Touchdown!

The eagle has landed.

Craig, my parents, and I arrived safely in Taipei about 2 hours ago (it's now 12:03 a.m. Taiwan time, 12:03 p.m. EST). After a 5 1/2 hour trip from Philadelphia to San Francisco, a 13 hour trip across the Pacific to Taipei, then a 45 minute taxi ride to our hotel, I'm dizzy. My body feels like it should still be in perpetual motion even though I'm sitting still in a chair.

At any rate, we couldn't have asked for better plane rides. All of our flights came on time and even arrived at their destinations sooner than anticipated (not always the case with EVA Airways, our van driver told us). We encountered little turbulence - very good because even a simple game of ring-arond-the-rosy can make me queasy. The rides also went by relatively quickly.

Craig just interjected and told me to, "make sure they know it was a looong, looong flight." I guess I slept more than he.

On the way there, we worked on a letter to William's birthmother. This was not an easy task, as you can imagine. My mother was gracious enough to translate the three-page tome into Chinese.

Interestingly enough, the flight trajectory didn't take us in a diagnol from San Francisco to Taiwan; instead, we traced along the West Coast all the way up to Alaska, then went West across the Pacific, then turned south again over Japan until we reached Taiwan.

We wake tomorrow at 6:30 a.m., eat breakfast in the hotel, then take the subway to the High-Speed Rail, which will take us all the way down to Zuoying in the southern end of Taiwan. The express train should take about an hour and a half. From there, we'll be driven up to Pingdong to see my grandfather and other relatives. We'll stay overnight in my aunt's friend's house, then drive up to St. Lucy's the next morning to meet William.

Tired and dizzy, I think I'll leave it up to the pictures to tell the rest of the journey:

Here I am in Philadelphia, feeling like a giddy tourist for asking my husband to take my picture in front of the ticketing counter:



EVA Airlines Flight #27 out of San Francisco. This was a massive jet with two levels.

Below is my mom, the consummate bargainista, trying to sweet-talk the EVA rep. into giving us a discount on our airfare. Her argument was that the Chinese name she gave Craig, Tsang Xong, has the same characters as used in "EVA Airways." Attempt failed. I liked the sign above her head. It made me think of fried chicken.

In this picture, you can get a sense of the legroom offered in EVA Airways Deluxe Class. There's a footrest that pops out at a 45 degree angle. The seats also recline at 45 degrees. Altogether, if you factor in the slab-hard padding, it's not too comfortable. Craig tried sitting on a folded-up blanket and found that it worked pretty well.


Below is the video console. Ours was an older plane and didn't have all the fancy features shown in the on-flight magazine. There were three movies that played: Elizabeth, the Golden Age (in English and in German dub-overs), Rendition, and Gone, Baby Gone. There were also a few films in Chinese. I watched a fairly interesting mock-documentary about parents fighting to keep a school open on a remote Taiwanese island.

Sadly, there was no outlet for our laptop computer so Craig didn't get to play SimCity for 13 hours straight.

Dinner is served. Craig and I both had the spicy beef with peppers, which really wasn't bad at all. They even gave us ice cream sandwiches for dessert. We were also served breakfast at 9 p.m., Taiwan time. I do have to say that the stewardesses are very attentive and obliging. Craig, who has a tendency to be a bit of a coffee snob (sorry, dear) only takes milk, preferably skim, with his coffee. The stewardess cheerfully chased down a cup for him.


The sign says it all. We are this much closer to meeting our William.

We're going to be incommunicado for the next two days since there will likely be no internet access where we'll be staying in Pingdong. The day after, we'll pick up William and it's anyone's guess as to how busy he'll keep us.

For now, it's off to bed to try to squeeze in 5 hours of sleep. Night, y'all.