Not.
To say that a 14-hour flight is the most boring experience of my life doesn't do the situation justice.
I didn't' sleep a wink.
Well, that's a lie. I slept for about 20 minutes after we boarded, but that was quickly interrupted by food service. Yes, at 2 am PST I was served dinner.
It's odd waking up from a nap to find a tray of food in your lap. I felt I had fast forwarded 80 years and my unborn children had checked me into a nursing home.
I was sitting there, with a blanket on my lap and small compartmentalized dishes of various food items. It was too dark for pictures, which is probably a good thing.
Mile-high club food isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I had some kind of beef tips with carrots and potatoes in this odd gravy sauce, with a fruit cup (consisting of a square piece of watermelon, one square piece of cantaloupe, and one square of honey dew) and some kind of dessert, which I think was some kind of cheesecake-brownie hybrid.
The flight itself was extremely painful. My Brandon Roy knees ached so severely I found myself in tears about a quarter-way through the trip. It made sleep impossible, which gave me the opportunity to chat with others on the flight who were having my same problems (they were in their 80s) and see every watchable movie on my TV screen.
I saw Japan from 30k feet high, and wished for a parachute. See, when we flew over Japan there was four hours remaining on my flight time, a three hour layover and another three hour flight right back to the spot that was directly below me.
I wouldn't have jumped to save 9 hours.
Breakfast was another interesting experience. I made the mistake, again, of making a "safe" selection. I went for eggs an sausage over the Rice and Fish Gruel they were serving. Well, they presented it as fish and rice gravy, which sounded as appetizing as gnawing off my left thumb.
I really thought I had made the right choice when my seatmate opened her dish. Imagine oatmeal, grits, gravy and diced fish fillets mixed in this soup.
There's no way it was worse than my eggs and sausage (which I couldn't bite into). That's as far as I'll go.
The interesting part came when they started to play symphonic orchestra music. It was a scene taken from Titanic, when the ship is sinking and everyone is dying but the violin is still strumming.
I was convinced death was imminent and they were just trying to keep us calm, but it turns out that was just what Taiwan airlines do.
When safely on the ground in Taipei, with no intention of ever getting back on another flight, I was corralled into a massive line of travelers to transfer to another flight. I wasn't allowed to get out of the line, and, since I don't speak any language above an 18-month-old level, I had no idea what was going on.
My movie scene day continued with a scene from Taken.
While in line, I met an American man who was on his way to Singapore to see his wife and son for the first time in three years. They met and were married in Singapore, where he was a teacher and his wife was a native. When the job market crashed and he lost his job, the man moved back to his hometown, LA, to find work, hoping to bring his wife and child over after he found a job. That didn't happen, because he couldn't find steady work here, either.
And I thought 6 weeks away from Ray was tough.
I did make my first foreign purchase in that airport. I bought a bottle of water for 25 TWD (Taiwanese Dollars). Before you go freaking out about how expensive that was, it was less than 1 USD. The Coca-Cola vending machine wouldn't take paper money, so I had to sweet talk a cashier into exchanging my paper dollar for her coins.
The last plane ride was a breeze. Kind of.
The last remnants of my protein shake spilled into my carry-on, getting chocolate egg protein all over my laptop, books and more. I decided to venture out and try something new when it came to mealtime, and boy was that the right choice.
I have no idea what it was, but it was some kind of fried seafood wrap over the thinnest noodles I've ever seen. There was some kind of fried hard-boiled egg which I skipped ingesting, but boy was that meal good.
Customs was another interesting experience. For the first time I experienced what it was like to be a foreigner in a country where you don't speak the language. I got a good laugh when the female Japanese security guard tried to corral me into the right line... She started speaking to me in Japanese, and, when I didn't respond to her liking because I didn't know what she was saying, she started saying the same thing but louder.
I got my first visa stamp in my new passport! Well, it's some kind of sticker stapled to the Visa page, but it's exciting nonetheless.
Seeing Ray for the first time in 6 weeks was really great, too. Really great :)
It's 4 am now Friday in Japan (2:10 pm EST), and I've been wide awake since 2 am.
This time change conversion is a real beast.
Until next time!