I took my daughter to Fukuoka for a week whilst my wife went to Taiwan for an exhibition.
A planned trip to Taiwan gone awry
After spending months back and forth with the Taiwanese Government, Florence’s Taiwan Employment Gold Card was approved in early November, and she could finally meet up in person with other AppWorks incubatees and attend the Meet Taipei exhibition.
We immediately checked the website of the Gold Card Office, and it seemed that Eira and I could enter Taiwan as Florence’s dependents and were eligible for visa-exempt entry to Taiwan.
As the time was tight and I was eager to take a break from my work, we went straight to Expedia and booked a flight and hotel package for 12–22 November. Leaves for work and leaves for Eira’s kindergarten were applied and granted, and Eira was already telling her teachers and classmates that she would be flying to places.
However, two days before the flight, I realised we had overlooked one critical factor on the Gold Card; there are different rules for Hong Kong and Macao Residents. It meant that Eira and I could not go to Taiwan with Florence. Fooooooooooooooooooooooooooooook.
How was I supposed to tell a 3-year-old that we were not flying because Daddy (actually, it was Mommy ;) ) misinterpreted some immigration rules?
Last-minute scramble to Japan
So after a futile attempt to get last-minute entry permits for myself and Eira, we rebooked in early Saturday morning (12 November) our flight and hotel package for Fukuoka, Japan, for 14–20 November after negotiating with Expedia the refunds of our flight tickets in the dead of Friday night.
But why Japan? Well, due to the pandemic, few nearby countries were open to visitors and offered visa-exempted entries. I could only think of Singapore, Thailand, South Korea and Japan. Japan seemed to be the most children/toddler-friendly among these countries. Also, Eira is a big Anpanman fan, and there is an Anpanman Children’s Museum in Fukuoka. So Japan it is then.
After driving Florence to the airport on Saturday and saying goodbye, Eira was surprisingly well-behaved. I guess the lure to go and meet Anpanman was enough to keep her on her best behaviour for a bit.
I was very busy on Sunday night sorting out the “visit Japan web” for the quarantine, immigration and customs procedures. Apparently, by completing the tasks before landing in Japan, we would be able to fast-track the immigration procedures. However, there seemed to be a problem scanning and recognising my passport, and I was stuck for hours taking many different pictures of my passport. Eventually, I checked the internet for help. In the end, I just uploaded another passport photo, went to the upload page again and pressed ‘skip’, then carried on filling everything else in. The review was finally completed around 2 am on Monday morning, 9 hours before our departing flight and with various QR codes ready.
The flight
We arrived at the airport by 9 am that morning. The once busiest airport in Asia was obviously feeling the effects of the tight quarantine restrictions. Most of the shops in the airport were closed even though it was a Monday. The number of flights also dwindled. The scheduled flight information for the whole day could be displayed on two screens.
We were flying with the budget airline Hong Kong Express and the flight schedule was great: departing Hong Kong at 11 am and arriving in Fukuoka at around 3 pm local time. Not that we were spoilt for choice, given the rush to book our tickets and the much-reduced flight schedules due to the pandemic anyway.
The plane was an Airbus A320, pretty small but comfy enough for a 3 hour flight. It was nearly full, but we were lucky that there was an empty seat in our row, so we had an entire row to us. Being a budget airline, there was no entertainment on flight, but I came prepared.
It was Eira’s first-ever flight, and with Florence away, I was worried that she might cause havoc on the flight, and I would have no way to soothe her. Therefore I have packed a few stuffed toys, a colouring book and even an iPad in my bag just in case. To my pleasant surprise, Eira did not cry on the flight, not even during take-off or landing, and only asked me a couple of times the dreaded “are we there yet” question.
Arriving Fukuoka
After landing in Fukuoka, we were met with a lot of friendly airport staff and thanks to my 3-year-old, we were fast-tracked a few times. There were some waiting times for the vaccination and passport checks, but with the QR codes in hand, the process was pretty smooth, and we were able to get our luggage and met with our pick-up driver within an hour of arriving in Fukuoka.
The airport was about a 20-minute drive from the city centre of Fukuoka, and we arrived at our hotel about 30 minutes after our driver took us to the wrong hotel of the same chain. But I would still recommend getting an airport pick-up as I would struggle badly to locate the hotel in an obscure alleyway whilst looking after my daughter in a foreign country.
The hotel was in the downtown area (Tenjin) and only a short walk away from the Tenjin Chikagai (Underground shopping mall), but it was off the main street, and the entrance was quite unassuming. The room was small but clean, and the front desk staff was friendly and spoke very decent English. However, the main reason I picked this hotel was its vicinity to the Anpanman museum and its very reasonable price. There was also an added bonus that it has its own launderette for its guest, which would come in very handy for a weeklong stay.
So after settling down and offloading the luggage, I started exploring the nearby area with Eira. Although it was no longer mandatory to wear a mask in Japan, it was still very uncommon to see maskless people around. From my own observation, pretty much everyone was still wearing a mask.
A stroll to the Anpanman museum and Kawabatadori
With both Eira and I covid-recoverers, we took the opportunity to take off our masks when we were outside and a safe distance away from other people. It was mandatory to wear a mask in Hong Kong since the start of the pandemic, about half a year after Eira was born. I missed breathing in the fresh air. The air in Fukuoka was just so crisp and refreshing, it brought me good old memory when I last visited Japan more than a decade ago. It was Hokkaido that I went to when I was still a grad student. How time flew.
We headed straight to the Tenjin Chikagai, as I was eager to find something to eat. After all, Fukuoka is famous for its cuisine, especially mentaiko and ramen, and also that we had not had anything to eat since breakfast that morning. However, Eira had none of it. She had her sight set on visiting the Anpanman museum even though I told her many times that the museum was closed and we would be visiting the next day. She just would not budge. With no other choice, we walked there.
It was an overcast evening, and even though it was mid-November, the temperature was around 20C, so it was not bad at all for a stroll.
We got out of the subterraneous Chikagai and went over two bridges over small canals to the Hakata Riverain Mall. The Anpanman museum was on the fifth and sixth floors of the mall.
As it was nearly 6 pm, the museum was already closed. I could see the disappointment on her face, but luckily, I spotted that the “Kawabatadori”, a shopping arcade, was just across the road, and more importantly, there were posters of Anpanman and Baikinman hanging outside. I gathered that there would be some Anpanman merchandise, and we hurried across to check that out before they closed up shops.
We got there just in time. Many shops were getting ready to close with attendants pushing various racks back to the shops. As I was used to the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong, I did not expect that they would be closing that early in the evening. We did manage to find a small shop selling some Anpanman merchandise though and with her favourite Dokin-chan doll clutched closely in her hands, Eira finally agreed to get some food after shopping.
There were many restaurants in the shopping arcade, and I would have gone to the teppanyaki or a ramen shop if Eira was not around. Unfortunately, she was such a fuzzy and stubborn eater that we ended up in a café, a chain Italian-style Japanese café in the midst of genuine Japanese restaurants.
Anpanman was everywhere
We headed to the Tenjin Chikagi after a quick dinner and went to the supermarket in Solaria Stage to shop for snacks. Unsurprisingly, there were more Anpanman-themed snacks available, and soon my shopping basket was full of Anpanman corn snacks, Anpanman biscuits, Anpanman sweets, and even milk cartons with Anpanman and his friends printed on them. I just could not understand why or how she got so into Anpanman. As far as I know, Anpanman has not been shown on Hong Kong TV for years.
We eventually got back to the hotel around 9 pm. After bathing her, Eira started crying for mommy. Facetiming with Florence put that to a stop, and I managed to get her to sleep soon afterwards. She started crying again in her dream around 3 am. It was quite heart-wrenching to hear her howling for mommy in her dream. Thankfully, after holding and rocking her for a while, she seemed to have calmed down and stopped howling. It was quite a terrifying experience for me to be honest, but there was still more than a week to go before Eira would see her mommy again.
After Eira calmed down and sound asleep next to me, I lay in bed and contemplated whether I had made a huge mistake taking Eira on holiday on my own. What if she kept crying in the middle of the night every night? What if she really missed her mom and wanted to come home before the end of our planned trip? Come to think of it, it was the first time she was away from Florence for more than a night since she left the hospital as a newborn baby. This would be a long, dreadful trip if things went wrong.