Getting down quotations and observations is vital to the travel writer, at least to one burdened with a truly short-term memory. So when the chipper and puffy-cheeked attendant on my puddle-jumper from Lincoln ad-libbed, "And if your travel plans don't include going to Denver, the best time to tell me about it would be right about now," I had to grab the closest dead tree available. The margins of my magazine (the excellent newer volume, The Week) were thinner than The New York Sun, so I grabbed a sparsely decorated bag that looked like a pastry sack and scribbled away.
Haste in writing wasn't needed at Denver International Airport, where constant repetition fastened this oddly humorous line in my memory: "Unattended baggage will be immediately confiscated, and may be destroyed." Well, isn't that what you pay them to do to your checked luggage, anyway, if they don't lose it first? Hard to imagine much harm coming to our articles, however: four big Rubbermaid Action Packers, which my sister-in-law and her husband will fill with their household items when they move back to the United States after three years in Taiwan.
Getting there really is half the fun for a plane buff like me, son of an Air Force office who can identify dozens of aircraft by their engine sounds alone. I'm beating dear old dad to the punch on this one, though, becoming the first Fulwider to fly the mighty Boeing 777. An average-size person is shorter than the landing gear on this behemoth, and a foolhardy person could stand inside one of the two massive turbofans.There are 43 rows of seats, with the lucky folks in First Class getting their own jetway and bulkhead door. The vastly greater number of unwashed Coach passengers enter through a separate door (walking uphill to the massive plane), but we have five bathrooms from which to choose. And much slower service!
Each seatback has a six-inch viewing screen, with five channels of TV and four movie channels. The screen conveniently tilts forward when the inconsiderate short-legged oaf in front of you tilts his or her seat back into your knees. One day, seat-tilters will deservedly join smokers as social pariahs -- until then, all one can do is mutter and hope to sunburn the offender's neck with a heated glare.
Those seat-tilters are especially noisome on the 777, which features 2-5-2 seating. Can you imagine sitting on the in the middle seat of five? Getting to one of the lavatories over the laps to two people is difficult enough, but the seat-tilters ensure an even tougher journey by stationing themselves over the two laps you're trying to traverse. It makes for depressingly lengthy glimpses of the middle-seater's posterior region as she or he inches ever so slowly away, butt held high for balance.
For the flight to Taiwan we'd ordered the vegetarian meal because the last time we flew, a person next to us did the same and got a delicious-looking and smelling pasta dish, piping hot, a good half-hour before the rest of us got our lukewarm processed chicken product food substitute. But for our two meals and a snack on the 14-hour flight, we somehow got the vegan vegetarian variety, the most restrictive kind -- no eggs, no dairy. A vegan chocolate-chip cookie tastes mighty different, let me tell you. So we won't try that again, especially after seeing the cheesecake listed as a dessert with the first meal. (They handed out menus showing us all the stuff we'd be missing.) Hey, I'll give them credit for trying, but the miniature plastic-wrapped pita and the two discs of cold pureed something with lentils just didn't cut it as a midnight snack.
The first six hours of the flight flew by, aided greatly by Cuba Gooding Jr.'s hammy overacting in Snow Dogs. After that, things began to drag horribly, and I won't bore you with the details of my futile attempts to sleep. Some wine (free on United Airlines international flights) induced some all-too-brief dozing. But it was all worth it when we descended below 10,000 feet and could see the armada of container ships steaming for the U.S., laden with everything "Made in Taiwan." Then the most excitable of our 12 flight attendants began screaming, in Chinese and English, through the lavatory door at a passenger still doing her business five minutes before landing. This was the same attendant who ran up and down the aisles, frequently, to deliver breathless coffee status reports to her superior, so her fit of concern for the safety rules came as no surprise.
More black comedy greeted us just off the jetway. "Drug trafficking is punishable by death in the R.O.C.," read a large sign placed where no one could miss it. No, it did not say, "And welcome to Taiwan! Enjoy your stay!" in smaller letters.
Next up was the immigration line, one of the easier things to figure out as all the foreigners were in one line and all the natives in another. Don't get behind the woman who looks at your customs declaration form (the one they handed out early in the flight, with much explanation, while everyone was still awake) and says, "What's that?"
They hadn't watered us for a good two and a half hours prior to landing, so we had to find a place in the rather Spartan Chiang Kai Shek International Airport to buy beverages. The Coke machine (yes, America is everywhere) took only coins. There was just one human-operated food cart, so off I went to try out my English on a nice Taiwanese woman. Lesson Number One: You'll confuse people if you make the American sign for "two" with the index and middle finger raised. Turns out an upraised thumb and index finger mean "two" in Taiwan, and what I was doing means absolutely nothing.
[...] you drive people off the street, they become less safe.” My two and a half weeks of travel in Taiwan bear this out. It’s crowded there, and the s [...]
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