Lol. Thankfully Taipei is rife with folks that speak "english", because my mandardin blows...
Google Translate helps too.
Traveling with the scary virus thingy that's going on is annoying.
Mandatory test in CO, no more than 72 hours before departure. United is too dumb to know how that works, so they have a 72 hour requirement set off your departure, and a 72 hour requirement set off your arrival. Took 45 minutes at DIA to get them to understand that the Taiwan .gov page was explicitly clear on this.
DIA was noticeably empty, more so than in August when I went to AK. Mandatory mask in airport and on flights, unless you are eating/drinking. Because the virus knows when you are doing that, and doesn't cause a problem then...
LAX was a ghost town. United Polaris lounge had a grand total of 8 people in it (our crew is 3). Grand total of ~40 people on the 13.5 hour flight to Incheon South Korea.
Incheon was also empty. Literally 12 people from Incheon to Taipei. On a 777-200...
United flights are hit or miss. We used to have easy flights to Taiwan. Den-SFO-TPE. Couldn't be booked for this trip. Had to use Asiana and bounce through SK.
Only certain hotels are allowed for "quarantine" in TPE. Booking them had to be done 2 months in advance to actually get a room. Once our two weeks is up, we will move to our regular hotel, closer to the job site.
The hotel provided food in quarantine sucks. Lunch was a shitty chicken sandwich (called a "burker, wif chicken" by the menu lady on the phone) and some cold, soggy fries. There are no microwaves in the quarantine hotels (our sister companies have had folks at the other options and we picked the best that they could recommend), so we all bought and brought plug in food warmers (canvas foil lined bag with a heater plate in the bottom).
We had to have a local TPE number for .gov health checks, and we have to report our temps 2x daily to the hotel staff. So we all bought burner phones when we landed. Yet another hassle.
The good news is, once we get out of quarantine, we get to largely move about the country without issue. So, all of our usual preferred and awesome food options will be available, and we can use Uber/Train/etc public transportation.
Now we just sit on our asses and wait to see if the TW import licenses for our project gear/parts gets approved on time, so we can still come home in time for Thanksgiving. Looking at minimum 4 weeks here due to this mandatory quarantine BS.