Taiwan, China and Korea Over Thirteen Days or So

Hello everyone...I’m sitting in the international terminal of Shanghai Pudong airport on a hazy Saturday morning awaiting Korean Air flight 894 to board in an hour or so. I’m about halfway through a thirteen day jaunt over to this part of the world to assess what’s going on in the company’s Taiwan, China and South Korea offices from a trade compliance perspective, my first visit over here for the company and my first since November 2009. From a professional standpoint it’s good to be back but from a personal standpoint, I miss my wife, son, psycho pooch and garden.

I count the beginning of the trip on the day before Thanksgiving when the fam and I packed up the car and drove to my in-laws in Dallas. After a nice peaceful Thanksgiving holiday, I woke up early Saturday morning to catch a 10:50am flight from Dallas-Ft. Worth Int’l Airport to Seoul, South Korea. For the first time ever I was sick to my stomach the night before the flight; something I ate I suppose. I had visions of a fifteen hour flight with the air sickness bag inches from my face. Thankfully in the morning I was feeling a lot better and thus not faced with the decision of whether to get on the flight or not.

I’d never flown with Korean Air before and was looking forward to it (yes, I’m now an airline dork). Air travel can be a bit monotonous, particularly with US carriers like American, United and Delta that I’m so familiar with, so it’s nice to see some fresh faces and aircraft livery. And Korean Air paints their planes with a light shade of blue that I don’t know how to describe but is pretty unique. As is my preference, I had a window seat near the wing that offered me a view of the ground. There was an empty seat next to me which was quite nice and my other seatmate, an American who does training for Hilton Hotels and was on her way to Manila, Philippines, seemed to be of the same mind of getting up every couple of hours to stretch your legs (which seems to become more important the older you get, eh).

Korean airlines had the plane decked out with a TV screen in every seat and on-demand movies, tv shows, video games and, my favorite, the in-flight map to show where you are. Problem was the map would always label the place names in Korean, requiring me to make a good guess as to what small town in northeastern New Mexico we were flying over, eh. The flight was going to be about fifteen hours, flying through daylight the whole way and arriving in Seoul in the late afternoon. I was going to attempt to stay awake the entire trip. Actually, staying awake wouldn’t be a problem as I can’t sleep on planes unless I’m a) lying down or b) take strong sleeping pills (Ambien is the only one I’ve found to work). I figured if I stayed awake the whole flight and for the following flight to Taipei, Taiwan, I’d easily fall asleep that night and avoid jet lag.

Well, the first thirteen hours went just fine. The skies were mostly clear until we hit Washington state so I had a good view of north Texas, Colorado and southern Idaho as we cruised along. I read the Hunger Games, the popular teen book which will soon be in a movie theater near you; I heartily recommend it though in a way you feel guilty being entertained by kids killing each other (though the political overtones are always lurking in the background which I love). Jennifer said I had to read it since she wants me to go see the movie with her when it comes out but I was interested in reading it anyway. I also spent a lot of time gazing out the window while listening to music on the iPod. As for movies, the only one that interested me was Captain America which, while a bit cheesy, was fairly decent as superhero movies go. Instead of other movies, I watched the first four episodes of the only scripted TV show I’ve ever watched much over the past fifteen years, Firefly (I’d treated myself to the 14-episode DVD set on Amazon for $25 in anticipation of this trip).

I’m definitely getting older. I tweaked my knee sitting down in the plane’s bathroom about two hours into the flight and it hurt on and off until I boarded my next plane in Taiwan. Ouch!

At some point we were supposed to completely close our window shades so that there was no glare on peoples’ TV screens. I couldn’t quite abide by that as I wanted to continue looking out the window so I only closed mine halfway. My seatmate said she didn’t mind though she may have just been polite :) Anyway, it paid off when we flew over parts of southern Alaska. Seeing snow-covered islands in the middle of what is undoubtedly a freezing cold sea was awesome. I love flying over the north. We even turned west a bit over a city which I’m pretty sure was Fairbanks, Alaska. I could almost see Sarah Palin shooting wolves from a helicopter below (but not quite within sight of Russia yet).

Later we flew over parts of eastern Russia, which was absolutely buried in snow. The cloud cover came back as we flew over northern Japan and turned directly west towards Seoul. By this point I was starting to feel horribly tired, seeing as it was around two in the morning Austin time. In fact, the last two hours of the flight were a bit miserable as I was not tired enough to sleep, too tired to concentrate on a book, lacking sufficient battery power on the laptop to watch another Firefly episode, too close to Seoul to watch a full movie and too much of a snob to watch anything else. Thankfully after a while we touched down in Seoul after cruising in over the ocean (I love those landings where the runway is right next to the ocean so that it looks like you’re going to crash into the sea until the runway appears at the last minute...going into Washington D.C.’s Dulles airport is great for that because as a bonus there are people sculling in the Potomac). Leg 1: complete!

I wandered through the Seoul (actually called Incheon because that’s where it’s located) airport to my next gate for my flight with Eva Air to Taiwan. Eva Air is, I believe, Taiwan’s national carrier. Most small countries have just one airline, sometimes (or maybe all the time) owned by the government. In the US of course we’re big enough for multiple airlines as is China (China Airlines, China Eastern, China Southern and Shanghai Airlines) but most countries are not. Therefore you have Korean Air, Eva Airlines, Thai, Malev Hungarian, Air France, British Airways, Finnish Airways, Lot (Poland), Iran Air and, still my favorite, Uzbekistan Airways (www.uzairways.com). I get a kick out of flying these new airlines so I was thrilled (in my jet-laggedness) to be flying with Eva. Plus their logo has green in it and darn it, I like green.

The last time I flew in this part of the world I had extremely bumpy flights from Shanghai to Beijing and back so I wasn’t surprised when our plane was rocked pretty good flying over the Pacific to Taiwan. The pilot came on the intercom and apologized though which was nice. I would have been more worked up over the turbulence, which lasted probably twenty minutes total, but I was much too tired to care. I just was imagining arriving in the Taipei airport, passing through Customs, collecting my roller bag and finding my new best friend, the driver holding up a card with my name on it just outside the baggage claim. And so it came to pass. His name was Jimmy.

As I wrote about in 2009 when I was last in Asia, I’m fascinated by the English names Chinese people choose because most foreigners can’t pronounce Chinese worth a lick, myself included. I learned the term for why it’s so difficult: tonal. Chinese is a tonal language where there are four different ways to pronounce ‘ma’, each meaning something completely different. So I may think I’m saying ‘thank you’ when really I’m saying something completely different or gibberish. We think to ourselves ‘how can they misunderstand me’ but really it’s all about your tone, inflection, etc. I realize that’s one of the reasons that China and Taiwan are not among my favorite places to visit: it’s too difficult to learn the language. In southern Belgium, I can reasonably pronounce ‘boulangerie’ either after somebody tells it to me or I read it on a sign. In Japan, it’s impossible to mispronounce ‘hai’. But in China, if I ask Leslie at the hotel front desk how to say ‘good morning’, I’m going to totally butcher it. It makes me feel like there’s a part of the culture I can’t take part in, even though I’ll only ever learn a handful of words. But the gap between knowing nothing of the language and knowing even four words is enormous. It bothers me. What I need to do is to make really good friends with someone in either the Taiwan or China office who can tutor me. Oh, and take the time to really sit down and try to learn. On the plus side, I learned one Chinese character: da! 大 Of course, I have no idea what ‘da’ means though or how to properly say it.

Doh, plane’s boarding.

And that reminds me, here’s my favorite article about Chinese people why so many of them in international business choose English names:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2009/04/the_names_du_xiao_hua_but_call_me_steve.html

Alright, now I’m in the Ibis Hotel in Suwon, Korea. For those who haven’t stayed in an Ibis, it’s like the Motel 6 of international travel: everywhere, relatively cheap (though not that cheap) and always feels like something important is lacking.
Anyway, Jimmy the driver drove me about 30 minutes in the dark to my hotel in Hsin-Chu, a large industrial center outside of Taipei. My hotel was on the 12th-18th floors of an 18 story tall building with a shopping mall on the first seven floors. I checked in and within a half hour was out like a light.
The next morning I was up sometime around 6. I went down to eat breakfast at the hotel buffet at which point I realized I was in a luxury hotel for business travelers. How could I tell? Let’s see:

- The waitstaff and reception desk staff spoke excellent English
- The breakfast buffet was full of mostly non-Taiwanese who were dressed at least business casual if not more so
- The breakfast buffet was extensive and had a healthy selection of (YES!) Western food such as scrambled eggs and bread (including croissants)
- All of the staff were outgoing and friendly, wishing you good morning
- There was someone at the front entrance of the hotel to open your car door for you when you got in

I realize that the company I now work for puts everybody in these types of hotels but it’s really a statement of where I am these days as a professional. I’ve got the word ‘Director’ in my title which means, at least to me, that I need to act more like the typical business traveler. When I got this job I spent $130 on a professional laptop/document bag and another $100 on a heavy long black coat (at Burlington Coat Factory, but still), replacing the L.L. Bean liner that I’d been wearing since high school. I find it harder to make friends with people whose positions are closer to entry level; am I imagining things or is it because of my job title? Should my days of staying in off-the-beaten path hotels lacking certain amenities like air conditioning but meeting my needs and avoiding other foreigners be over? I don’t know but regardless I need to be more cognizant of the consequences of my sometimes non-professional actions where my fun-loving and sometimes offbeat and sunny personality pokes through.

Anyway, I was picked up by my co-worker, Richard, in Environmental, Health and Safety (a different type of compliance) who would be my chaperone for this whole Asia trip and driven to the office. This was my chance to really see Hsin-Chu and, well, it’s not very visitor-friendly. Lots and lots of tall buildings, industrial areas and crowded tenement buildings along with innumerable buzzing mopeds on the streets. Just a crazy place, even as a pedestrian. This brings me back to another theme of mine in travel: it’s difficult not to stereotype a country based upon the experience in an urban area. I can’t base my opinion of the entire country off of my experience in Hsin-Chu. I told Richard about this and he agreed; he’s not overly fond of Hsin-Chu either :)

One other issue I have with Chinese culture: I just can’t get into the food. Everything tastes a bit off, even something standard like beef and broccoli. I can eat most everything but it just isn’t appetizing. And occasionally there is something extremely interesting to eat like the Taiwanese hot dog: a steamed rice ‘bun’ that is more tasteless than tofu, something resembling a sausage in the middle and various stewed vegetables as a topping. Chinese food we get in the States is oh so totally different. On the plus side, I’ve probably lost weight since I’ve been here since the food I’ve been eating has been healthier and in smaller quantities than normal.

I was in Taiwan for only two days and then hoofed it out, with Richard, on a Wednesday mid-morning flight to Shanghai. I was thrilled, and yes, I’m a dork, to be flying for what I was pretty sure was the first time on a Boeing 747, the double decker planes that have been around for decades. Even though Taipei and Shanghai are only separated by a 1.5 hour flight the number of people flying back and forth merits a large plane. Now that I think of it, in every Asian airport I’ve been in so far all I’ve seen have been big planes, very much unlike all of the small and mid-size planes in US airports. Anyway, I had a window seat on the 747 on the first desk and neglected to take a quick peek at the second floor (though I’ll bet it looked the same).

The weather in Shanghai as we descended was rather interesting. Not really rainy or smoggy near as I could tell but there was crazy fog-like clouds until about two minutes before we landed. I’m still impressed with pilots and their ability, with the help of technology, to land in such adverse conditions. At least the ride was smooth.

So I was back in Shanghai, a place I hadn’t been in two years. It felt like a homecoming of sorts since I had half-decent memories of the last trip when I was awed by Shanghai’s size (but immune to its craziness as my hotel and work were in the suburbs). It became even weirder when I took a cab to the office that afternoon to find that it is located next door to the hotel I stayed in in 2009 and within walking distance of the Shanghai office of my previous employer (and where I was working in 2009 during that visit).

While in Taiwan I was never taken out to eat. This suited me ok because I was going to bed at 7 or 8pm anyway and waking up at 4 or 5 in the morning. By the time I reached Shanghai though I’d fully acclimated to the local time and thus was happy to be taken out to eat. The first night I chose a pizza joint because, well, I felt I had nothing to prove eating-wise. In retrospect, I should have chosen Chinese food to better show appreciation for Chinese culture with my new co-workers. Oh well. The second night found a group of us in a Thai restaurant but we had had Chinese food for lunch. I’m not too bad with chopsticks but at both places I avoided dishes that required a lot of deft chopsticking such as fish with bones in them. The following day we had pizza for lunch (not my choice, actually) and then Taiwanese food for dinner. That dinner was interesting actually in that three of us with ATMI had dinner with two of my old colleagues at National Instruments. It’s weird when you leave a company and then interact with your former co-workers. I found very quickly that I didn’t care too much about how NI is doing and really, after that sometimes there’s not as much to talk about. Thankfully my new co-workers hit it off quite well with the old so the dinner was a success, even if 80% of the time they were speaking in Chinese among themselves.

During the trip I’d been pretty good about staying in touch with Jennifer and the Kid over Skype. With Taiwan and Shanghai being 14 hours ahead, 7am my time was 5pm theirs. This made Skyping quite conducive to my rising early in the morning. Now I’m in Korea which is 15 hours ahead, making Skype still doable. I love Skype.

So yesterday, Saturday, Richard and I flew with my new friend Korean Air to Seoul, South Korea. I hadn’t been in South Korea since a two-day, all-work, no-play stop in 2005. Richard and I arrived in the mid-afternoon, enough time for me to head out from the hotel and walk around the million citizen city of Suwon, about a forty-five minute drive southeast of Seoul. I had a good time wandering around the back alleys of the city trying to find the Hwaseong Fortress, a stone wall built around 1796 to defend the country. Richard told me I had to go see it for myself and I enjoyed walking along the entire 3.5 mile length of it, checking out the different main gates, hidden gates and view towers. I was joined by many Koreans out for a stroll or a power walk as well as teenagers looking for a place to get away, in at least one case to make out as I walked by. That made me realize that one thing we take for granted as adults is having a private space to ourselves, namely our apartment or house (although the older the kid gets the less private I have a feeling the house will feel like, eh). All in all, I walked about 8 miles that night, and successfully purchased two bottles of carbonated apple juice (didn’t realize they were carbonated but they tasted good) and an apple.

The next day Richard and I hired a van to take us out to the coast and into Seoul. I really, really wanted to get to the ocean and wander around. We ended up on a little island called Jebudo (do, pronounced ‘dough’, means island) and actually walked around most of it, maybe a two mile walk. It was mostly beach with a bit of rock cliffs thrown in. It was in the 30s temperature-wise but my new wool jacket and my Peruvian stocking cap (it pays to have a stepmother from Peru, eh!) kept me nice and warm. In the cold though, it was interesting to see how many Korean women still wore shorts or skirts. Oh, and heels. On the beach. Whatever works.

Richard highly recommended also going into the heart of Seoul to walk up the biggest hill in town: Nam-san. It was a nice brisk walk up, accompanied by a bunch of other locals and tourists, though most tourists took a bus 9/10 of the way up and walked the rest, especially the women in high heels. The view up top was pretty neat, particularly as I thought about other cities where I’d visited the high point of such as Athens, Santiago, Tokyo and Budapest. I’m of the opinion that all cities are exponentially more interesting if they have hills in them, including Austin. There were two interesting things at the top besides the view. The first was the wall of locks where couples in love would leave a lock with their names and a note on it signifying their undying love for each other, ha! The second were five signal fire ovens used for communication of an enemy invasion at the border. One fire was lit if all was normal, two if the enemy was at the border, three if the enemy was across the border, four if the enemy was being fought at the border and five for the enemy marching well past the border (I think). You could even see the mountain in the distance where the next signal fire oven was. Just like that scene in ‘The Two Towers’ where Pippen lights the fire in Minas Tirith to ask Rohan to send their army to help break the siege of the city!

Here’s the scene from the movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZbJrn7L_X4

I like Korea a bit more than Taiwan and Shanghai because a) the language is much easier to learn and b) the food is a bit better, though still not anything I crave when I get back to the States. Eating in Korea is fun though as many restaurants have you sit on the floor, Indian style, leaving your shoes at the door. The poor waitresses have to bend over a lot (bad ergonomics). Usually your meal consists of something actually cooking in the middle of your table, either meat over coals or a soup/stew over a gas burner. The most interesting stew was military-style stew consisting of hot dogs, spam and various vegetables (the story is that starving Koreans during the Korean War made the stew out of leftovers from the various armies in the country, including the US one).

After six days, it was time for me to go home. I hopped on another Korean Air flight, this time for LA (and only ten hours, yay!) and unfortunately stayed awake most of the time despite popping a sleeping pill (I may have slept one hour). And now, here I am, probably somewhere over southern New Mexico waiting to walk out to the pick-up area in Austin-Bergstrom, dressed up in my khakis, Doc Martens (oops, probably still unprofessional), polo shirt and wool jacket and do the professional thing: take a cab. And then home to see Jennifer, the Kid and Maisy Insaisy. Time to be home!

As always, I hope you enjoyed this travelogue (those of you who made it this far, eh). I hope each and every one of you is doing great and appreciating everything you have in life.