I got to spend 2 weeks in Taiwan for work, so I decided to document it here :)

April 6

Day 1 consisted of me flying 2,956 kilometres towards Istanbul, where I spent another 3 hours waiting for my connecting flight.

April 7

Day 2 consisted of a further 8,407 kilometres, taking another 11 hours.

When I arrived at the airport, I decided to get a Taxi to the hotel since I hadn’t set up a work profile for Uber yet. This was one of the best moments I had in Taiwan. Neither of us shared a language, so we had to use Google Translate back and forth to speak to each other, it was such an amazing experience.

Once I got back, I quickly unpacked everything and headed to Raohe night market. This was a pretty busy place.

April 8

This day, I decided to head somewhere quirky and unique to Taiwan, so I chose Houtong, Taiwan’s Cat Village.

This is an old village built around a now-abandoned mine. Many stray cats settled into the area and local businesses decided to promote them and turn the area into a tourist attraction! I got a ton of great pics here.

On the way back, I stopped at Guanghua Digital Plaza to explore. This is a giant shopping centre filled with tons of cramped electronics stores.

I also checked out Syntrend next door, this is a more traditional shopping centre with big brand names instead of small, independent merchants like Guanghua.

I headed back to the hotel for a while before meeting up with my coworker, who was also here for 2 weeks. We decided to meet up at Shilin Night Market, I didn’t expect Shilin to be as large as it was, we walked around for about 3 hours and I think we still didn’t see everything.

April 9

Just work today :)

April 10

More work, but we also went to Taipei 101! It’s crazy how tall this building is, your ears pop in the elevator.

April 11

Work, Pics of Ximen

April 12

More work, Thunderstorm today though!

April 13

Work + Sushi!

April 14

For some reason, I decided it’d be a great idea to walk up a hiking trail and get a view of the city, so we set off to Xiangshan Hiking Trail. What was supposed to be a 25m walk up the stairs ended up being a little over an hour for me. This was a 9.4 kilometre walk up towards Elephant Peak. The views were worth it, along with the pride of having come far enough in my own dieting and exercising to be able to walk these trails now.

April 15

Today I went to Taipei Zoo! I didn’t expect to spend so much time here, but I got a load of great photos and videos. I have a few here, but have the entire album on Google Photos here

April 16

Work!

April 17

Today was a normal work day, however I woke up feeling sick and ended up going home early. I had to do laundry also, so when I had finished that up, me and my friend went over to the ER of the nearby hospital.

We were seen by a doctor pretty quickly, maybe about 15 minutes wait time. Doctor said I had a viral infection after doing some tests, gave me an injection and a cocktail of medicine. The whole experience was pretty good, and only cost 25 euro, far far less than a doctor would cost back in Ireland!

April 18

Still sick :(

April 19

Less sick, so more work :)

April 20

Final day! Was a very slow day, I was working alone for most of the day in a different building so I didn’t get to take part in the main group photo :(

But, us ITRs wound up together at the end of the day, so we got a photo with the Manager there and one of the TW employees we’d been working with the past two weeks :)

Afterwards, we went for a final meal :) We settled on Steak, and found a really nice place called EPL.

April 21 and beyond

April 21st is my last day in Taiwan, and I won’t be doing much more. I am flying off to Hong Kong for a couple of days, so expect another post soon :)