train -- with no real markings to tell you thats what it was until the doors opened -- with "coach" class behind, and the Regular train. I got to Tennoji station's platform as the Regular train was pulling out. The next train was a half-hour later. So I waited and hopped on the doubly expensive car by accident. It was an express -- which the conductor couldn't explain to myself or the Chinese gentleman who made the same mistake -- so even if I wanted to I couldn't change to another car later on. I had to pay an additional 730 yen on top of the 1030 yen it had already cost. I was not impressed.
I got to the airport in plenty of time and offered my Northwest card to the girl at the counter who said my ticket wouldn't let me have any miles. I was surprised. Every other time I had spent at least 50000 yen on a ticket, I got miles. Okay, I said. I couldn't force her to because the Northwest computers make the ultimate decision.
If you don't know, I lived in Korea for a short time in 1996. I liked my boss there at the school I was working at and a few of my co-workers but I really hated the country. It's a discussion for another time. I'd been there for transit once before, the first time I came to Japan in 2001, flying from Moscow. It was the infamous suitcase incident.
I had to go there for transit again. I like the airport in Incheon pretty well. Nice, modern (it opened in 2000, I think). But on Dec 15, it was rainy and not so good, like I would expect. The food was too pricey for me and I was a bit hungry. So I had to wait for my flight to go. I went to the gate where my flight was supposed to be and found a Korean Air flight ready to board heading to... Moscow. Imagine that. The last time I had been in that airport, I came off the opposite flight as this one. Amazing!
Lots of really cute but somehow young Russian girls were waiting and getting on the plane. Hopefully they didn't have to spend any more time in Korean than their transit. As they boarded, a man in a leather coat approached the gate attendants and said that one of his party wasn't there (he used English). He also said that if they made an anouncement, he wouldn't understand it as he only spoke Russian. So the gate attendant let the man make the announcement. TO THE ENTIRE AIRPORT! I was agog! If he tried to do that in the U.S., I'm sure they would find a translator and get the translator to do it, even though this method was faster and, to me, better. The missing man still didn't show up... and... the plane left!
Five minutes later, the missing guy showed up, a medium height brush-cut blond guy who looked way too relaxed to have just missed his flight. Suddenly, there were eight Korean Airline/airport personnel around him at the gate, one a translator and one a gate attendant. The translator subsequently shouldered the gate attendant out of the way and went to work rerouting the unfortunate genetleman onto another flight. The other six (seven) people just stood there, doing absolutely nothing. Two of them in suits with what I am calling brushed back hair helmets, sat at the end of the bench of shairs from me, drinking like three bottles of tea and talking to each other while they probably should have been doing something. Anything. They sat there for at least half an hour doing nothing, apparently unafraid that they would be caught by anybody.
If I did that at my job, I really don't know what would happen. I have no desire to push anyone into action for my back decision.
The translator got it all figured out and the Russian guy was really cool and nice and accommodating under what I would think might be very stressful circumstances. They all left, including the hair-helmet guys.
I was left to my own devices for another hour or so, writing down what I saw, reading a few pages of "Victory" by Joseph Conrad and nodding off a few times before boarding the plane.
My meal was a beef concoction of some kind. Not bad. It was an uneventful flight, two-and-a-half hours to Chep Lap Kok in Hong Kong, the new airport. We arrived late though.
My first impression in HK this time was a 10 minute walk from the gate to Immigration. No joke. Maybe we arrived at the farthest gate but it was horrible. No people movers, nothing. At the Immigration "counter," it was another 30 minute wait. Thirty minutes! You think I'm making this up but I'm not! I was at the bus stop waiting for my airbus (A21 or 22) ONE HOUR after landing. Which is to say it was 11:30 p.m. And the buses were still running. Unbelievable.
To make the rest of this a little shorter, the bus ride was 40 minutes to Causeway Bay. I got off on the stop the hostel recommended and turned the wrong direction and walked five minutes before deciding I wasn't in Causeway Bay. I went back and found the place on the first try.
Inside, it smelled like food, old food -- but not particularly bad food. But neither of the middle-aged Southeast Asian women sleeping on the futon on the floor could speak English so they had to call a Chinese guy to come talk to me. He said they didn't have the room I had a confirmed reservation for so could I take a slightly lesser room, with no en suite bathroom? I guess so, I said, if you drop the price. Did he? Of course not. Was the room in that building? Of course not. It was another five-minute walk down the block, into "Fashion Walk" at Causeway Bay. I was in my room after 1 a.m. And boy was that room bad...
Next time:
The room. Exchanging. A haircut. And maybe the next day too.
