Welcome to the premiere post for There and Back Again!  Already my journey has been quite an adventure, though not exactly as expected...

It all began on the morning of June 21st in San Francisco, where thick fog was posing problems at the airport.  These morning delays put a lag in the runway schedule that could not be caught back up.

Fast forward to around 5:30pm at Chicago O'Hare.  I arrived in a timely fashion to the airport, said my good-byes to the family, passed through security, and was headed out to my terminal gate when I realized something was missing.  I had left my necklace in one of the bins at the security checkpoint.  I walked all the way back to security to see if anyone had found it, though I knew this was fairly unlikely.  The guard I spoke with was kind, and looked through all of the bins that they had at the station, but to no avail.  I thanked him, took the airport lost and found number, and hiked back to my terminal gate.

This little incident flustered me a bit.  To settle my emotions, I pulled out my book of devotional quotes, and as alway, the page I turned to suited the situation.  "Beyond Expectations" was the title... yep, there's a ringer for this trip.  Reminded that I should expect great things and that God works in mysterious ways, I settled in with a book (just started The Hunger Games) for the hour and a half wait.

My flight was scheduled to leave at 8:10pm, so I began preparing to board at 7:30pm.  Just a minute or so after I had put away my book, the lady at the gate counter announced that our flight had been delayed until 9:45pm due to congestion at the San Francisco airport.  Great.  Accepting the situation, I set in to wait some more.

Finally, around 9pm we began to board.  Of course the fun was not over yet.  After we taxied out to the runway, the pilot informed us that we were about ten minutes ahead of our scheduled take-off time, so we would have to wait on the tarmac until air traffic control gave us the okay.  Before this time had elapsed, the pilot came back on the speaker to inform us that we had been given a different run way assignment.  We taxied around again, sat for a few minutes, and then taxied to a third location.  At this point the pilot, with a dryly humorous tone, came back on.  "Well folks, what you've heard about O'Hare is true. We've just been given our third runway assignment, but thankfully air traffic control is running out of excuses to delay us any further.  We should be off the ground in a few minutes."

True to his word, we were off.  One notably fortunate feature of this flight was my seating assignment.  I ended up with a window seat toward the back of the plane with no one else in my row.  Naturally, that was too good to be true, and after we had been flying for about ten minutes a business man was transferred to the aisle seat in my row.  No matter, I still felt luck to have at least one empty seat beside me.  The flight was smooth and uneventful, but at our destination, all was still not well.  We flew in a conga line of planes waiting to land in San Francisco for fifteen minutes.

By the time we touched down and disembarked, it was 1:00am Pacific time.  My connecting flight to Taipei was scheduled to leave at 1:35am.  Rushing toward the international terminal, I met up with a white-haired man from my Chicago flight that was also trying to catch the plane to Taipei.  We ran together, past all of the empty airline counters to the China Air window, where two people were still waiting.  When we got to the counter, the man showed his boarding pass, and before I could even think about the fact that I had not actually gotten a boarding pass yet because online check-in hadn't worked, the lady was rushing us to security.  When my turn came, the guard said he couldn't let me through without the boarding pass, so I ran back to the counter and had it printed.  Sprinting, I went through security and out to the gate.  Of course, in a terminal of 12 gates, this flight was at number 9.  As I passed gates 8 and 9 I heard over the loud speaker, "Final call for flight CI003 to Taipei.  All passengers board immediately." Just after this announcement, a man in an airport-official-looking suit came up the escalator.
Breathlessly, I told him, "That's my flight!"
"Hurry, down the escalator and hang a left!" he returned.

The attendants waved me up, checked my boarding pass and hustled me on to the loading ramp.  Relaxing, I boarded the plane and shuffled down the aisle to my seat.  When I got there, a man was already sitting in it.  I asked the attendant, and she apologized and had me sit in the row just in front of my original spot.  I was next to a  mother with her adorable, five year-old daughter.  She told me that the man in my seat, an old and apparently grumpy fellow, had be assigned to the spot I had taken, but when she arrived with her daughter, he had refused to move to allow them into their seats.  She spoke with the attendant, refusing to sit next to the man, so he had been moved to my then-empty seat.

As it turned out, this was a pleasant change because my new row-mates were very friendly.  The mother was originally from Bangkok, but had come to California for school when she was sixteen.  She eventually married a man from the U.S. and had two daughters with him in California.  With her youngest daughter, she was traveling to Bangkok to visit her family.  Not long after take-off the mother grabbed a snack from her bag.  "When you travel with kids, you have to bring food," she said.  The snack was dried seaweed, and she offered some to me.  I tried it an thought it was really quite good.  It was thinner than paper, a bit crunchy and tasted salty and plant-like.  Thinking about it, it was just like you would imagine seaweed should taste.

For being a thirteen hour flight, I really can't complain.  The seats in the upright position were not very comfortable, but when reclined they were decent.  During the flight, I came to the conclusion that the fleece blanket from my sister that I had packed was a life-saver.  I'm sure I would not have slept at all without it.  With it I think I dozed for about four hours.  They fed us dinner early on, around 4:30am Pacific time I think, and breakfast at 3:30am Taipei time.  Time is really a strange concept when you are floating around the sky in a dimly lit tube.  Even now, time hasn't quite started to make sense yet.

When we finally arrived in Taipei at 6:00am local time, the windows on the plane fogged up from the humidity.  Making my exit, I walked through the long terminals into the arrival gate, where I filled out my arrival card and had my passport stamped.  Then all of the arrivals were funneled into the baggage claim area.  Not surprisingly, my checked bag had not gotten on the plane.  I filed the delayed baggage report and moved on to the exiting hall where I was to meet the driver from the school, Mr. Lin.  I had been told that Mr. Lin didn't speak English. When we spotted one another, Mr. Lin waved and then started walking quickly.  When we met up he handed me his phone, and on the other end was Jack, the sponsor for the program that I had been in contact with.  As I spoke with him we continued walked out of the airport at a brisk pace.  Jack asked if I had changed any money yet, which I hadn't.  He told me I should change my money at the airport because the bank was closed today.  So I motioned for Mr. Lin to stop, and unsure of how much English he knew, I just pulled out some cash.  He replied with an "Oh, money change," which was a pleasant surprise.  Then we turned back around and went to the currency exchange window.

With that errand complete, Mr. Lin walked me to the curb where vehicles pick up people, and motioned for me to stay put.  Then he went back into the building to get to the parking garage, or so I inferred.  After a short wait, he pulled up in a Mercedes, loaded up me and my luggage, and drove us into Taipei.  He dropped me off at a 7 Eleven right next to my dorm with Ms. Wang Ting.  She is a graduate student at National Taiwan University (NTU) that is helping to facilitate the Biodiversity, Agriculture and Culture of Taiwan (BACT) program that I am participating in.  She spent the morning with me, showing me my room, important parts of the dorm like the laundry room, the MRT (metra) station down the street, and some of the shops around the neighborhood.  We also ate brunch together at a little coffee shop.  Around 11:30 she left me to get settled in my room.  Since this post is already a book, I will leave off here.