Day 0-bis: The arrival
This flight was a really bad combination of jet-lag and flying against the sun. I left at noon from Amsterdam, I arrived in Bangkok in the morning and I haven’t slept an hour. The worst thing is, we didn’t even finish travelling. They just let us walk a bit around the terminal, making us find our way back to the gate as to give them enough time to clean the plane. Well, if we did arrive at destination, I would have worried a lot, giving that Bangkok lies in Thailand and my flight booker wouldn’t be the first person I knew who would confuse Taiwan with it. Anyway, the connection went smoothly, it felt good stretching my legs a bit in that big open space. Now, only five more hours of terror for the claustrophobic to go.
Even for somebody hat has travelled a lot like me, is going to an Asian country alone for the first time too much of a challenge. Just considering the first few problems: not being able to communicate with basically anyone, not knowing how they do things around here, and more important, having no place to stay. Just try finding a hotel when most of the billboards are written in Chinese characters. So that’s where my fellow practitioners kick in. After a few mails, the two persons I surname Fabian and his son Danny decided to pick me up at the airport. That seems like holding hands isn’t it? Well, when I got there, the perspective of not having anybody for support was just frightening. So it’s with a calm hart that I saw the huge Taiwanese flag proudly hanging on the airport hangar. Maybe a bit too calm, because while staring at that flag, I must have missed some lady passing some papers around.
Immigration paper, I’ll never forget them again. If you don’t have one – or you neglect to COMPLETELY fill them up- you can do the entire queue through immigration again. But I don’t really mind, it’s nice having nobody behind to pressure you on. It was not nice for Fabian and son waiting as the last ones in an empty arrival terminal. But now I can finally say: ‘Taiwan, at last.’
But this day was still long not over. It was only midday, and that made me really surprised of not swaying on the brink of exhaustion. It was still a long car ride to my new home: hotel Leo. It’s nothing permanent, just cosy and cheap. I was really too sleepy to do anything else, so the first thing I ever did in Taiwan was to sleep.
