I feel super lucky that I was able to fit in another trip out to Asia this year. About a month ago, I was groaning about studying for finals. Joanna said she had a week of vacation to burn otherwise she would lose it and I realized I did as well. I managed to find tickets to Taipei for $730 for a week and booked them right away.
Yesterday was really hard for me. It was my last day working at Unityworks which I’ve been at for the past 2 years. The impact that I had at the company became really apparent the past few days when people told me how much they appreciated my hard work and that it was in my nature to go above and beyond to make sure my projects were successful.
I took a picture of my desk on my way out with all of my stuff, including my Legos, put away. I really do feel sad leaving because I like my team and I’m proud that I got to a point in my job where I was confident in my work and that people found me reliable in the stuff that I did.
I wasn’t looking for a new job but my classmate Sandy recommended a Technical PM position at her company and it turned out to be a great opportunity I couldn’t pass up. Change is hard but I’m looking forward to it.
With studying for finals and wrapping up work I’ve had zero time to plan an itinerary for this trip. We’ll be in Taipei for 6 days and basically the plan is to eat and shop and shop and eat.
I was a little worried about my booking because usually I prefer booking my flights directly with the airline. Our flight from MSP to LAX was through Delta but I wasn’t able to book the $430 tickets from LAX to TPE through China Eastern Airlines website so I had to go through Cheapoair.com. The website was a bit shady and if anything happened with our trip, I’d have to deal with them instead of resolving with the airline itself. Luckily we didn’t get snow yesterday which meant no risk for delays to LA. Also China Eastern is a Delta partner, the ticketing agent was nice enough to send our bags straight from Minneapolis to Taipei without charging us $25 baggage fees.
The flight to LA went smoothly with a 4 hour layover. The flight out to Shanghai departed at 12:30am and was a 14 hour flight. Really glad that nobody booked the aisle seat so we had extra room to stretch out.
Right now we’re on a 5 hour layover in Shanghai waiting to fly out to Taipei. My internal clock is all over the place because I think it’s been 24 hours since we headed to the airport to start the trip and I got about 5 hours of sleep on the flight over here. There’s a restaurant chain that I want to visit in Taipei that closes at 4am that I’m hoping to go to tonight because I know I’ll be wide awake at 2am.
