Am I just crazy, or did LAX get rid of the departure immigration check entirely? Counting ticketing, security, immigration, and boarding, I waited a total of five minutes the whole time, which is some kind of record.
It wasn't a full flight. Since I would be arriving around 8PM local time, the goal was to stay awake for most of the 13-hour flight so I'd be ready to sleep when I arrived. You probably wouldn't believe how many times I listened to the same five or six Hall & Oates songs.
In-flight movie 1: Call me a square, but I couldn't really enjoy Kick-Ass. I kept getting weirded out by how, uh, fascist the whole premise seemed, what with all the frustrated young men taking matters into their own hands, the little blonde kids murdering people, and all the in-movie spectators watching the whole deal on TV and cheering it on.
In-flight movie 2: Au Revoir Taipei (一頁台北) was a nifty little love letter to the city, and would've made me incredibly nostalgic except that I was actually just about to arrive in Taipei. The feckless and chumpy male lead kind of irritated me, but I think it was because the portrayal might have hit a little close to home.
In-flight movie 3: The lady sitting across the isle was slogging through the entirety of Dr. Zhivago and I tried hard to avert my eyes. But I saw enough to get really depressed anyway; I even caught the end scene where Omar Sharif gets off the bus and keels over from grief and/or cardiac arrest. As a special bonus, I also ended up feeling really cold.
Outside of pissing away my time at cafes surfing Facebook and sipping weak Asian coffee, I do actually have minor ambitions to do something productive on this trip. While on the plane, I took my very first crack at throwing together some one-off game ideas that might be feasible on a short time frame. It was under just such a pretense that I convinced myself to acquire a new MacBook Pro a couple months ago; a key productivity motivator will thus be to avoid being just another hipster douche with a thousand bucks to blow on overpriced hardware.
Post-Employment Tour Goal #2 was to play shitloads of music. I made several pre-deparature jokes about how my suitcase would be half-filled with guitar gear. What was shitty was that my suitcase actually did turn out to be half-filled with guitar gear.
Pro tip: if you're pondering your meal choice on a China Airlines trans-Pacific flight, just stick to the following set of preference relations and you're golden:
- Chicken ≻ Beef
- Rice ≿ Noodles
At the airport waiting to greet me were Kevin, Yinghwa, Shuxian, and some random dude whom I don't know but who is evidently good at hiding behind orchids and fucking up my photos.
Yeah, being back in Taipei feels better than I thought it would. This used to be my town.
Yeah, being back in Taipei feels better than I thought it would. This used to be my town.
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