Well, I survived my first 16 hour flight! It went by surprisingly fast considering the sleep didn't exactly come easy. Interestingly, it was dark the whole way. We took off just before 2am from Toronto, were in the air for 16 hours and landed in Taipei at about 6am, still in the dark. Fun fact: everything here is Hello Kitty. Even the plane was painted like Hello Kitty. Hilarious. I wish I could have gotten a good pic of me and the plane but the dark made it to...

After a hectic weekend of trying to pack between frigid hockey games and winter carnival activities, I'm ready to roll. Suitcase weighed in at 49lbs with the backpack inside that I'll be living out of for the first few weeks. Just said my farewells to family and we're headed to the airport! After the -40 temperatures we've had this week, I couldn't be more excited for tanks and flip flops - or singles and pluggers, as they say down under. Here's a little overvie...