Kikukawa Station

When the weather starts getting cold, I can't help but look back on past memories.

That is the sentence I started off writing when I thought about this post many, many months ago.

Suwon

We visited Suwon on my first trip to South Korea, but I only briefly covered it in my single post covering the week we spent there. I wrote it about a year and a half after my visit, so I had tried to condense the memories that remained into that post, but over the years, bits and pieces of the day we spent in Suwon came back, and I decided to write about some of the fond details I remembered from that day.

Vending machines in Tokyo

One of the things I noticed upon my first few days in Tokyo was the abundance of vending machines. Not just confined to indoor spaces, vending machines lined the outside of convenience stores, alleyways, car park garages; just about anywhere there was a few extra feet of space, a vending machine was plopped in place.



Vending machines weren't limited to dispensing drinks and snacks. They sold all kind of imaginable and unimaginable things, but my favourite were the ones outside restaurants that printed tickets. You would order your food and pay through the machine, and it would dispense your food ticket. You enter the restaurant, hand your ticket to the chef, and in no time, your food would be placed in front of you.

Quite honestly, my mind immediately went to a post-apocalyptic theory, that will perhaps see the light of day in another form. I found the plethora of vending machines fascinating.

Fuji-san

This isn't a new trip, but our trip to Japan in 2015 mainly consisted of exploring in and around Tokyo, as it was all of our first time in the country, and there was lots of do in the city. As I was responsible for part of Hong Kong and Seoul, this leg of the trip was planned mostly by my travel buddies, but my one request was that we visit Mount Fuji.

Tokyo; the city of efficiency

Our overwhelming takeaways from our Asia trip was definitely that everything was more efficient, more technologically advanced, and just made so much more sense than back home. Also, we don't know how they did it, but Tokyo has mastered the art of the egg. Every single egg we had here, no matter how it was made, was just perfection.



Starting off with a toilet. As it was around 12am when we landed, I was bleary-eyed when I headed to the airport washroom and was greeted with a talking toilet that also played music to hide the sound of your wee. I must say I found the music more embarrassing than helpful and thankfully was able to find the button to shut it off.



First order of business: convenience store food at Family Mart.

Seoul searching

I can't make a post about Seoul without some sort of pun - believe me, I tried.
It's been about a year and a half since my time in South Korea, but I haven't forgot about it and even while I was there I was already awaiting my next visit.

We lived by the Dongdaemun Design Plaza, in a small apartment that barely fit us three, but was modern, clean, and had an accessible rooftop.

Tai Mei Tuk

One of my friends was studying at CUHK (香港中文大學) for the term, so I went to visit as it is also my mother's alma mater. Afterwards, we headed over to Tai Mei Tuk to see the area and walk around the reservoir.

First stop: Chinese University of Hong Kong - 香港中文大學
If you can see the white speck at the right of the photo - while at CUHK, we saw it and wondered what it was...

Tai Mei Tuk - 大美督

Luk Keng

Hiking has become a popular activity in Hong Kong as of late, and many people have been trekking to the mountains in the early morning to beat the heat.

I was invited to go hiking, but as it was a bit of a trek there, it was already 10am when we were on the last minibus up to the mountains.

Rediscovering Hong Kong

I first went to Hong Kong when I was a small child, and the memories I have are of a see-saw at a park, where my sister and her friend both sat on one end, and let me dangle in the air alone. I also remembering having 油炸粿 (yau za gwei) with congee for the first time with my grandpa, who had a stroke twenty years prior and would eat little else besides that.

I should mention that this was also the time of the avian flu and I distinctly remembering covering my nose while passing my caged chickens all along the streets. After that, my sister flatly refused to go back to Hong Kong, and I, ever the follower, decided the same.