[trip slideshow]

For this trip to Asia, Elijah is actually going with me for his first time on a business trip. We are going to visit 9 cities in 14 days! It’s going to be a lot of meetings, speeches, and more meetings.

Unfortunately, this time, the day before we flew out, I got seriously sick with a killer sore throat. I was out for most of Saturday just trying to get some semblance of health so that I wouldn’t be suffering entirely on the flight. On Sunday, I was feeling a little bit better, but still quite sick. We decided to take an afternoon flight so that when we got to Taiwan, we would still have one night to recover before our meetings started.

We got to the airport early enough to check-in and hoping to get some rest in the business lounge. But turned out that the lounges were under construction and all we got was a lousy $15 coupon to show for it. I wasn’t about to spend that much on McDonald’s, so got something at Sushi Boy, which turned out to be almost just as nasty. Thankfully, Rebecca had prepared some pears for me to snack on. So not only was there no lounge without anything to snack on except crummy fast food, we didn’t have any wifi connection either. Fortunately, we were able to hookup our laptops to our pdaphones and use the EVDO connections.

Then, when we went to check the info board on our flight, we got conflicting information from two boards, and so we figured we might as well go to the gate, and we found out that the flight was actually delayed for an hour! Not a good start, considering I was already sick to begin with.

Once we got on the plane, things started to get better. Fortunately, we were able to get seats in the upstairs section, which is quieter and roomier. Actually, we got the last row of the upstairs, so it was a little bit close to the galley and we could hear them preparing stuff throughout the flight, but still better than downstairs in the main cabin.

My plan for the flight was to try and get as much rest as possible and try to break my cold, regardless of the consequences of jetlag. They wouldn’t turn off the cabin lights until after dinner which was the first 2 hours of the flight and then they would turn the lights back on 2 hours before we landed at which time they would serve breakfast.

So at the beginning of the flight, I watched Jackie Chan in Rob-B-Hood (not bad, entertaining) while eating dinner. Was then able to sleep for most of the time in between about 7 hours. And during breakfast, I watched a Japanese movie Udon, which is great if you like Japanese food and culture.

After landing, we got through immigration pretty quickly and got our bags without much of a wait. The office sent a car to pick us up to take us to our hotel. Unfortunately, by the time we got to the hotel, it was too late to try and head over to Din Tai Fung and get some dumplings. I was hungry from not eating much on the plane, so we headed out to find something to eat. At first, we saw McDonald’s and then a couple of coffee shops, and just as we were about to resign ourselves to western food in Taipei, we found a potsticker shop, where we got a light dinner for the both of us for less than $5. Gotta love Taiwan.

Afterwards, we picked up some drinks from 7-11 (another beautiful feature of Taiwan, the 7-11s actually sell things that are useful, and not just sugar filled drinks and junk food). We then headed back to the hotel to get some sleep before our long day of meetings.