Goodbye Canada.....Hello Kitty??

So after a 'last supper' of pot roast and chocolate chip cookies (the kind of food we won't likely see for a while), we headed to YVR for our first flight. Thanks to the Coopers for both the food and the ride. All of our friends and neighbours have been particularly generous over the last few days, feeding our kitchenless family and sending us off in style. Many thanks!!

We flew out on Chinese New Years Eve on a Taiwanese airline (EVA). So I guess it came as no surprise that the flight was actually not too full - while it's true many Taiwanese will fly back home to see family, they would have done so in the days before. It would be like westerners flying home on Christmas Day.

Hmmmm......not a good start to the evening's flights.

Here's Owen with all our worldly possessions for the next six months - we're limiting ourselves to carry-on luggage only, so it took some discipline and hard love ("no, you may not bring blankies and stuffies on this trip - time to grow up!")

Who needs an e-reader when you have a "she-reader" - the ever dedicated mama reading 'House of Hades' to the kids to pass time before the flight.

So we boarded the flight (747) and we discovered that EVA Air has adopted Hello Kitty as it's main mascot. I don't (I should say "didn't") have anything against that until 30 minutes after I boarded the plane, at which point I had endured exactly 30 minutes of an endless loop of Hello Kitty music, and in-flight entertainment system animation which you could not turn off. I even heard Owen start to complain.

10,000 km of Hello Kitty would be a different kind of hell, but they finally relented and we got on with our normal flight.

This actually looks remarkably similar to what our kids are like at home when there's a screen nearby - "Hey Annie, I think that's Mt. Fuji below". 

No answer. 

"And Godzilla's climbing to the top". 

No answer.

"......sigh"

We all managed to sleep for about half of the 12-hour flight, which, considering we arrive at about 5:00 am in the morning, should set us up well for our first day in Taiwan. Which begins....

.......now