Taipei Day 0

Like San Jose I've been here before so it doesn't extend my world map at all - on the other hand I know a little of what to expect, which is handy. One difference is that last time I was in a group of 4 including our Asia-Pacific sales manager who knew the area and here for 3 days. This time it's a week and I'm by myself. Oh well, be brave.

The flight over was uneventful, the taxi to Heathrow - not one of the flash mercs we normally get but the part-timer with the normal cab who fills in, still he was good company - dropped me at 7:20pm Saturday with 2 hours to check in. NTL issues meant I used the self-service check in terminal at the airport - which was quick, followed by the baggage check in - which was as long a queue as you often get for checking in. Thirteen hours later I was in Hong Kong, I slept a bit but not much to try and ensure I wouldn't spend all of my first night awake. Getting off the plane I saw a sign with my name on telling me where to go to get my connection to Taipei (nice!), then I had a 90 minute wait, a 90 minute fligt and finally I was in Taipei (or at least in the same way that landing at Stansted means you are in London...).

My hosts had arranged a hotel for me and also a driver to pick me up from the airport. And they rang whilst we were en-route to check everything went OK. It was a good thing they are so efficent as the hotel our travel agent had booked was the other side of the airport from Taipei - continuing the previous analogy it was kind of like booking a hotel in Cambridge as it was on the "suburbs of London". Luckily I had suspected something like this might be the case and had kept emailing people until someone responded to tell me whether the original hotel was OK or not.

I'd had enough food on the planes that I didn't have a need to go out and find any food once we got to the hotel (around 9:30pm Sunday) which is good because getting food - especially vegetarian food - here without knowing the language is going to be challenging. I may have to take up the various offers of dinner I've had from other business contacts (who are in town for the Computex show). So a phone home, a shower and flick through 100 channels (95 or so in Chinese) and then to bed.