This latest business trip lasted 12 days and was a little different from past trips. Instead of conducting meetings in multiple cities in each country, we had centralized training camps in Malaysia and Taiwan. The result was that I did not have to spend as much time traveling from city to city and still got to meet with our managers and top sales people from each country.

Here are some things I learned:

• Take a picture of your hotel room number, because you WILL forget after a day of meetings.
• Laksa in Malaysia is not the same as in Singapore.
• Google Maps, especially Street View, is your friend. I saved so much time by looking up locations ahead of time and not having to wander around.
• Meeting up with friends (outside of work) keeps me grounded and accountable.
• Sulfur hot springs smell like durian, and now I know I don’t care for either.
• Traditional Taiwanese breakfast places are disappearing from Taipei Downtown.
• Google Translate can’t help you translate offline documents (at least not yet), particularly restaurant menus and subway maps.
• Next time I go to Yangmingshan, I bring a bike! Whether it’s paved or dirt, it’s bound to be a good ride all the way down.
• Ximending is worth checking out, especially for hard-to-find Japanese mecha models.
• New favorite dessert place, MeetFresh, tasty old-style shaved ice.
• Jetlag is more than just the physiological adjustment, there’s also the social, emotional and psychological.

Most of my friends and family know that when I’m hungry, nothing takes priority over getting something to eat. I’ve learned to make sure I have emergency snack stocks to tide me over when meal delays beyond my control occur.

Regardless, this is an open apology to those that I have shown my impatience when it comes to mealtimes, especially to my loving and patient wife Rebecca who knows how to tame my growling and ill-tempered stomach.

For my last day of work on this trip, we started by leaving early for the airport on the way to Kota Kinabalu (KK). I had a stomachache (maybe from last night’s dinner), so I didn’t eat that much in the lounge for breakfast. Fortunately, it went away after a couple of hours.

After we landed in KK, a bunch of our distributors met us at the airport and drove us to our hotel where we were staying and also where we would be holding our training. We had a quick lunch meeting with our top distributor in East Malaysia, and then went to get ready for the training session. This turned out to be the only time I had to wear my suit for the entire trip. That was a big plus. I was commenting to Rebecca before flying out that the only time I ever wear a suit is for business in Asia, and weddings and funerals.

In the afternoon, I held a three hour training session, I think this is the longest business talk I’ve ever done. It went pretty well, and most of the audience stayed awake, J/K. Afterwards, my parents and I ditched the hotel food and walked outside to a nearby seafood restaurant which was quite good, and incredibly fresh.

After dinner, I still had to make one short appearance at the distributor meeting, and then I was done, no more meetings for the rest of the trip! Now, all I have to do is pack for the long trip back.

Today started off with a breakfast meeting in the hotel lounge, then off to the office for a full day of management meetings. We did take a break in the middle to go to a lunch meeting, and then it was back to the office for more meetings. We finished after 7pm, and finally headed off to dinner with one of our managers. She took us to our best meal of the trip yet at this local Malaysian restaurant called Melaka Street. They have a website, but doesn’t seem to be working, so I found this great review.

Once again, I was too hungry to take pictures of all the dishes, but here are a couple of dessert. Anyone who can name these local desserts, must have been to Malaysia or Singapore before.

Last night I was just too pooped to post, so this is a combined post from the last couple of days. Tuesday, Day 6 started with some more meetings in Singapore, then after lunch, we headed to the airport to fly to Penang. After checking into our hotel, we went straight to a dinner meeting, and then to a talk which I gave with my dad. It was a pretty good crowd and the meeting went well. But it did go kind of late, we didn’t get back to the hotel until almost 11pm.

The above is a picture out my Penang hotel window, which I took Wednesday morning. Penang is quite beautiful and relaxing compared to the rush of Singapore, but that sure wasn’t exemplified by our time there which was less than 24 hours. It might be nice to actually come back just to relax and enjoy the island one of these days.

In the morning, we had another breakfast meeting in the hotel. Then it was off to the airport to fly to Kuala Lumpur (KL). At the Penang airport, I finally got my first Coffee Bean of the trip as shown in the picture below. The great thing about Singapore and Malaysia is that they have lots of Coffee Bean’s as opposed to Taiwan which is flooded with ‘the burnt coffee place’. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the time to stop and grab a drink.

After arriving in KL, we went to check-in to our usual hotel, and then off to a lunch with our Malaysia managers. In the afternoon, we were back on the ‘meeting treadmill’, and finished off the day with a full course Chinese dinner with our senior managers and their families. One of our managers has 2 girls about the same age as our girls, so it was really cute to watch and talk to them during dinner.

After looking at the bill, I was quite surprised by what a great deal dinner was considering all the good food (although the service was ridiculously slow). Here’s a shot of the delicious roasted suckling pig:

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Here is a customized Google Map of some the places that I’ve been to in Singapore.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already the halfway mark for this trip. Every day is so packed full of meetings, that I can barely keep track of the time. Fortunately, I can still remember my hotel room number by the end of the day so I don’t have to go to the front desk and ask. We’ll see how I am doing by Day 10.

Today started off with breakfast in the hotel, then over to our Singapore office for meetings upon meetings. At lunchtime, we came back to the hotel for yet another meeting in the Thai restaurant, which had some pretty good food, but it’s so hard to enjoy food when you’re talking business with people you are meeting for the first time. It was then back to the office for some more meetings, and then over to the Mt. Elizabeth Medical Center to talk with a doctor.

We finally finished our meetings and got to eat dinner after 8pm. We were too tired to go out, so we just ate at the Chinese restaurant in the hotel, which has some pretty good Sichuan food. Here’s a couple shots of the potstickers and the beef noodle soup:

Today started off a bit rushed since I didn’t realize that our staff meeting was starting at 9. Got ready quickly and rushed out the door to grab breakfast on the walk into the office. I picked up a breakfast sandwich at a shop that I had taken the girls to back in July and surprisingly the shopkeeper remembered us and asked why I hadn’t brought the girls this time!

After a morning of staff meetings, we headed back to our hotel picking up some dumplings at Chou Pang Zhi along the way. Unfortunately, once again, I was in too much of a rush to take pictures of the delicious dumplings (you’ll just have to imagine them). We then headed out of downtown to Shenkeng where we were having our business training. The training went pretty well. I did two sessions which lasted about an hour. Check it out, I have my own placeholder:

Once we got back to downtown, my mom and I went to Dun Hua Night Market. She got some clothes for the kids and I got some fried pork ribs (I thought it was chicken :p, should’ve read the sign more closely).

Got a good nights sleep, just woke up briefly at 5am and went right back to sleep until 7:30am. Went again for some Taiwanese breakfast (and remembered to take a picture before eating), this time with my parents. Afterwards, headed back to the hotel to change and get ready for another day of meetings. I took a couple of pictures of the view out my hotel room:

At lunchtime, we went to look at a space that is available for purchase near our office. I took some pictures of the space and the view out the windows.

We finished our meetings a little late and went for dinner at 101. It was late enough that we didn’t have to wait very long for a table at Ju Ru. Afterwards, we went back to our hotel to drop off our bags before going out for a little shopping (sans my dad, he hates shopping, so he asked me to go and keep my mom company). Here’s a shot of my hotel room:

It had been sprinkling on and off all day, and when we went out again, it was raining pretty consistently. We decided not to go to the night market and went instead to the shopping district on Chung Xiao Dong Lu Section 4. We checked out the East Metro Underground mall, but most shops were already closing. I then took my mom to a fashion mall which has mostly local brands, but I guess it was too fashionable for her. Turns out she was really looking for some clothes for my youngest brother. So I took her to a shop around the corner that had brand name rejects and she got a bunch of stuff there.

Alex suggested that I create a Google map of the places I know in Taipei, so here it is:

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I’m once again, on a business trip to Asia. This one will be a little bit shorter, just 10 days, and this time, I’m traveling with my parents.

Things didn’t start off too good with the lackluster combined airline lounge at LAX, but I guess I should have been happy that there was someplace to sit down with a power outlet. Because, we found out that our airline had switched us with an older plane, so that meant a 14 hour flight with no power. Sure, I was planning to get some work done, but mostly, just missed out on a bunch of movies that I had on my notebook. I ended up watching a soccer movie, Goal 2 (can you believe it’s a series) on the old-style entertainment system, catching 5 hours of sleep, and watching Sunshine on my notebook with just enough juice to finish an episode of CSI Miami.

We got into Taipei at 6 in the morning. So after checking into our hotel, I ditched the hotel breakfast, and went out to get some Taiwanese breakfast. Unfortunately, I was too hungry and forgot to take a picture before I scarfed it all down.

Then after a whole day of meetings, we went out to dinner at Din Tai Fung for some delicious soup dumplings.

I didn’t want to go to sleep too early and end up waking up at 4 in the morning from jetlag, so I decided to make a quick run to Guang Hwa Sang Cang (the Taipei tech market), but unfortunately, that proved fruitless. More often now, I am finding that most of the stuff I can get back in the US online cheaper.

Since I still had some time before going to bed, I decided to work off all that eating make use of the hotel gym. On the way back to my hotel room, I saw the following sign. I guess we can all use grammar check every once in a while.

Once we got into Singapore, we took an airport taxi straight to our hotel. After checking in, we went looking for food, and discovered that there was a food court in the small mall connecting to our hotel. We got our first laksa of the trip:

[trip photostream]

We then headed into the office which is only a couple of blocks away from the hotel for some meetings. Afterwards, we went to check out Singapore’s latest mall VIVO City. Our manager kept telling us that it was really big, but after walking through it a couple of times, we felt it had nice wide corridors, but wasn’t that big compared to malls in SoCal. The mall did have one nice feature, the top floor was covered with a grassy park and a wading pool in the middle. Oh, and another nice feature was their food court called Food Republic (there’s another one on Orchard Road). Our cousin Leong stopped by after work to join us for some dinner and dessert:

After dinner, Elijah hung out at the hotel, while I headed out for a late night meeting with one of our leaders and a doctor from one of the leading hospitals in Singapore. It proved to be a rather informative and encouraging meeting, but it sure was tiring. Finally got back to the hotel around 11:30pm.

On Saturday morning, we got woken up by our hotel telephone ringing. When I went to pick it up, it was our Auntie Mary calling with a ‘wake-up’ call. She found out from our cousin that we were in town and wanted to bring by another cousin from Kuala Lumpur who happened to be in town as well. They joined us for breakfast in the hotel, which was unplanned but a nice surprise and welcome time of catching up.

In the afternoon, we had a bunch of meetings including taking out some of our Singapore office staff to lunch. And finished off by giving our last speeches in the afternoon. What a relief to be done with that.

We then headed over to Holland Village at the suggestion of another cousin living in Singapore. We went to check out some electronics, but didn’t find anything that we couldn’t get at home for the same price. Turns out, Holland Village is a nice outdoor shopping and eating area where a lot of expats hang out. They even had a Coffee Bean (which are all over Singapore, what a wonderful city).

For dinner, our Co cousins took us to meet up with their parents at Singapore Island Country Club for some delicious chili crab which they had ordered ahead of time just for us. They made us finish every last piece, which was quite a bit of work, but worth every bite.

On Sunday morning, we had one last bit of business. We took the MRT (first time, very convenient) to Raffles City Convention Center to visit a cardiologist conference which we were sponsoring. Didn’t take too long and we headed back to the hotel to check-out.

For brunch, our cousin Phebe picked us up and took us to her current favorite restaurant Brown Sugar. Not exactly sure how to describe the food, kind of like modern casual gourmet. The omelettes we had were pretty good, but what really stood out was the wagyu hamburger topped with foie gras and the two pastry desserts, one made from dates and another from peaches.

We finally headed over to the airport, where we checked-in and did some last minute duty-free shopping. We then boarded the plane for a 4 hour flight to Taipei, a 4 hour layover, and a 12 hour flight back to LA. Fortunately, the business class lounge in Taipei is quite nice and we got to take showers while we were waiting. The flight back to LA wasn’t too bad, slept a few hours and watched some average flicks.

When we got to LAX, the airport was totally packed with a bunch of incoming international flights. We got through immigration after a bit of a wait, grabbed our luggage and joined the customs green line to get out. What we didn’t realize was that we accidentally picked up some first class guy’s luggage by accident, and I didn’t see it until after getting all the way back home. We called the airline but the office was closed by then, so we called them in the morning and ended up having to take the luggage back to LAX and exchange it for our luggage. That is a good lesson to always check our tags before you head out of the airport.