Week in Taiwan: Day 0

I'm backlogging up until day 3 with fake timestamps so they appear in order, since I haven't had Internet access. Onwards...

Today was a long day, though it was technically quite a bit longer than a day. I stayed up all night on Friday, since I didn't feel like sleeping for some reason which was quite odd, since I'd been sleeping at 3:00am for the past week or two. Anyway, my mom drove me to the airport and dropped me off, and I flew out to Chicago without a hitch. Of course, the day was young.

After disembarking at O'Hare, I found out my connection to Tokyo was delayed for 30 minutes. Okay, no big deal. I sat down and read Design Patterns instead, and got a good bit of reading done. When it came time to board, I saw that the flight had been delayed another 2 hours. Well, crap, I thought to myself. My connection time to get on the plane to Taipei would be something like ten minutes. At 2:00pm, I finally got on the plane to Tokyo. Unfortunately, there's about a 13 hour gap in the story, because aside from meals, I slept all the way there.

When we were landing, they informed us that they automatically re-booked our flights until an hour later. Cool. We had to follow a Japanese guy around to get to another terminal and for some reason, every time he said, "sankyuu," I wanted to giggle, because fobby accents do that to me. I got on the plane at around 7:30pm Tokyo time, and got to the Taipei airport at like 10:30pm.

Customs/immigration was pretty boring; I was able to get through without filling out all of the fields on the "disembarkation card." It only took about five minutes to get my checked baggage, after which I headed out to find my ride. Of course, I had no idea who was picking me up when I left, which is just a recipe for disaster. There were tons of people standing around holding signs, and now that I think about it, one of them might have been my hotel. Of course, I didn't even remember what hotel I was staying in. Crap. I walked around, hoping I'd see someone I recognized; no dice.

Eventually, I figured I could get some money and call my dad. After I got some coins, I tried putting coins in a phone, and it wouldn't even fit. I figured it was a credit card slot, but I didn't see any coin phones around, which didn't make any freakin' sense, since the credit cards were disabled. Eventually I saw a WiFi advertisement and turned on my laptop to see if I could somehow get to my dad via e-mail; fortunately, I stole a connection from a cafe and eventually got to him. It took him an hour to pick me up and an hour to drive back, finally arriving at the Grand Hotel at 1:00am. The hotel is pretty awesome, but I was too tired to notice, so I showered and went straight to sleep in preparation for day one, starting at 6:00am.