As a result of jetlag, I ended up waking at 4:30am, bright-eyed and hungry. Unfortunately, Elijah was still sleeping so I went over my speeches and did a little reading.
At 7am, we decided to ditch the hotel buffet and go out and get us some authentic Taiwanese breakfast. It was raining and cold, so we caught a cab. When we told our cab driver where we wanted to go, he thought we were nuts not to eat at the hotel and just laughed at us and showed us the bread that he was eating for his breakfast. I guess you have to be a foreigner to want to trade a breakfast buffet for common everyday breakfast food, but that’s the thing, it’s not common for us, so that’s why we had to go out and get it.
After breakfast, we changed into our suits (aka “monkey apparel”) and headed over to the office for our first day of meetings. We started out by taking Taiwan’s newly opened High Speed Rail Train, which was very cool because I’ve been looking forward to ride since it was first announced several years ago. It beats taking the plane out of convenience and it’s almost as fast. The added bonus is that I normally get motion sickness on trains, but this one was moving so darn fast and was so steady that I didn’t have any problems, even while reading.
In Tainan, we met with one of our sales leaders where he treated us to some local noodles, pastries and fruit. Next, we went to Kaohsiung to meet another leader who treated us to more fruit, and then took us to a restaurant that served some pretty unique and authentic Taiwanese dishes (anyone ever tried ‘sauteed dried cauliflower’, it was actually pretty good).
We ended the day by giving our speeches to a room full of sales people and customers, and then had to rush to the airport in order to catch the last flight back to Taipei. I think the pilot must have had something to prove against the new train, ’cause that is the fastest I can remember flying from the south to the north.
[...] I’m not going to try and do a detailed description of our trip. Emmanuel’s doing a wonderful job of that (Day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7..) And here’s his flickr set. I’ll just blog about impressions. This was my first business trip to Asia of its kind. I can’t say that I enjoyed it as a whole. I was counting down days starting from 14. I just had to look at it as work. I woke up each day, and told myself, “It’s time to go to work”. There were some fun and interesting times to be found: company lunch with corporate Taiwan office, meeting up with relatives and the Huang’s, walking the streets with Emmanuel, some good conversations with co-workers and distributors. For being a small multi-national company (tiny by most standards), I never realized how big we were. I was amazed at all the different offices and store fronts out there. [...]