I’m the type of flyer who prefers red eye flights: I’m pretty good about sleeping on the flight at the right times so I minimize jet lag when I arrive.
So I took the red eye EVA Airways flight from Los Angeles (LAX) to Taoyuan (TPE). EVA has always been the choice airline of my family when flying to Taiwan from the U.S.; Taiwan’s flagship airline is China Airlines but its safety record and our experience with it one year don’t make it highly favored.
For the first time ever, I sat next to one of the “talkative” types of passengers. He was a man from Portland, I would say in his late 40s, who was flying to the Philippines for the first time with his wife, who was born and raised a few years in the Philippines and grew up in Hong Kong. Their travel was Portland to Los Angeles to Taoyuan to Manila, which was crazy if you ask me.
But he was talkative, which was nice at first. I got to know a lot about him; he got to know a bunch about me. We exchanged experiences with air travel and foreign films (we watched Firestorm on the flight) and I helped them however I could when they couldn’t hear/understand what the stewardess had said.
So, in all it was a pretty good flight. There wasn’t much turbulence except for over Japan. It’s funny how as a kid I used to love bad turbulence and now as an adult it makes me cringe.
I watched The Lego Movie (shush, I’m a kid at heart and everything is awesome~), The Monuments Men, and Firestorm, spent a few hours on the Flight Information Channel, and enjoyed both a dinner and breakfast as well as seemingly unlimited drinks (the guy kept getting ginger ales it was hilarious…)
One thing to note: Domestic airlines may be more lenient with the weight of the carry-on luggage (not the personal item), but with international flights they weighed my smaller suitcase full of camera gear. Which ended up being 16 kg, aka more than twice the 7 kg limit. The suitcase itself was probably 1/4-1/3 of the 7 kg limit, so I spent some time shoving non-lens gear into my checked luggage which was really light. Fortunately everything survived.
I arrived at Taoyuan International Airport early in the morning (an earlier than scheduled because EVA flight crews seem to fly fast) and was so thankful there was free internet. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to contact my relatives and figure out where exactly they would be. It took a good thirty minutes…
But I got where I needed so all is good.