Remember that trip we did to HKUST? What a dream and it feels like forever ago!
I remember that our flight was on Monday Dec 23rd. It was two days after our family Christmas party, and we had been pretty busy finishing work, exams, gifts, and family events. We secured a backpacking bag for Melody and got to packing sometime on the Sunday Dec 22 afternoon. We packed until about 1230 in the morning at least and were surely just running on adrenaline at that point.
These bags are ready for an adventure!
The trip from our apartment to the Pearson airport should have been pretty easy, all things considered. I live near Lawrence street, which has an easy single bus route that can take us to Pearson airport. The one big wrench in our plans was an ice storm that rolled in that day. Anyone who was in Toronto over Christmas 2013 remembers a long icy holiday with lots of power outages right? Well that rolled in somewhere in the morning of Dec 23 when we were supposed to take that flight, but luckily the more intense parts of the storm held off until sometime later in the day. There was so much ice all over the sidewalk and trees that we had a very precarious walk to the subway to catch our bus. Some of the trees were bending clean over the sidewalk due to the weight of the ice.
We had also shed our jackets because of the balmy weather that we were anticipating in Taiwan - so we were happy that the Toronto temperature was still about -3C! Average daytime temperatures in Taiwan were about 17C at this time of the year, so we definitely didn't intend to bring our snow parkas just to grab our flight!
This is pretty much how the walk looked
We crossed the icy, snowy tundra of North York Ontario and made it to Pearson airport. Thankful to hear that there were no flight delays listed on the board! We breeze through security and get into the lounge and we are ready for our 12 hour flight! The one concern we had when we were in airport is that our seats were still not assigned for the Shanghai leg of our flight. The flight from Toronto to Shanghai had successfully been checked in, but I had no certainty on what seats we'd have in our flight from Shanghai to Taipie. More on this later.
Last time we flew from Vancouver to Hong Kong to Taipei. This time we are flying from Toronto to Shanghai to Taipei. Although we are not leaving the airport, this will be the first time I touch foot in Shanghai.
Melody is ready for an adventure!
Let's start this trip off!
The 12 flight is always a weird experience that has at least 3 distinct stages:
- The initial excitement for the trip, where you are smiling, and playing with the free headphones, and playing with the seatback TV
- The boredom onset stage, that you try to fight as long as you can, by reading, watching shows, trying to sleep, etc.
- The exhaustium/acceptance stage where you are just drained, greasy, and sweaty. All you can do is just lie there and wait for the flight to finish
Our plane touches down in Shanghai without incident and then we have to make our way through Chinese security, which lacks overall signage and seems to divert us down a secondary wing that that they don't usually use.
Our biggest concern when we hit the ground in Shanghai is that we still didn't have those seats confirmed. We go talk to a very confused front desk staff at EVA Air, and things just got worse. They were confused and agitated, Melody was agitated, and I was just sweaty. We didn't know what was going to end up happening at all here. I believe we didn't end up making that initial flight at 8pm Shanghai time, and ended up on a flight an hour or two later.
They end up putting us in business class to get us on the flight. I was just happy to get on the flight. Were were further amused to discover that we were on our first ever flight on the Hello Kitty decorated planes. They offered us some very heavy handed drinks on this flight. I got a glass of cognac so full that I could barely finish it before the 2 hour flight touched down. I think it must have been 5 oz of cognac.
We unfortunately didn't get the red carpet treatment
I was OK that they gave the day off to the nightmare inducing mascot
Super cute bento style meals were indeed present
Shanghai airport is massive, and very nice looking. I'm using a wide angle lens to capture this massiveness
Ramen for dinner!
Ramen for dinner!
I like to take pictures of random objects and see how the English translations came out
We wander the airport for a bit since we don't want to sit any longer and I find some places with Johnny Walker Blue samples.
Time for this plane to take off!
We land in Taipei at some unholy hour (I think 12am or 1am) and get to the hotel around 3am. This means 3pm on Dec 24th back in Toronto, meaning that we've been up for about 33 hours.
As tired as we are, it's nice to see Taipei!
Time for a sleep!
Time for some shuteye!
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