Flying to Taiwan

I arrived in Taiwan in the early afternoon. I had to wake up at 4:30am to catch my flight to Hong Kong and then grab a flight to Taipei. Grrr. In any case, as I'm leaving Beijing after several months, I've accumulated quite a bit of stuff. I've got one massive suitcase that I also bought in Beijing and one other suitcase which I used to think was big that I brought from home. It turns out my massive suitcase weighs in at 41kg, 9 kg over the 32 kg weight limit. (Take that Europeans! We big Americans get 32kg for each suitcase!) So now I'm frantically moving all the heavier items from the massive suitcase to the merely large suitcase. In the end I'm successful and the two weigh in at 33kg and 25 kg. Of course this means I now have very little time to board my flight. I totally forgot about immigration as I was trying to turn my five carry on bags into a more accepatble three (I was hoping that the laptop bag and sutffed full backpack combined would count as my purse), and ended up needing to be rushed through the diplomats' line. The Cathay Pacific reps helped rush me through security too and along the way I kept hearing that I (or a Korean--still could be talking about me) was the last one holding up the flight.

In Hong Kong I nearly hit a snag when the Dragon Air people told me my visa is invalid because it has zero entries listed. After a while they figure out it is an extension and let me pass. By the time I reached Taiwan I was tired and hot. I was the last one to pick up my luggage and go through customs. The customs people gave me funny looks because I was wearing a coat and a scarf and because I had enough luggage for three people. Aren't you hot? Why are you wearing so much? Are you moving to Taiwan? Since they were saying all this after I passed through, it didn't seem like it was part of any sort of official questioning. I was supposed to take a taxi to my grandmother's apartment but I only had 800 Taiwan dollars and it costs about 1200. I tried getting money from the ATM but I kept getting errors. I went to the exchange booth and looked for the exchange rate from RMB, but naturally they don't exchange RMB. I finally remembered I had Thai Baht so I exchanged my last bit of that giving me a total of 1188 Taiwan dollars. I called my grandmother and then looked for a taxi stand. The policeman said taxis don't really come by the airport and I should take the limo service. So after all that floundering with money I could just pay everything with a credit card.