A 3-Day Trip (on 3 day's notice) to Taipei, Taiwan

So for the 3rd time on our road trip, I had to hop a flight to somewhere else for work for a few days (the first back to Austin, and the second to Prague, Czech Republic). This time, I flew from Seattle (via San Francisco) to Taipei, Taiwan.

Needless to say Kim was a little disappointed to have to drop me off at the Sea-Tac airport, but fortunately, I'd be back after 3 (long!) days, most of which I'd spend over the Pacific Ocean.

Actually, the journey starts on the Monday before I left, as I spent most of my day at the Taipei Economic and Cultural office in Seattle, obtaining a landing visa. Ask me about it sometime, if you're in the mood for a complicated, entertaining story...

Anyway, I flew from Seattle to San Francisco, and after about a 4 hour layover, from San Francisco directly to Taipei (nearly a 13 hour flight). I arrived around 11pm, and a car was waiting for me. The driver spirited me off to the Fullerton Hotel South, which turned out to be a very nice accommodation. I got to my room around midnight and had a mini-bottle of wine and a Snickers for dinner. Not yet tired, I actually Skyped with my mom and her eighth-grade class, which was a lot of fun!

The next morning I awoke to see that I had a brilliant view of Taipei 101 from my hotel window. It positively towers over everything else in the city.

I met my Canonical co-workers for breakfast, and several of us walked the 3km from the hotel to our office in Taipei 101 (bypassing the taxi option).

The weather was quite warm, and very humid. Taiwan is practically a tropical island.

Scooters dominated the roadways. They looked like swarms of minnows swimming through oceans of bigger fish and coral.

Having less than two full days in Taipei, I opted for the morning walk to the office to see as much of the city as possible before my marathon trip back on Friday. The walk was quite good for this, strolling along markets, past residences, and across bustling streets at around 8am on a weekday. I got a good feel for the vibrancy of the city.

This was my first trip to the far east. Needless to say, Chinese characters mean nothing to me. Some areas of the city are so foreign it's amazing. On the other hand, most of the city is extremely accessible. Almost anything important is written in both Chinese and English.

We crossed a sky bridge over the highway at one point, affording a great view of Taipei 101. I walked to the office with my buddy, Tim. You might recall just a few weeks ago, Tim and I were hiking the hills and mountains around his home town in Helena, Montana. Yeah, we're a long way from Montana now!

The foot of Taipei 101 is a hard place to get a feel for the monumental scale of the structure. However, it's an awesome vantage point to appreciate that a stalk of bamboo is the inspiration for the architecture. Thursday morning was clear, and gorgeous.

The front doors and lobby to Taipei 101 were quite open and inviting.

The lower levels the monstrosity consist of several levels of a shopping mall, and food court. The elevator process for the building is complicated, but incredibly efficient, at the same time.

Multiple RFID badge-ins later, I made it to the 46th floor where we have a beautiful Canonical office.

I worked the morning from there, catching up with other colleagues also in town, and meeting much of our Taiwan team. At lunch, I went up to the top of the building with a friend, doing the touristy thing. The stainless steel decorations at the top are absolutely huge.

Only half of the outside view platform was open, due to high winds.

The engineering of the building is all-around impressive. Taiwan is a hotbed for earthquakes, tsunamis, and typhoons, and the building has been designed to withstand all of these. I found it incredible that the structure sits on top of 38 pillars drilled 150m into the ground.

Also impressively, their is an exposed, tuned mass damper weighing over 700 tons! This giant, suspended weight helps stabilize the building, and minimize sway against winds and earthquakes.

Here's a better illustration, from Wikipedia.

Having spent nearly an hour at the top, I went back to work for a while. Eventually, though, we knocked off of work, and headed down one of the many, many super-fast elevators.

We hiked a few blocks to the metro station, where we stood in very orderly, perfect lines to wait our turn and board the train.

From there, we walked several blocks to a 6-story electronics flea market. There were hundreds upon hundreds of tiny booths selling everything from transistors to cell phones, head phones to CPUs. We bought 8 of the smallest wireless routers I have ever seen, for 1000 TWD (about $30 USD) apiece. These little WAPs are great for hotel rooms where the WiFi is crappy (or non-existent).

After our haggle and quick purchase, we hustled back to Taipei 101, taking the subway again.

On our walk back, we approached the skyscraper from a new direction, and got some beautiful views of the building in its entirety.

It was pretty impressive to see the building peeling layers off of the clouds passing far above our heads.

And its antennae shrouded in cloud...

We worked the rest of the day, and eventually exited the building to some pretty heavy, intense rain.

I carried a few souvenirs through this nasty storm, which completely soaked and shredded the gift bag.

We had a short dinner and a couple of beers at a nearby Thai restaurant, and I crashed out as quickly as I could get back to the hotel.

Friday morning came far too quickly. We boarded a shuttle bus to the Victoria Hotel where our conference was held. It was a nice, though western conference center.

The attendance was impressive. They were mostly representatives of computer hardware vendors local to the Taiwan area, interested in what we're doing with Ubuntu.

Each of us from Canonical gave 45 minute talks, in 3 simultaneous tracks throughout the day. I spoke about the Ubuntu Server Road map. Here is Pete Graner (one of our other hosts along our journey) talking about the Ubuntu Kernel Team and Process.

I left for the airport directly from the conference on Friday afternoon, at about 5pm. After hanging out in the Taipei airport lounge for a few hours, I flew back to the future, arriving in San Francisco several hours before I left! And a few hours later, Kim would pick me up in Portland where we will have continued our tour, by the time you read this ;-)

:-Dustin