Friday, May 8th

Since we crossed the International Date Line during the Texas-to-Tokyo leg, we arrived at NRT around 3pm Friday. I think this may have been the scariest plane arrival I've ever had.

Because of the swine flu thing, we had these guys in full-on Hazmat suits and heat-sensing cameras come on the plane to make sure none of us had a fever. We had to fill out these health questionnaires and any sane-minded person would've checked no on every question asking about coughs and fevers...but apparently there was a crazy Canadian on the plane who said they were sick. While my row made it off the plane with our handy-dandy "you passed the quarantine test" papers, Drs. Fox and Chen, who were sitting behind us, and their little section were detained for half an hour.

The majority of our group was waiting outside the gate wondering where our leaders were and clueless about where to go next. The small wing of the airport we were in was so strange; there was no air-conditioning and we had trouble figuring out how to get our tickets for the next flight. We thought we were supposed to be flying American again, but ended up on Japan Air.

When we finally got our tickets, we made our way down to the gate and found a little store that sold super-awesome Kirin lemon beer that tasted nothing like beer...delicious. I think we departed NRT around 5pm. Megan and I sat together again with a cool girl from Taiwan, but who was a grad student at Missouri or some other random American university. Apparently on this flight we had free drinks, but Megan and I were unaware of this fact...the food was amazing though.

Finally, after what seemed like a million days of traveling, we arrived in Taiwan sometime around 7pm. We still had a loooong bus ride to the Hotel Flowers; everyone was exhausted as Charlie and Jerry tried to tell us about the population of Taipei (I guessed an accurate 3 million) and how to use dang Asian cell phones. I think we just went straight to bed after we chose our roommates (Megan!!) and checked out our cool rooms with rock-hard beds. Oh yeah, we also all had trouble figuring out how to turn on the lights because you had to stick the roomkey in a box to work the electrical stuff in the room.