Arrived Alive

Hi all,
I'm finally here! Brutal flight. But totally worth it.
Vancouver to Calgary was VEEEERY late and had a helluva time trying to fill my day leading up to my 9:40 pm departure. Got thru security in about 3 minutes and wandered around the YYC for an hour or so. Uneventful flight, and I thought how fortunate I was that I would be in Vancouver from 11pm-2am...just in time for last call! Sadly everything in the whole damn place was closed so I used my last CDN$ to buy a Starbucks. I headed straight for a nice, comfy-looking couch to read my book and pass the time when I found myself sitting next to a 30-something year old guy who was either a sociopath, schizophrenic, or a compulsive liar. According to him he was a rig pig who had dropped out of school at 15 after his friend had shot himself in the school cafeteria, but also somewhere in the conversation he dropped something about his property in Italy and that time he lived in Dubai and then proceeded to tell me all about his friend Lynn and showed me her text messages. Very very wierd and I could not get away fast enough.
The flight to Taiwan was me (the only blonde and the only white girl on the flight), 200 Chinese people, and their LUGGAGE. Sweet Lord can those people pack! Every single person in the lineup had a mountain on a luggage cart, all marked Oversize. A little girl ran up to me and suggested I come back to check-in 2 hours later because the line would be gone by then and my luggage was already checked through to Manila. I have also discovered the reason there are so many millions of their kind on our planet: they can breed! I couldn't count the number of children under 5 on that flight. Each more delightful than the next. My personal favourite was the 3 year old sitting behind me for 13 straight hours gleefully kicking my chair and babbling unintelligibly to his mother. His mother eventually got just as frustrated with it as I clearly was and stopped responding to him, prompting a demonstration of his lung capacity for a solid 60 minutes of "Mommy-Y-y-Y-y-Y!!!!" I wanted to strangle him. Also Air China is no Air Singapore. Between not having any white wine on board (GASP!), only red, and unceremoniously throwing my headset at me when I boarded, this flight was a far cry from the days of delicious Japanese noodle soup and unlimited in-flight vino.
Anyways, transfered in Taipei to Manila, got thru customs and such with no problems and walked out into the furnace inside the boiler room in Satan's summer cottage on Mars. It is HOT HOT HOT. The weather channel will tell you its about 33, but my armpits and afro tell me its at least a humid 40 if not more. As usual, I do not enjoy large dirty Asian cities such as the one in which I currently find myself. It smells, there's beggars, and I saw a Starbucks which totally ruined me feeling all free and backpackery. We leave for our 3-day trek thru the rice fields on the northern part of this island tomorrow and I cannot wait. I need a beach ASAP or at the very least some serious cultural immersion. I think by Monday I should be lounging in my bikini as opposed to sweltering in perpetual rush hour.
My group is a small one. There's 8 of us in all, all from either Edmonton or Calgary. Andrew never appeared, strange. But its 6 girls, a boy (poor thing) and our tour guide Bertus. We're all in various stages of jet-lag from different epic journeys, but we're all rousing ourselves for some activity in 30 mintues that Bertus has yet to let us in on, then we're having our first group dinner tonight. I am heroically attempting to stay up all day until at least 10pm to avoid a 7 hour nap that has me waking up at 3am for the next 2 weeks. I'm sleepy and sweaty but so excited to get this show on the road!

Sweatin' and smilin'.