Transit in Taipei....

I am currently Still waiting in Taipei for our flight to Singapore...another hour to go. Our flight from LAX arrived at 6 am this morning...9 hours ago. Don't ask me why the transit time is soooooooo long but we took the opportunity to go downtown Taipei to eat. Took a bus down, and with my smattering of Mandarin and Hokkien, managed to eat quite a lot of stuff. hahaha... Had some pork buns, then some yau char kwey with soya bean, beef noodle soup, some condiment-wrapped rice thingy, more beef noodles, porky sausage and of course pearl bubble tea. Didn't eat any siu long pau though. We did get to see Taipei 101 (didn't want to pay NT400 per pax to go up so didn't go to the Observatory) and both the Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek Memorials from the outside. Not bad huh? For a few hours huh? We left the city at noon as H didn't want to be rushing again...like when we were in LA.

We took our own sweet time...going for dinner at Red Lobster and then to Michael's (hey..it was across the street from Red Lobster)..and then to the airport. When we got there, we found that there was no Bag Drop counters for Internet check-in and the queues were soooooooo long. I have to say that I sorta started to be a bit nervous...as we still had to fill the tank and return the car. Decided to ask H to go ahead and return the car and I wait in the queue. The check-in guy was nice enough to let me check-in even though he has to sight all the passengers...but he did held on to our boarding pass until H and S1 came back.

Aiyo...and the queue through security was soooooooo long, body scans and all... Donna whether it's because the airport is under Reno or what, but the airport looks quite sad lor. Not many shops... Unlike the Taipei Airport ...lots of shops wor..

Anyway, The bummer thing was I had to pay USD 32 for excess baggage. There was 4 of us and 5 bags... The allowance was 8 bags with each bag not exceeding 23 kg. Two of our bags were very light but they see the weight of individual bags..,and one bag was 32 kg. He said I could
transfer stuff over to the other bags. Aiyo...how to do that in the middle of the airport? Plus H had the keys to the bags. So I just paid the USD 32 la...what to do?? We really had so much rubbish. Donna what we bought also...the car was packed to the brim - the boot plus the back seat as well. The boys had to sit closely together...and needless to say, lots of fighting in the back.
And we probably need 2 cabs in Singapore to get to sister No.2's place, and then another 2 cabs to get back to the airport on Sunday... Hope I don't have to pay excess baggage for my flight from Singapore to Jakarta...on AirAsia!!! Yeah Yeah....my China Airlines flight to LAX is from Singapore, so we had to buy separate budget airline flights from Jakarta to Singapore... Hehe..

Okay lah...later....