Home Sweet Nishinomiya - 1/7/08

After almost 2 days of travel starting at 2pm yesterday, we finally arrived back in Nishinomiya today, Monday, around 1:30pm. Basically all we did yesterday was organize and pack all our Chinese loot into our 4 bags and head to the airport. Thats 2 more bags than when we arrived thanks to our excellent negotiation & purchasing at the street market. When we got the bags I didn't think we really needed them, but with all the souvenir shopping, restrained as I thought we were being, somehow they filled up fast!

Now, let me tell you about HK public transport. It's awesome. From our hotel in Kowloon we took the free shuttle to the Airport Express train station. The really cool thing is you can check in for your flight and your bags at the train station in town! So as soon as we got off the shuttle, we walked straight into the station, bought our train tickets and proceeded to the check-in counter. We got our boarding passes and that's the last time we touched our bags until we arrived in Osaka today! And we were still miles away from the airport.

More about public transport . . . We tend to notice, use and are usually impressed with public transportation in the cities we visit. We've used the Tube, trains and ferry in London, Metro in Paris, New York subway, BART in San Francisco, Seattle buses and monorail, haven't used the Portland system yet, of course all over Japan and many other cities. But Hong Kong is at the top of the list, rivaled closely by London. It demonstrates how the in-city train system can extend into the countryside to other cities and then extend again by a good bus system and more trains going to more outlying areas. This can really work anywhere and with a high percentage of the population utilizing it like in HK (@95%)it makes it very affordable. Transportation was the cheapest thing about HK. Most local rides by boat, train, tram or bus cost less than 2$, many of our trips were less than 25 cents (USD)!!! And it was clean, convenient and not really that crowded due to the frequency of trains & boats. This is something we have got to improve on in America, in our opinion. Some cities do a good job, but they are few and far between and usually limited only to the city. It will be a hard transistion for most Americans to give up their freedom of going anywhere, anytime in a car, but it's only a mindset and once routines are changed the mindset changes as well.

Enough of the soapbox, back to the story. We did each have a small carry-on because, with a 13 hour layover in Tapei and our next flight Monday morning, we planned to stay overnight at the Transit Hotel in the airport, rather than doing our usual cheap-o routine of trying to sleep on the airport chairs. (I think in Miami it was the floor actually!) All I can say is the hotel was barely better than the chairs! We could hear everything going on several rooms away! And the Tapei airport has a really nice area with comfy looking couches.
I have a feeling they would have shooed us away if we had tried to camp out though. The next morning we headed to our 'Hello Kitty' gate - only in Taiwan! - where we caught our flight to Hong Kong, but not before getting a quick picture of Rex sitting in his pink 'Hello Kitty' chair with his new pink suitcase. Cute huh?!?! They also had Hello Kitty bathrooms.

Arriving back in Osaka today we took a Limo bus from Kansai Int'l to the Nishinomiya JR train station and then a short taxi ride - and finally we were home!

It's freezing and rainy here and already I miss Hong Kong and it's 70 degree weather. But it's nice to be back too, traveling is fun, but exhausting. So, vacation is over. Rex is back to school tomorrow and I get to start trying to scrapbook the pile of new pictures we just accumulated. At least it's fun for me! :)