Hong Kong and Taipei (Taiwan) trip

I went to Hong Kong and Taipei as part of a 2 1/2 week business trip to Asia and Australia. I was in Hong Kong Feb 13-17, and Taipei Feb 17-20. The flight to Hong Kong was incredibly long, or so it seemed. I left Columbus, Ohio early the morning of Feb 12th, and arrived in Hong Kong late evening on Feb 13th. In other words, the time zone change made it seem like 2 full days had passed. In Hong Kong I stayed at the Hilton Conrad. Certainly an extremely nice hotel. While in Taipei I was at the Grand Hyatt.

I had some free time the weekend in Hong Kong to walk around and see some things. I went to the Pacific Place mall and actually saw a movie there. I saw Valkyrie, and it was in English. Most of the time in Hong Kong was quite busy going to customer and OEM meetings. I met with several banking customers and our FICON OEM partners. My Brocade colleagues Tony Thomas, Emily Cheung, Eric Lam, and Wilfred Wong managed to pack a lot of things into the schedule to ensure a productive, yet fun trip. I expect to be coming back to Hong Kong within the next three months due to how well the visit and meetings went.

In Taipei we also were quite busy with business meetings with banking and telecommunications companies, as well as with IBM and HDS. I even had a chance to give a presentation that was more open systems SAN focused to an open systems audience. Tony Thomas , Ivy Lin, Michelle Hsu, Moris Tso and I enjoyed several wonderful dinners. Tony Thomas and I went up to the top of the world’s tallest building: Taipei 101. http://www.taipei-101.com.tw/index_en.htm I will add some pictures when I get home next week. Eric Lam and Mori Tso took me to a really neat mall that had only electronics/computer stores. Amazing. And even more amazing was how low the prices are on things. $150 for a HD 22″ Widescreen display for example. Michelle and Moris convinced me to try a very spicy soup for lunch my final day in Taipei, and the lunch was right before a meeting with HDS. As luck would have it, I was giving a presentation when my stomach started to cramp, but fortunately I was able to finish. I had to run out the door to use the lavatory right after, but I did finish the presentation. I expect to be coming back to Taipei as well.

I took a Thai airways flight to Melbourne via Bangkok Friday Feb 20th. More on the Australia trip, including hopefully some pictures from the Sydney Bridge Climb (assuming I do not chicken out).

Here is a couple of pictures of the Taipei 101 building, and view from the observation deck.

 Taipei 101

Taipei 101 view from Observation Deck (89th floor) 

Dr. Steve

This entry was posted on 27. February 2009 at 15:09 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.