Well, after some 13 hours of flying, I made it to Taipei. I'm sitting here in a cheap Internet cafe pounding on this grimey keyboard (it looks not unlike an ashtray, actually), but I'm only paying US$1.50 for the priviledge. Lots of stuff is dirt cheap here--we just got a pretty good traditional Taiwanese breakfast for four people for US$5. And next week we're going to hunt down cheap RAM straight from the local chip makers. Yay Taiwan...

Monday's ten-hour flight to Tokyo wasn't that bad really... if you sleep as much as I did. I've never been so pampered on a coach flight. Flight attendants kept bringing us hot towels, snacks, and microwaved chicken teriyaki. Plus we had our own personal video gadgets and movies to watch.

We landed in Taipei at night, at the considerably more ghetto Chiang Kai-Shek Airport. As soon as we stepped off the plane we were surrounded by masked locals. Paranoia about SARS is running high here; one 70-year-old man who thought he might have it jumped off a bridge (it turned out he was recovering from a flu he caught a month ago). We only donned ours till we got out of the airport. There are still a few running around the streets with face masks of varying elaborateness and stylishness. But given how much pollution and smoke there is here it might not be a bad policy, SARS or no SARS.

My time here is running out so that's all for now... a plethora of pictures will be coming soon to my Website. I'm dangerous when armed with a digicam and 64MB CompactFlash card...