China Air Flight 21

So, if you’re flying on China Air’s redeye to Taiwan, and you discover that it’s an Airbus A340, make sure you don’t get seated in row 10. This is the only row on the plane without a window. No idea why – some structural thing. Not like there’s an escape hatch or something, just that the wall is blank. Now, it’s the middle of the night, and there’s nothing to see anyway, until you land, but if you aren’t going to be seeing out the window, you might as well get an aisle seat and a little more leg room. Because on this plane, leg room is non-existent. I’m 5’8”, and I usually don’t find planes that cramped – taller people are miserable in coach, but while I’m not comfortable, my legs aren’t scrunched up, either. Not so on the ChinaAir A340. My knees were at less than 90 degrees the whole way. And the flight takes 12 ½ hours.

Now, I would advise you to bring lots of water with you, but that’s not allowed now (I think it will soon be allowed to buy water inside the terminal). I had to ask 3 times for more water, and each time it came in a Dixie cup. I was pretty thirsty by the time I got off the plane. The side effect of this dehydration is that I only got up to use the restroom twice, both times just because I felt like a walk.

They do have quite an entertainment system. It was like having a tivo in your seat, with 30 or 40 movies and 10 or 20 (mostly Taiwanese) television channels. Embarassingly, it took me three full hours to figure out how to control it (about the time I figured it out, I discovered the instructions in the seat pocket). There’s a Nintendo controller type thing, and… just because I quickly figured out how to start and stop the currently playing movie, but not how to change the channel… well, I was forced to watch Mission Impossible 3. Sumner Redstone is right. (Once I figured it out, I watched movies all night instead of sleeping – at some point, I was doing both – Thank You For Smoking is well worth seeing.

One more thing about China Air, then I’ll move on. We took off at 2AM. Immediately on reaching altitude, they turned on really bright overhead lights, and served breakfast. Not sure what the rationale for this was. All anyone wanted to do was sleep. This lasted about an hour, then they finally turned off the lights. And Jerry, I owe you another beer – never once on this international flight was I offered any alcohol. Flights to Europe have it all over flights to Asia in this respect.

Anyway, on (finally) landing, I wandered out from my gate and followed the crowd. I needed to get my automatic visa/stamp/whatever (American citizens are allowed to be here for up to something like 70 days without a visa.) Things were going well until I found immigration, got in line, only to be told after I got to the front that I needed to fill this form out (not available anywhere else, so far as I know - back to the back of the line) then on going through the line again that I was in the wrong terminal. The immigration guy was nice and alert enough to point out that my luggage was in the other terminal, and I should go to immigration there. You can take the SkyTrain to the other terminal. This was very exciting, since I like trains. But, it ended after a few hundred meters. That was the SkyTrain. Connecting two terminals, that already had a long hallway with a moving sidewalk connecting them, together. Anyway, I finally picked up my luggage, the customs guys made a little fun of me for being so late, and I emerged to find a worried Evelyn! Yay! There is a system of private bus companies that will take you into town. We picked out the cheapest one (I think this wound up being a few bucks, but Ev has the local money, so I’m not sure.) So, after getting downtown, watching parts of what I think was “Crash” on the in-bus dvd system, and a few MRT transfers (an actual Sky Train!) we made it back to her apartment, where I met her roommates, Jenn and Patty, who she met teaching at the Princeton review. I had to go running as soon as we got back (this was still only about 9:00). There’s a nice park called Da An park right near their apartment, with nice biking and running trails around and through it. Despite the heat and humidity, this was pleasant, and I saw lots of things:

• A giant ad for Yahoo on the side of a bus which consisted of a smiley face with devil horns.
  
• A bunch of birds that kind of resembled pigeons with really long tails in a tree making a bunch of noise at each other. This sounded like a mix of some bird that has a really whistley-musical call with the caw of a crow. Each bird was making all these noises, and as soon as one started, the others immediately chimed in, and the whole thing was over after a few seconds.
• Something I tried to see, but only succeeded in hearing. In certain trees, something is making a hell of a racket. I thought it was birds, but never could see any, so my theory is that it’s insects. Ev thinks it’s Cicadas.
• A bunch of old men playing croquet on what has to be the toughest croquet course ever – divots, potholes, burned patches on the lawn. The lawn itself is mostly closely cropped weeds.
• A lady selling sun hats on the sidewalk.

Water tastes really good here, and you can easily go through many bottles a day of it. In the afternoon, we went to the zoo. More on that in a future post. I probably only got about 2 hours of sleep on the plane, so by the evening, I’d been up for almost 2 days. I was trying to stretch it, so as to sleep when it’s night here. I finally passed out about 2000 or 2030. And now it’s 3AM, and I’m wide awake typing this.