My flight from YYZ -> TPE arrived on time at 05:00 this morning.  I think I did pretty well, considering I got about 8 hours of sleep, but I am now starting to feel the jetlag a bit.

The EVA flight was awesome.  Hands down the best flight I have ever been on.  The food was great and the fully flat bed in business class made it easy to sleep.  They did serve Dom Perignon champagne which was a nice touch.

Taipei feels very warm to me.  It was 20 degrees with I got to downtown at around 6:30am this morning.  Considering my phone gave Ottawa as -5, I guess there was a big difference.  The problem with getting somewhere at 5:00am is that nowhere is open.  At 6:30 all I could find were coffee shops, so at least I could get coffee!

Chiang Memorial opened by 9am with the changing of the guards (um, the arriving of the guards).  Before that there were just a lot of people doing tai chi around it.

So, I was evicted from the international maple leaf lounge (they closed, I didn’t get kicked out).

 

The majority of the flights that I will be taking over the next 3 months are on an Aeroplan reward ticket.  I took advantage of the fact that you can book a round trip flight, and add 2 stops on to it.

Here is a cool visualisation of the routing:

The Toronto to Taipei flight is pretty cool, since it flies over the arctic instead of the pacific.

I put quite a bit of thought into which airlines in the Star Alliance I wanted to use, since I not only wanted to avoid paying fuel surcharges if possible, but I also wanted to fly on the 787 Dreamliner on the way back.