One of the best months of my life happened this June, the summer before I started that 4-year-long hell called “High School”. The story started the day after my promotion at middle school. It was late afternoon, and I was all ready for the trip. We were headed to Vietnam for a whole month with a bonus few days in Thailand, which I was super excited for. This was my first time leaving the borders of the United States in a long time. I hadn’t left the borders in 5 years when I briefly crossed into Canada. So much has happened since then, and due to COVID, my family hasn’t done much international travel. I was eager to get started. I was going with my mom, my dad, and my little brother Casey, who you might recall from the first post on the blog.
At about 5:30, we got in the car, which was filled to the brim with bags, and left our house, heading towards the airport. After about 30 minutes of driving towards the airport and a little bit of questioning where we were supposed to park, we finally figured everything out and began to take our luggage out. We weren’t coming back home until July 5th.
We knew there was a lot to look forward to. Still, the main thing at the moment was Casey, who had brought his new Jordans on the trip (They were delivered to our house just an hour before we left). He said he was going to use them to pull the “Flight Attendant Baddies” on the plane… the first of many hilarious things Casey did while we were there. My parents started to talk to the people in charge at the airport about stuff that I didn’t pay attention to— I just took a look around the airport. Eventually, some woman who worked at the airport just happened to appear in the area where we were. Casey immediately noticed her and whispered in my ear, “I spy a flight attendant baddie,” which got a bit of a laugh.
We then got through security which wasn’t too long. Casey’s second comedy moment was his spontaneous decision to grab a random guy’s attention in the security line and tell him, “Hey, you got nice shoes.” He was a middle aged man going with his family and didn’t even notice Casey at first until his daughter got his attention for Casey. Casey then complimented his crocs, which had a picture of R2-D2 on it. The man awkwardly laughed and said, “Thanks, you got nice shoes too.” In the back of his mind, Casey was probably pretty happy that he could show off his Jordans, because there weren’t many “Flight Attendant Baddies” around to show his Jordans to yet.
We sat down and waited the next couple of hours before we got on the plane. It was about 8 or 9 PM when we started to enter, taking our first flight of the trip to San Francisco. San Francisco would be our first layover, and the flight would be only an hour long. Several moments later, the plane was on the other end of the runway, and the next thing I knew, it was speeding up. I’d forgotten the force you feel when these planes first start to speed up; they go incredibly fast. As we began to fly north to San Francisco, I tried to fall asleep but couldn’t because it was still very early. On the other side of the plane, Casey had begun to record videos of himself making weird faces and drinking water (I still have those videos now, just in case I need leverage in the future). The hour passed fairly quickly, and before I knew it we were already landing in San Francisco. As soon as we landed, we needed to make the long walking journey across the airport to the next gate, which would take us straight to Taipei.
View of San Francisco from above at night, a few moments before our plane landed.
As soon as we got on the plane, I could tell this plane ride was going to be a drastically different one than the first one to San Francisco. The first leg was only one hour long— just a warm-up. This was a 15-hour flight, and we were going to be on the other side of the world… jet lag would hit for real this time, which I hadn’t experienced in years. The plane was much bigger and equipped with entertainment systems. Normally when I see one of those, I start exploring all of its functions, trying to find the most interesting things on it. But by this point, it was already 1AM and I was tired. I fell asleep in just moments…
I woke up around 6 or 7 hours later and checked the map. We were right over Alaska. These would be my last moments in American airspace before we entered a whole new world. Just after I woke up, we crossed the International Date Line, and I time-traveled into the future. I’d get that day back when I came back to the States. As the hours slowly passed, my other family members including Casey began to wake up. The plane was dark and there was little activity since most people were asleep at this hour. We just did our own thing (My dad was watching movies, Casey was playing games, I was staring blankly at the plane map as it flew very slowly over Japan and Russia) quietly over the next couple of hours, occasionally getting up to use the restroom or ask something. We were given one meal on the plane (Actually two, but I slept through the first one) which included some rice (Of course it did, it’s China Airlines) a bit of meat, yogurt, and bread. It was not that bad in my opinion, which might contradict some other opinions people have about airplane food.
Soon, we were at the final stretch, the last couple of hours before we reached Taiwan. We didn’t have any window seats, but I snuck some glances at other people’s windows and saw the dark sky was beginning to brighten— still dim, but I could see the ocean below the plane as well as the clouds. And eventually, I could feel the plane slowing down and descending. And suddenly… the ocean changed into land. Below me, I saw the large, amazing skyline of Taipei. This is going to be great, I thought to myself. We’re going to see all the iconic buildings. We’re gonna see Taipei 101, the Memorial Hall… wait, what the hell?! We’re flying past Taipei! Where the hell are we going?
Yeah… when we were searching for flights 6 months in advance, I didn’t bother to check that the airport we were headed to was the airport where we’d get to see all the cool stuff. There are two major airports in Taipei, one of them is called Songshan and the other is called Taoyuan. Songshan is the airport right in the middle of the city where you can see all of the cool stuff, and that’s the airport I was eager to land at. The problem is that Songshan doesn’t accommodate huge flights that go across the world. That job is handled by Taoyuan, which is located in another area which is about 15 miles from the actual city of Taipei. Because our flight came from America, it was headed towards Taoyuan. And when it landed, I did not get to enjoy the iconic skyline that the world knows.
It wasn’t all that bad. Even though the only hour we had in Taiwan was pretty much messed up by that disappointment, we were able to get a bit out of it. After getting through security, we had about 20 minutes to spare, so we walked around the airport a bit. I took a few pictures in there, but there wasn’t too much at the airport that I saw as really striking and I didn’t get much out of it. We just ended up getting on to the next flight which would take us to our first real stop in the trip, Saigon in Vietnam. As the plane rolled down the runway, I suddenly remembered something.
This was the best photo I could find that I took while we were in Taipei. Sadly we didn’t land at the main part.
Earlier, my friend who is into aviation had requested me to take videos of all the plane takeoffs and landings from each city. I hadn’t taken any landing/taking off videos yet because 1) I was super tired and 2) It was night so you couldn’t see anything. I decided now was a good time to start. It took forever for the plane to start taking off, and I wasted about 10% of my phone’s battery recording videos, but the plane would not take off so I kept deleting it and waiting. I argued with Casey for a while about when the plane would take off. Casey was worried that I would miss the takeoff but I ended up getting the takeoff, which was pretty cool to get. I probably would have been excited and snapping away with photos of Taiwan if we had taken off from Songshan Taipei airport but we didn’t… so I got bored and fell asleep. Checking the flight path a couple hours later when I woke up, it turns out we flew right through the mountainous part of Taiwan, which would have been fun to photograph. Yep, I missed two in a row. Sorry if you wanted pictures of those.
Full screen is recommended for these videos
Taking off from Taipei
When I woke up, we were flying over the ocean again. We were now in the South China Sea, less than two hours away from Vietnam. It was fully daytime now, and the bright sea was shining the sun’s reflection. And then… I began to notice it. Land ahead. I was going nuts when I saw the forest below, instantly taking pictures of the endless green carpet below. And then the buildings came into view. More and more of them appeared, eventually morphing the green forests into a bustling metropolis. As we came closer and closer to landing, I took some pictures of Saigon from above. As the plane lowered itself more and more, I started recording a video that went all the way until the landing. It’s probably one of my favorite things on my camera roll.
Landing in Saigon
And immediately it felt surreal. As the plane went to a stop and we stood up in our seats, I felt something that I’d never be able to describe. But it was certainly something driving me wild, and I’d get to enjoy that feeling the whole trip, all the way up until we arrived back home. As soon as we got there, Casey saw a SIM card stand near the luggage claim. Because Casey never budges when he wants something, we all kind of just agreed to go where he wanted us to go. We did end up getting a sim card, but only for my phone (Casey didn’t get one because he had the oldest phone and the SIM card was not compatible). For the first 11 or so days of the trip, he would go on and on about how he needed a SIM card which annoyed our parents since they didn’t even have a SIM card.
There was too much luggage to carry around so we ended up putting them in these carts, which made moving them around much easier. Then we walked outside and got my first look at Saigon in 8 years (Unless you count the few times I played with Google Street View and went to Saigon). Hundreds of people were outside. It was a loud and active scene. Taxi drivers waiting for someone to enter… people carrying their luggage around, trying to get to where they needed to be… I didn’t know where to look. I just stared into the crowd of people chattering, not knowing how to navigate through all this. My parents had already said that my mom’s sister, her brother-in-law, and my cousins, Mia and Koia, would be there but I wasn’t sure if we’d ever see them in a crowd like this.
Somehow, in that infinite crowd of people, we found them. My mom’s sister and brother-in-law, my grandparents on my mom’s side, and two young girls who were Mia and Koia. Both of them were way taller than me. The taller one introduced herself as Koia, which immediately confused me because Mia was the older of the two. “Wait, which one is which?” I asked. I’d forgotten what they’d look like. The shorter one I was pretty sure was Mia, who was the older sister, and it turned out I was right. Koia is only 13 years old, but she’s a whole head taller than me (I’m only average height) and wishes to be shorter. Mia has a few years on Koia and me. Koia was very excited to see us, and immediately asked us a bunch of questions. It was later on revealed that this was the first stage in her master plan to turn me and Casey into anime addicts, which didn’t work out in the long run.
Koia: Hey, what’s your favorite anime?!
Me: I don’t… watch…. Anime
Koia: So do you like detective animes? Mafia animes? *Insert expert anime terms here*
Me: (Basically trying to comprehend the anime stuff)
Koia: What video games do you like?
Me: I don’t really—-
Casey: FORTNITE ALL DAY! WOOHOO! AND ROBLOX PLS DONATE!!!!
Koia: NICE!
After that all happened, we got in a taxi and began to drive through the city toward my grandparents’ house (on my mom’s side of the family). As we drove through, I looked around the city, taking pictures of everything in sight. It was nothing like the States. Houses were much closer together, so close it was more like everyone lived in the same big house. They were six stories tall but each separate house was very thin. What they lacked in square footage they made up for in height.
It wasn’t long before we arrived at our grandparents’ house. It was smaller than most of its neighboring houses, being only 2 stories tall while the others were at around 4 or 5. I also discovered a few weeks later through Google Street View that it was older than most of the houses in the area. Most of the houses in the area were less than six years old but this house has been there for several years, maybe even longer.
I took this photo on the way from the airport to Saigon.
As soon as we went inside, we were in for a very interesting first day. First off, the front yard area had this hole in the ground that a bunch of fish lived in. You wouldn’t find a fish pond like this in America that had 20 fish (I regret not taking a picture of it). The inside was pretty nice, and I was only half-listening to Koia’s rant about detective animes because I was so focused on taking in the scene around me. Grandma offered us some orange juice and began to drink.
Koia and Mia were both called home (We’ll see them again soon, don’t worry). I was told to go take a shower, which wasn’t heated so I cooled down extremely fast. In less developed countries like Vietnam, you have to manually turn on the heating system in order to get a heated shower. You also need to turn on a pump that changes the intensity of the water spray which I also didn’t turn on. Since I didn’t know how to turn on the heating system yet and am not used to showering with unheated water, I sort of just cowered in the tiny shower area for twenty minutes and got my body a bit soaked. When I came out, we had Pho for lunch (Noodle soup) which was pretty good. I started to sweat as we were eating because it was so hot— yes, I just took a cool shower and I already was hot.
Anyway, I wasn’t exactly feeling my best at that moment so it was decided that we should get some rest. We were given a bedroom to sleep in— if you’re used to king-sized beds, you won’t enjoy sleeping here because the beds are downsized and basically on the floor— it’s just a thin cushion from the hard tiled floor while you’re inside a net that’s meant to keep the mosquitos out because they can get in all the time. I was too excited to sleep that afternoon, so I spent the afternoon reading until it was time to get up. We were about to head to dinner with our family. We ordered a taxi and waited. It wasn’t until around this time that the past 50 hours finally started to get through my skull. I was done with middle school. I wasn’t in America. I was on the other side of the world. As I looked into the raining grey clouds, I had a feeling that the adventure of the next few weeks was about to be very enjoyable, very intriguing, and not at all the way I anticipated.
Nice! When is the second post coming out?
Nice! When is the second post coming out? ..