taiwan & japan pics

i'll be very happy if, by the end of next week, i'm not either shot & dead, or fired. our new forecasting system is live and has bugs all over the place. we were so rushed on the timeline (march go-live was pushed all the way out to june & july, and the longer it takes, the more it costs us $), that we were forced to go live before we were ready. next week is forecasting week - if we don't get these bugs fixed, we will be giving our entire company - finance, ceo, exec staff, etc the wrong revenue forecast. at quarter end. NOT a good thing. the only solace is that it's not next month, where the revenue forecast is even more important because they use it to give guidance for our next quarter in our public quarterly conference call (which obviously affects our stock price). it's 1 am, and i just got off the phone with our IT/BSA project manager for this system. man, do we have some major problems. sigh.

anyway, on to happier things. pics from taiwan & japan! feels like that was ages ago...

i didn't take as many pics as i normally would have since this was a business trip. plus i felt weird whipping out my camera all the time to take pics of food, so i didn't do it at every meal.

our first meal in taiwan, breakfast at din tai fung.


that night, joe took me, my coworker and my boss to a really delicious taiwanese dinner & shaved ice afterwards.


some people from the taiwan office took us to... karaoke. they LOVE karaoking, let me tell you. crazy.


you can't really tell, but at the top of taipei 101


views from my hotel room in taipei - super nice hotel. it was definitely a big step down when i went to tokyo (tokyo hotel was nice too - especially for tokyo, just taipei hotel was extravagantly nice - and $100 cheaper per night!)




rest of my taiwan pictures

on to japan! i didn't take any pics in my hotel... besides a picture of the toilet. haha. the hotel itself was pretty nice, i just got stuck in a pretty low floor, and in a room with two twin beds. there's one of me, what am i going to do with the other twin bed? but apparently they had no rooms available with one queen or king sized bed. and talk about expensive! sheesh.

my cousin & i did an all day tour of tokyo, which was cool.

at the meiji shinto shrine. you only go in the shrine to pray, so my cousin & i stayed back while everyone else went in.


we got to see two traditional japanese weddings while in front of the shrine waiting for everyone, so that was pretty cool.


harajuku - where teenage girls dress up like anime characters. quite interesting.


mochi on a stick


hmmm... i thought i was in japan, not in new york


dinner with some of my relatives - can you tell which is my dad's sibling - my aunt or my uncle?


yuuuuummm...


dinner (izakaya style - the same style of japanese food as tanto) with someone from our japan office


i wandered over (after getting lost) to the fish market the morning i left. i got there too late to see the fish market action, but wanted to try the sashimi. this is the line at the most famous restaurant at the fish market - this is at 9am! inside are two tiny bars - seats maybe 8 ppl per bar, so the wait is long. definitely the best toro i've ever had, but no pics allowed inside, and soooooo expensive! i got lucky and got to cut the line because i was by myself.


one of the things i love about both taiwan & japan is that in the basement of every department store is a huge food market where food is both cheap and quick. i wish we had something like that here in the US. ted kept telling me to try the food at 7-11 (seriously, 7-11 in asia is so different than 7-11 here!) so as my last meal, i decided to get a bento box & onigiri at the 7-11 next door to my hotel. it was actually quite delicious & very cheap.


one other thing is that everyone in japan wears suits. i asked people in our office about it, and they said if you work for a japanese company, you're required to wear suits. even if you're an engineer. everyone in our japan office dresses like we do in the US since it's a US-based company, and they said if they go eat with their friends after work, their friends always ask them if they had the day off, or if they went home to change because they're dressed so "casually." i seriously can't imagine someone like bob, mike, or byron going to work in a suit. haha!

rest of my japan pics