This is the day the 'travel blog' loses its quotes, for I have actually left the country (and arrived somewhere else other than daydreams about somewhere else). I'm writing from Taipei, Taiwan, and I'm sure the timestamp is wrong (it's Wednesday, 8/16 at 6:14 AM) and I'm sure that the tone is wrong as well, since I've gotten maybe six dubious hours of 'sleep' on the plane, and things kept happening. Like I woke up and blearily realized I was watching MI3 because my butt sat on the remote control while I was sleeping (my butt chose Tom Cruise - I now distrust my butt). Is that word mistrust, or distrust? I can't think. Everything looks like it has been sterilized with Scrubbing Bubbles. Don't they have dirt here? Don't people ever pick up dust from the street and track it places? Like airports, for example? Don't they ever miss the garbage cans when they throw away their 7503481298765 cans of Coke? Oh, wait.

There was nothing beautiful, though I expected there to be. But when I was expecting I forgot to remember that all airports everywhere are the same. Hold on, I have one.

Flying over the Pacific might have been breathtaking if it hadn't been night. As it was, you could look up and see stars and think you were in a spacecraft, which was disorienting, but not beautiful. This was beautiful: a half hour before we landed, maybe, after 11 hours of black and space and stars, I started seeing tiny lights on boats. And then, before I was able to see the water that the boats floated on, I started seeing this orange glow spreading unevenly, like giant starfish, over something ripply, but it didn't look like water - it looked like the desert. The kind of desert that moves faster than a 747. The sun. As we hit (one of) the eastern shores of the Pacific, the desert caught up with the plane and I saw that it was water, and that it was the sunrise.

My mind, my fingers, my metaphors, are writing like they just smoked a bowl of exhaustion (see?) but there it was; it was more than enough. Being somewhere unfamiliar enough that you don't recognize the ocean.