Friday May 8th

Today we departed from Charlotte very early in the morning. After a layover in Dallas we took the 14 hour flight to Tokyo's Narita Airport. Because of the swine flu, all the passengers had to be examined by airport officials and scanned with a thermal camera before getting off the plane. We also had to fill out a health form with all of our travel plans and our health information. Most of the group was cleared to go inside but the other part were forced to remain on the plane because a passenger reported having a cough and a fever recently. We then boarded a JAL plane for Taipei but were held on the runway because of bad weather. We arrived in Taiwan three hours later only for me to get pulled aside by an official examined up and down and have my temperature taken. Quarantine is not where I wanted to be for three days. An hour and a half later we made it to the hotel to find that the rooms were quite nice. Not nearly like American hotel rooms but still nice. However, we are not allowed to drink the water here so we had to brush our teeth with boiling water from a tea machine in our room. The bed feels like a piece of plywood but its perfect after such a long day.