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| I bought my air ticket from HIS |
On the 9th I visited the of office of HIS in
Hiroshima to buy a single trip ticket from Japan to Hong Kong. I wanted to
leave Japan as early as possible in order to avoid a quarantine in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong Government had announced that very soon all incoming visitors to Hong
Kong would be subjected to a 14-day quarantine. The staff in HIS was very
helpful and suggested me to buy the Cathay Pacific air-ticket. I agreed and it took about
2 hours for me to finish the ticket buying process. My found that it was a new
experience for the HST staff to receive a client like me. It was a rare case
for a foreigner to buy a single trip ticket in such relatively small town like
Hiroshima. The paper work was done very slowly. There were many reasons, for
example, the staff had to spend some time to sort out how to position my first
name and last name (as indicated in my passport) into my ticket buying documents which was designed for the
Japanese clients. This air-ticket buying experience reminded my Japanese
language learning experience in my university days.
I learned Japanese in the University of British Columbia (UBC). In
the classroom in those days, often there were group learning scenarios in which
students had to do role playing. The setting of one scenario was inside a
travelling company and the students had to play the role of a customer or a staff. Students had to practice using Japanese vocabularies such as days, months,
the city names, the means and purpose of traveling, and the payment amount and
method etc. Now, in Hiroshima, all things came into live again and my memories came
back to my mind.
At that moment, the Japanese government had already
announced that the only airport opened to foreigners were Osaka and Tokyo. Although
I wanted to fly back to Hong Kong from Hiroshima where I was staying, I had no choice
but to pick Osaka as the departing airport. As such, I had to sort out my trip
from Hiroshima to the Osaka International Airport.
One strange thing I noted was about the air ticket price, it
could rise suddenly at any time because of the pandemic. The Cathay Pacific single
trip air ticket that I bought was 64,000 yen before tax and 70, 100 including
tax (about HK$ 6,000). Out of curiosity, I checked the price again the next day
on the Internet, it had jumped to about 220,000 yen (about HK$18,000). That was
unbelievable.
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| Bullet train time table from Hiroshima to New Osaka |
My airplane would leave Osaka for Hong Kong on the 12th
at 6.00 pm. I chose the bullet-train as the means to travel from Hiroshima to Osaka. The
average time taken for a bullet train would usually be from 1.30 hours to
over two hours, depending how many stops it would make en-route. I picked the
fastest one which made only three stops en-route and took 1 hour and 27 minutes. I noted that all the carriages of any one bullet-train had
been designed into either reserved seat (指定席)
carriage which was more expensive, and the non-reserved seat carriage (自由席) which
was cheaper. So, tourists had to wait at the right spot at the platform for the
carriage. The waiting spots were clearly marked on the platform floor.
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| New Osaka in early March |
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| My train ticket from New Osaka to the International Airport |
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| The bullet-train has a lot of leg room, big enough I put my luggage |
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| My lunch at New Osaka. It costed me around 1,000 yen, a very reasonable price |
Due the pandemic, my trip to Hiroshima was cut short by a
few days. At this moment I am still waiting for a refund from my air-line
company because they had cancelled my return trip air-ticket.
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