To TPE airport
The air conditioned bus took 50 minutes at 6 am, and cost only NT$125 (US$4.50).
It looked like they are working on a metro line along the highway out towards the international airport.
TPE-NRT flight (3 hours)
This was operated by ANA (All Nippon Airways); all the announcements were in Japanese, Mandarin and English. Being a Japanese airline, I was surprised that there was no Sudoku in the inflight magazine!
I also got to experience regular economy (as opposed to economy plus) as the couple in front of me and my seatmate immediately leaned back all the way, bringing the seatback personal entertainment screen that much closer to my face. There were a few movie choices – I watched Happy Feet, an animated penguin movie, which was cute. The lunch meal was decent, with wine, and kudos to the airline for putting a real quantity of pepper into the little packet, as opposed to the usual barely noticeable amount.
I had a window seat on the right so that I could see the Taiwan coast and had a view of hazy Taipei (having arrived on a cloudy night I didn’t see much then)
Fun feature: the flight showed the image from a forward-facing camera on the overhead monitors for the last 10 minutes of the flight, including during the landing at Tokyo’s Narita airport.
NRT airport
The answer to my previous question is: I gate-checked my rollaboard bag. They were kind enough to put a fragile sticker on it (recall it was mostly empty so I was worried it would get crushed – it looked fine when I claimed it in SFO). Though when I rechecked it after customs for my next flight, the baggage guy really wanted to close it (no way).
I also lost my cold peanut soup can I had bought at TPE (just to try it for fun) since I forgot about it in my carry on bag when going through the connecting flights security area at NRT.
One of the things I bought at NRT (besides cough drops) was strawberry kitkats (chocolate bar), which I had never seen before. Not bad, though a little sweet for my liking.