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My family had organized a trip to Taiwan some time ago and it was originally said that I would be able to stay a lot longer than what I was able to stay. The reason for the trip was to visit my younger sister who is living in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, and also to visit this country.

So this is my story…

Well, since things at work have been changing very rapidly, at first I was going to stay for two weeks and return with my older sister but then there was the trip to Colorado and that caused for my plans to be delayed one month. A couple of days before I was going to Colorado I was chosen to be the trainer for the new team that was hired and that caused me to cancel all of my trip plans to Taiwan for this year, but finally, one month before my family was going on the trip I was told that the training was to take place in mid August so that allowed me to make a one week trip to Taiwan with my family.

The whole airplane flight from Costa Rica to Taiwan is around 18 hours which is a very long time in the uncomfortable economy class, well it isn’t that uncomfortable, but I tend to exaggerate things a bit . We did plan on spending one day in Los Angeles, you know so we could do some shopping, so we arrived around 1am in the morning after I finally got out of the airport. Given the fact that I bought my ticket late I had to take a different plane to Los Angeles and thus I arrived a couple of minutes after they did. After we had gotten all of our stuff from the airport and gotten out of there we had to get the car so that we could drive around in LA.

Dad originally had reserved a smaller car, since I wasn’t coming, but we had to change the reservation because otherwise we wouldn’t have all fit inside the small car that was reserved. So after we got there and explained to the lady at the car rental that we needed a bigger car, she told us that they were all sold out of the bigger cars and that we could get a station wagon so we got the Volvo car, which I must say that it’s a great car, it came with the GPS, so that’s an extra charge, but we had to pay it. So after getting everything to fit in the car we began to search for a hotel were to sleep the next couple of hours because it was like 2am already and we had to start our shopping early if we wanted to get everything done in time, we went to the planned location first and it was full, we drove around looking for one and the only one that had vacancy had two rooms, one that was non-smoking and the other which was smoking, my mom said that we shouldn’t take them because we could get sick from sleeping in the smoking room so we drove around a bit more. Finally after we came to the conclusion that there was no other option than to stay on those two rooms we drove to that place and discovered that someone had taken one of the rooms and that there was only one left, so bummer, oh and I have to say that the person that was at the counter was not happy of being there at that time. After driving like 10 minutes we came to a hotel that had two rooms, yes one of them was a smoking room, and we took them, the person on this instance was a lot more helpful and organized us in two rooms. My family slept in one suite and I slept in the other room.

We woke up bright and early, right now we had slept less than 6 hours so we were kind of tired, got organized once again and drove to our shopping destinations. I was able to get the hang of the GPS and programmed the thing to guide us to where we were going, unfortunately I wasn’t very good at getting it programmed and it got us lost like three to four times which took a lot of time to get back on schedule. After getting all of our shopping done we drove to the car rental and then got on the bus to get to the airport.

We arrived at the airport and got everything checked in and ready to go. We found out that there was a long line to get through security so we had to wait in line for like 10 minutes before we were even able to get a bite of food. After getting all checked and ready to go, my aunt lost her watch and we had to look for it, luckily we found the watch and got on our way. We were finally in line to get on the plane and Samsung, IIRC, had a post that would allow you to plug in your laptop or whatever device you had to get it charged, so I plugged in my dad’s laptop since it’s battery doesn’t last that long, and also got my iPod charged. Once we got on the plane we were all getting ready for the longest part of the flight and trying to sleep on those seats is no picnic.

Since I was unable to sleep in the seat I was able to fit between the seats where my mom and aunt sat and the wall of the plane, this because we had seats all the way on the back of the plane, so I was able to get some sleepy time there. The food wasn’t the best I’ve eaten but it was eatable and thus I wouldn’t starve in the long flight.

Finally we arrived at the airport in Taiwan at 5:30 am, after the plane had to basically lift off again because it came in too quickly and thus had to circle around the airport before it was allowed to attempt another landing, and called my sister who was waiting for us at her apartment.