Day 1: Taipei

Day 1: Taipei
Arrival in Taipei

After a 14-hour red eye in which Saturday was just erased from the calendar, we arrived in Taipei at 6AM on Sunday. Stefan, who works for the company we are visiting, picked us up and was our guide for the rest of the day. It rained all day. We were pretty exhausted from the jet-lag and not having slept much, but we kept busy so as not to go to sleep until the evening. I'm traveling with George, one of the engineering managers.

We visited the National Museum and saw a lot of ancient Chinese ceramics and artifacts. It was interesting to hear the "china" story from the Taiwanese (TW) point of view.
We had a great Italian meal for lunch then walked all over the malls via the footbridges that connect them with Taipei 101 and the hotel. It rained non-stop all day. Still people were out strolling.
We finally stopped and settled into one of the hotel bars and had a couple of drinks (still full from lunch), we didn't feel like dinner. We talked business and George and Stefan went over old times. They've know each other for years. We finally called it a night (or an afternoon) about 6PM and each crawled off to our respective executive suites. All the "cheap" rooms were taken.
Btw, Stefan told us that when the US gov't evacuated diplomatic families from Tokyo after the recent earthquake because of fear of radiation, they ended up at this hotel, the Grand Hyatt. He said they mostly gone back to Tokyo or home now. There were radiation detectors in the airport we noticed when we came in.

I'll post some links to pictures later when I have more time.
[if the picture doesn't show to the right of this post, click on the little black square to show it. I'm not sure why it's not showing up.]