On the first day of the trip, I woke up at 04:00am as we took China Airlines flight to Taipei at 08:20am. Luggage, passport and other necessity were well prepared, but I still found it hard to devote myself to the coming journey. I kept working until eight o’clock last night when I eventually decided to give up ongoing and endless routine work. Nonetheless, I have to persuade myself to concentrate onthe coming journey: my first study tour to Taipei.

As a new comer of Taipei, I am nearly known nothing about this place although a book “Taipei People” written by Pai Hsien-yung is one of my favourite books. No doubt, what the reflection of the nostalgia or the complex emotion to the mainland China might not totally mirror the mindset of contemporary Taiwanese as the current generation didn’t experience the outcome brought from the civil war after 1949.

I sat with Brenda during the flight and she asked me if I would have an expectation to the trip. My answer was certain. This trip not only would give me a chance to have another learning experience outside Hong Kong after finishing study in Australia in 2009, but also would allow me to act proactively to the providing tasks, which should be a good training for me to work out of my own comfortable zone.

We arrived at Taipei at 10:00am and subsequently took a travelling bus to our first eating-place: ‘Tai Woo Pik BBQ’ Mongolian restaurant. It was such a special arrangement for my very first meal in Formosa with Mongolian cuisine under relatively hot outdoor temperature, but it tasted pretty good after all. Then the official provided us with an opportunity to buy some souvenirs by visiting a traditional Taiwanese shop (Photo). 

After that, the travelling bus brought us to the Long Bon Resort at 02:00pm where would be our dwelling place and training centre. Our first workshop of this residential was Team Building. In this section we were required to present our team with ground rules and team song. We had prepared the song and rules before the trip and took about 15 mins for the final preparation. Generally I wrote the song, which imitated the original Cantonese song ‘Youthful Ignorance’. I was pretty satisfied how our group performed especially our emotional expression with our team song regarding the dilemma we are facing in our life. 

We had a short tea break subsequently followed by the team preparation for tomorrow’s field trip before having the dinner at 06:00 pm Banquet Room. Soonest after finishing our dinner, we rushed to attend a guest lecture. The speaker was Dr. Chen Jiann Mou who was an experience property management profession. He conducted a comprehensive and thorough introduction about the development of real estate as well as the housing policy in Taiwan. In this session, we were learnt that some of the information was quite relevant to our field study.

The last session for today was the preparation of Case Exercise 1. We acted as Chairperson of the Incorporated Owners (IO) of Whampoa Garden in the case scenario when certain proportion of the owners intended to terminate current Property Management Agent. We expected the debate of the owners’ meeting might go right down to the wire. As such, we had to quickly resolve the hostility with another group who acted as Property Management Agent (PMA). Although continuous disturbance by another group who acted as the Vice-Chairman of IO had adversely affected our lobbying progress, we could still match consensus with the PMA before the end of today. We are looking forward to seeing how it’ll go for the owners’ meeting tomorrow evening.