July 19, 2018

Japan trip: Preparation

Two weeks ago I went to Japan and this was the first time my family went abroad by ourselves not through the travel agent (excluding Malaysia, Singapore, Hongkong, and China which were familiar cities for us). These posts series will be about how I and my sister prepare for our trip and the results of it. Let's start!

First, we bought the flight tickets a few months before our departure. We planned to go for two weeks as we wanted to enjoy and have fun throughout the vacation. Next we decided which cities we wanted to go. Your relatives or friends' itinerary would be really helpful in this step if you were like me as a first timer to Japan. After the date and cities had been decided, I (the unofficial tour leader), with the help from my sister searched for our stay. It's the most difficult part because we needed to view many properties to choose the best one. We searched through Airbnb, booking.com, agoda.com, etc. We were a 5-member family so it's quite a dilemma to choose a hotel because we needed two rooms and in Japan, hotels were expensive. Usually people prefer for Airbnb or apartments and these were our choices for this trip. We took quite a long time to decide our stay, viewed here and there, spent around two weeks because we read everything to details. Finished deciding our stay, we started to search for transportation. The most popular one was of course JR Pass but I will make another post for Japan's method of transportation because this also confused me before I went there and experienced it myself. Date checked, accomodation checked, transportation checked, what's next? We decided which places in each city we wanted to go; you only have limited time yet there's A LOT of it in Japan. For food and snacks, it wasnt a problem for us since we didnt have any restriction in food and planned to try everything! We only brought four luggages and it's not that big since I heard from my relatives that we needed to walk everywhere in Japan and mostly they used stairs. Later I found out they always had elevator in each station because the facilities for disabled people were super complete. Spare time to do lots of research before you go, either through blog posts, websites, or youtube to make sure you are at least a bit familiar of the places you want to go.

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