The night before leaving

So finally, as of about 10:00pm, I'm packed and ready to go. My flight leaves from Detroit to Chicago at 10:17am tomorrow. From there I go from Chicago to Tokyo (a 13 hour flight!) and finally from Tokyo to Taipei. Once I get up tomorrow morning I'll be staying up over 24 hours, this includes all the flights and the travel time to the hotel in Taipei. I won't lie, this is not something I'm overly looking forward to, but I shall survive.

I've been doing a bit more research into the two countries and international travel overall and I've learned a few bits of information that I found rather interesting. For example:

• In Japan, it is customary to refill other people's drinks and not your own
• Upon entering Taiwan, our temperature will be taken at the airport. This is to check to ensure someone who is sick isn't coming into the country
• While in Taiwan, I'll be 12 hours ahead of the time back home in Michigan. In Japan, I'll be 13 hours ahead
• In order to make sure jet lag is not an issue, the key is to stay awake the entire flight, go to bed around 11:00pm, and then just sleep until you need to get up the next morning (which is roughly 6:00am in my case)

The last major thing I did in preparation for my departure is exchange currency. For this, I just used my bank. I got between 540-550 USD worth of both the Japanese Yen and the Taiwanese Dollar. This translated into about 51,000 Yen and 14,300 Taiwanese Dollar. Interestingly enough, because the Yen comes in denominations of up to 10,000 (while the Taiwanese Dollar only goes up to 1,000), I have a much smaller stack for the Yen then I do for the Taiwanese Dollar. However, I think both of the currencies look pretty neat, so I took a picture so that everyone else could see what they look like. Next time I post, I will be in Taiwan!!

Taiwanese Dollar

Japanese Yen