This is a familiar site: I’m getting off of an airplane in an international terminal. In this case, I’ve just landed in Narita Airport, Japan, and I’m on my way to Taipei.
The longest time that I’ve ever been away from my wife is 25 days. This is when I was with IBM in the early 90’s, and I left to go to Asia-Pacific for 3.5 weeks. This trip is 18 days away, and it is on top of many other trips this year. I have been the traveling fool.
On this trip, I was to bring along George and my supervisor. Our industry is going through some new exciting things, and it is causing us to rethink about our storage solutions.
This is George in the lobby of the Sherwood in Taipei. I was kidding with him about “how much he is suffering” as the violin and harp player serenades him as we wait to go to the Intel Ultrabook Symposium.
We had some meetings with our key customers and other makers of computer parts that make up PCs, so my supervisor came over after the Intel event. We had a big meeting on Friday, and then we decided to take out one of our customers golfing.
David is our local American in China (doesn’t speak Mandarin), and he arranged an outing at the Kuo Hua golf course. This was a very nice golf course, and I was incredibly disappointed in realizing that I had forgotten to bring my camera to the golf course. I took a picture with my cell phone, but it is pretty bad. We took off at 6am in the morning to get to the course, and in my rush, I simply forgot. I would have loved to take some more pictures.
David said that this golf course was more of a Japanese type layout of the course. It was a little shorter, and a little narrower. I had a set of borrowed golf clubs. The best thing about the clubs is that it had a flop wedge, which meant that I was much more equipped for the short game. The bad news is that I had zero opportunity to practice with the driver. It definitely was more of a hook type driver. I hit a couple with David’s driver, and they were slices, so it was something about the driver.
So, I hooked it off of the first tee, but then I really started to find my tempo. The biggest issue way that I was smacking the ball extraordinary far. I was out driving the rest of the group by 30-40 yards. This meant that I was driving the ball so far that I would constantly go into the rough, and the rough was very rough.
The caddies were excellent however. The were covered similar to the caddies from two weeks ago, but had a great grasp of were the ball went. Even though I out drove everybody into the rough, the caddies were always able to yell at me and tell me where the ball went. I didn’t understand the Mandarin, but could hear them yell and point.
On Sunday, Colin wanted to go to the Harley shop in Taipei. He figured it would be cool to get his kids a couple of Taiwan based Harley shirts. We got the the store, as he asked Chris, one of the people that work in my group to take us, without any problems. However, as Colin looked around in the store, he figured out that the T-Shirt were very expensive. They were something like 300% more expensive here than in the USA. So he decided to not buy anything. Harley’s are a big prestige cost item.
By the way, it was ghost month in Taipei. During this month, business owners burn money to the ghosts. It is quite amazing to see these type of canisters on fire everywhere, with people throwing money into them. Only it isn’t real money. It is designed to look like money. I’m not sure, but maybe they can fool the ghosts.
One of the office people said that Taipei was very smokey during this period. It always looks smoggy to me.
The scooters are everywhere in Taipei. You either walk, drive or scooter. The scooters are pretty wild in traffic with cars pushing into groups on the road, and the scooters sneaking up on the cars. They say there is a lot of accidents, deaths and brain injuries, although I didn’t see any problems. However, it is always a bit wild in my trips here.
Finally, after 9 days, I’m leaving. Not to go home, but to go to Tokyo. I can’t say I was sad to leave the Sherwood, but the room was very nicely cool. If you can get room 1725, it is the best. It has a neat de-humidifier in it, and I’ve staid in room 1724, and my supervisor was in room 1726. Neither one was as cool is one.
It’s the place to be.
