The Asia Tour

A little over a week after circumventing the globe in 23 days, I was set to head to the other side of the world once more. In what I'm dubbing my Asia tour, I was scheduled to present two different talks at PyCon Taiwan and PyCon Japan over two consecutive weeks. This would also be my first time presenting in Asia and my first time in Taiwan.

🌎 Should I stay, or should I go? 🌏

I'll be honest: I was not ready to leave home so soon after such a long and far trip, and I was going to have a big time difference on top of it. It took some effort to get myself to where I needed to be mentally for this trip, and I did have to change some of what I had planned to not overwhelm myself.

Don't get me wrong – I still love traveling, but I was exhausted from all of the running around and using my weekends to present at conferences. My mind and body needed a longer break. I knew this wasn't going to be the only short turnaround between trips this year, so I resolved to try to sleep as much as possible on the flights and make concessions during the two-week trip, if I was feeling mentally or physically drained. In the future (2025 onward), I need to be more strict about the time between trips.

🛫 The 3-million mile club 🛬

My first stop was Taiwan, and on the flight to Taipei, there was a woman reaching a milestone I am still having trouble wrapping my head around: she was surpassing three million miles flown on United alone. The pilot made an announcement congratulating her, and she also received a small token of their appreciation (I later learned she gets lifetime premier 1K status, which is a great perk on its own).

Throughout the flight (and the trip), I found myself doing the math with different scenarios to see how this was possible and what my trajectory might look like. For context, people always tell me I travel a crazy amount, and I was at 0.25 million during this trip. Circumventing the Earth at the equator is roughly 8,000 miles, so I have to make about 344 around-the-world trips to hit the three-million-mile mark.

According to Delta, it takes the average customer 22 years to reach one million miles. Assuming I travel 50,000 miles a year with United, I would reach one million in 15 years. I should definitely reach the one-million mark in my lifetime, but three million sounds like a tall order.

📍 Taipei and Kaohsiung City, Taiwan 🇹🇼

Upon arrival at my hotel in Taipei, I was upgraded to a suite with some pineapple cakes waiting for me in the room (not bad for redeeming my free night!). The hotel itself was also very nice (Courtyard is very different in Taiwan, at least compared to the US), and the free breakfast they threw in was both ample and delicious, which really came in handy because, with the jet lag and 12-hour time change, I was waking up quite early. The jet lag actually worked in my favor this time because I was able to walk around before it got really hot and humid (or rainy).

My time in Taipei was limited, so I opted for a variety of experiences that would give me a taste of the city. Sightseeing-wise, I visited the Taipei 101 observatory (thankfully, learning about the building's design and the damper ball¹ was very interesting because there was low visibility due to a thunderstorm), Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (including a changing of the guard ceremony right before it opened), and Lungshan Temple during the day, and at night, I did a food tour.²

During the food tour, we went to 10+ locations at a night market frequented mainly by locals. Several places even had Michelin guide honors. I learned what many Taiwanese foods have in common: chewy textures, which they call Q-Q. We tried local favorites like stinky tofu, bubble tea, and a "fire and ice" dessert consisting of shaved ice, condensed milk, and warm mochi topped with sesame and peanuts (not too photogenic, but absolutely delicious 😋).

There were foods I did not like: number one being a delicacy from emperor times that the guide wouldn't tell us what it was until after we tried it (one person did like it). Definitely the strangest thing I have eaten. Perhaps it was quite bold to be so adventurous with food right upon arrival in a new country, especially considering the food poisoning I got the night before presenting at PyCon CZ in 2023, but thankfully, I was fine afterwards.

Before catching the high-speed train to the Kaohsiung City in the south the next day, I visited the Discovery Center of Taipei³, where I received my first fortune of the trip: "Good news will reach you one after another. Fame and fortune are waiting for you." 😎 Afterward, I went to Din Tai Fung for the xiao long bao and dim sum 😍 (and to have a robot take me to my seat 😂). From this point on, it was pretty much raining non-stop for the rest of my time in Taiwan. Sometimes, so hard you couldn't go outside, although not quite a typhoon.

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For PyCon Taiwan, I was presenting Data Morph: A Cautionary Tale of Summary Statistics on the first day and hosting a sprint for Data Morph on the final day. I was very cognizant of the fact that English levels would vary greatly, so I made a concerted effort to talk slower for this presentation. While I was afraid this would increase the number of um's and related filler words, I forced myself to pause at those moments when I needed to remember my next point, and I think this was one of my best presentations of this talk for this reason.

Afterwards, an attendee came up to me and introduced herself. She was a member of PyLadies Tokyo and told me that she really enjoyed the talk. She was one of several people I met there that were also attending PyCon Japan the following week. There was even an interesting talk from one of the PyCon Japan organizers about using Python to learn Japanese at PyCon Taiwan.

Other highlights from the event include the board games open space with a community member from the Philippines, catching up with old and new friends over the boxed lunches, which I thought were very good, and running my second sprint for Data Morph. At the one-day sprint, I had four contributors and merged five PRs during the event with three more for review later. These changes included adding the club target shape and finishing the spade target shape, which was started at the EuroPython sprint earlier in the year.

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The nearly constant rain made it impossible to see anything in the city. One night, to get out of my hotel room, I visited Costco, which was next door to my (5-star) hotel. I found the juxtaposition comical, and I couldn't resist poking my head in. I spent over an hour exploring the massive Costco and comparing/contrasting with the ones back home: think entire aisles of different types of dried mushrooms and others for woks.

The morning of the sprint, it miraculously wasn't raining, so I headed over to see the Dragon and Tiger Pagodas (what could be seen behind the restoration work, at least), the Spring and Autumn Pavilions, and the Zuoying Yuandi Temple. These are some of the highlights of the city, so I at least feel like I saw something.

The morning after the sprint, I had a very early flight to Tokyo along with several other conference attendees. By this point, I was completely over the jet lag, so getting up at 4 AM was brutal. The Uber I took to the airport had the same "no vomiting" sign I had seen in several Ubers throughout Taiwan, and I realized I had never gotten to the bottom of why they need to instruct riders not to do that 😂 (if you know, leave me a comment).

📍 Tokyo, Japan 🇯🇵

Upon arrival, my luggage was already set aside by the airline as their priority luggage service, which was a nice surprise. I headed to my hotel in Tokyo and worked from the room for the rest of the day. For dinner, I headed to Ichiran for some tonkotsu ramen and walked around Shibuya before calling it a night.

The next two days, I experienced a different side of Tokyo: I commuted on the subway and worked from my company's Tokyo office. It was also different to be hearing a language I don't understand all day in an office setting. After a while, it really struck me how often hai (yes) is said in conversation, and one of my colleagues there explained Japanese sentences using a data structure, and it made so much sense (to me at least). He said that syllables are pushed onto the stack, and the hai is the acknowledgement that the listener is on the same page as the speaker with respect to when things come off the stack (after the syllables there have formed a word that makes sense in that context). This combined with the talk about learning Japanese with Python from PyCon Taiwan, gave me some new insight into the language.

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My presentation at PyCon Japan was in the afternoon on the final day. This time, I was presenting my talk Getting Started with Open Source Contributions, and for the first time, I was instructed to wear a special speaker's T-shirt. Through discussions with others, I learned that, in general, there is a movement to encourage more open-source involvement in APAC, so I was very happy to be able to help with that initiative. The talk itself was very well-received with some people saying it was the best talk of the conference (which means even more this time because it was one of the last ones). One attendee also mentioned that he had read and recommended my pandas book to others.

During the conference, lunches were served in bento boxes and had good variety, but curry udon, conveyor-belt sushi, yakitori, and more were on my list of foods I wanted to have again (curated from my 2019 vacation to Japan), so I had to do some planning to fit it all in on this short trip. The biggest disappointment on the food side was that I never figured out where the Japanese sweets during the coffee breaks were served at the conference, and I'm told they were remarkably good 😢

On Sunday, the conference was hosting sprints, but I was too mentally-exhausted to even think about running another development sprint (maybe next time). I felt like I needed a day to disconnect, so I slept in, checked out the Tokyo National Museum (where I had my fortune⁴ interpreted by casting some animal bones: "Your dreams will come true. You will not face any obstacles." 🙏),⁵ and met up with some new friends (two locals and a fellow visitor) to experience a parade of traditional dancing and grab dinner (izakaya).

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No trip to Japan is complete without bringing back some sweets (emphasis on some because they have a short shelf-life). I was flying out of Haneda and opted to get them there; I was nearly run over in the process – people are serious about their sweets!

Now, for some much-deserved rest 😴

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1. The tuned mass damper applies physics to help the building withstand earthquakes. ↩
2. The food tour I had booked a few days before my flight was canceled while I was en route, but thankfully, I was able to find an alternative on such short notice. ↩
3. A couple of the volunteers there went out of their way to show me around, provide context in English, and share why they loved Taipei – easily some of the best interactions I've had with museum volunteers. ↩
4. Both this and the fortune in Taipei were free, as they were part of the respective museum experiences. ↩
5. I saw a couple of people have a go at it before me, and they got some very unlucky fortunes (for some, multiple times). I only had time for one roll, and clearly, I made it count 😉 ↩