Okinawa Trip Day 1

Date: January 6th, 2020

I’m going to start a new series of posts on my recent trip to Okinawa. It was pure fun!

To start off, we finished packing on January 6th, since our plane was kind of late in the afternoon (precisely 5 PM Taiwanese time). We started our journey at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, where we traveled along the Tamsui-Xinyi(淡水信義) Red Line to the Taipei Main Station(台北車站). The station’s usually crowded around that time, but we managed to get through the crowd and walked an underpass to the platform of the Taoyuan Airport MRT(桃園機場捷運). The airport MRT is also close to the Beimen Station(北門) on the Songshan-Xindian(松山新店) Green Line, too. 😉 We took the airport MRT, which took about an hour to get to the airport.

I also noticed that the MRT rides on the bridge-tracks similar to the Taiwan High-Speed Rail System(高鐵) or the Wenhu(文湖) Brown Line in Taipei. When we got to the airport, we met the lady that would also accompany me and my mom for the trip. After hours of roaming the airport, we finally got to our gate and our seat in the airplane.

In reality, the flight that would take us to the Naha International Airport only lasted one hour, so the flight wasn’t as long as the flight from San Francisco(14 hours – yikes!). However, on China Airlines Boeing 747-300ER, the movie system is broken! The operating system is an old type of Linux, but anyways it kind of sucks if you don’t have personal entertainment…

When we landed in the Naha Airport (那霸機場) it was already 8 o’clock(Taiwan time+1 hour), so we quickly got off and ran through the inspection checks. It took us plenty of time to figure out how to buy the tickets for the Yui Monorail though, since the language there is, well, Japanese.

Getting on the train and getting off at the Prefectural House, we deliberately could not open the mailbox at the hotel since the owner told us the wrong combination! Luckily the mailbox had a flap for the mailer to put in, so I used my small hands to reach and grab for the key. 😂 By the time the owner told us the correct combination, we where already going on the elevator.

On the album shown below, you will see the interior of the Japanese house. For detail, there is a separate room for bathing and another one for your toilet needs!? Just so you know, Japanese people love cleanliness, so they tend to put a room for everything. In the bedroom, there are three total beds: two mattresses intended for the ground and one normal one. My mom and I chose the mattresses while Mrs. Chien-hue chose the regular one. The bedroom was pretty small for three people, so we had to watch where we were going. The kitchen was just a small bar with a rice cooker, microwave, and refrigerator. Good thing there was a washing machine to wash our dirty, smelly clothes, too!

We arrived at 10 o’clock to see all of this and it took us about 2 hours to settle in and sleep. And…there comes the next day. Read my next post for Day 2 highlights! 😎