Away from Home (Part 1)
A few virgin events took place in Feb’09.
1. My longest time away from home and YB - 15 days.
2. My first overseas assignment.
3. My first time to Taiwan.
Sounds exciting? Let’s see about that!
On departure day, YB came over to my place to specially send me off at the airport. All was under control until the moment I bid my goodbye after clearing the immigrations - I teared because I have already missed him that much.
Four hours plus on board SQ flight was an unfamiliar experience. It has been a really long time since I last took SQ flights and I did not find it that sensational as expected. My last non-budget flight was with Qantas in July 2007 (or maybe I should stop flying around with budget airlines).
I can’t remember the Boeing model but SQ’s personal tv set is small and unclear. There seems to be only two stewardesses serving lunch in my sector. The speed was too slow for hungry me and by the time it was my turn - I had no choice of meals. Had a discussion on this with my steward friend and learnt how to tackle certain situations ;)
My colleague and I decided to skip direct taxi transportation (est NT$2-3K) from Taoyuan Airport to our hotel in HsinChu.
(1) Ubus to Taoyuan THSR (Taiwan High Speed Rail)
(2) Taoyuan to HsinChu on THSR
(3) Taxi to Hotel
Traveling on a bullet train was really an eye opener. It took us 10mins to travel to a city which is about 28.65km away from Airport. The speed was at over 200km/hr and it can go up to 300km/hr. Woot!
to be continued…