Feb 20 - Bubble tea after a very long dark night..

I'm now sitting in in Taipei airport, which is awfully fancy (but has some interesting signs), drinking bubble tea and waiting for my connection to Phnom Penh. At 11:30 last night, when I should have and would much rather have been in bed sleeping I was sitting in a departure lounge in Toronto waiting to board an EVA flight leaving at 1:20 AM.  I'd never heard of this airline before I booked my ticket, and who leaves at 1:20 AM? However EVA turned out to be a lovely airline, no surprise to anyone who has traveled to Asia before. Comfy seats, little paper slippers for our feet, warm towels and individual dental flossers with each meal, not to mention a full selection of scented soaps and creams in the bathroom along with a little flower thing on the wall that reminded me of the bud vase in a Volkswagen beetle. Dinner was served at 3AM, in tiny perfect plastic dishes, and there was a huge selection of movies from North America as well as representatives of a variety of Asian countries. In the aid of cultural immersion, I watched a subtitled Japanese movie about how a depressed man out of jail and running a dorayaki (sweet Japanese pancake) stand learns to love life again when a strange old woman with leprosy (OK, the leprosy is supposed to be cured) turns up on his doorstep and teaches him to make the world's best aduki bean sauce to go in the  centre of his dorayakis. It was charming. And to top it off for breakfast I eschewed the North American fare and had congee ( a tapioca-type porridge) with a little packet of something called fish floss which looks like ground up peanuts but is actually - you guessed it fish. I had to check out my neighbour's breakfast to see what to do with it - it goes on the congee of course! The long dark night comment refers to the fact that we chased the night for the whole flight - up north and west, not sure if we actually passed over the pole, and then down the east coast of China and over Japan. The sun rose shortly after we arrived here about 6:30 AM - a 13 or so hour flight later.

I can hardly wait for the next leg of the trip.

Cheers all .. Dale

1:20 AM - REALLY ??

At least the numbers look the same

Looks delicious - right? But what are the little red things on the spinach?

Signs on a button next to the flush button in the Taipei ladies room. I wonder how often they have a problem with this?

I'm really glad they told me about not breeding any pigeons (while I'm in the departure lounge) because I might have been tempted.