California Travels

Day 1 (2005-08-26)

My company paid for this business trip to the U.S. I arrived in San Francisco on Aug 26th, 2005 at 16:30 local time after 11 hours on an EVA direct flight. As soon as I got through customs, we rented a car (fig. 1). I opened my computer GPS and began my business trip (fig. 2).

Day 2 (2005-08-27)
After one hour of driving we arrived at my company – Sigma Design in California Circle Milpitas. We stayed at Residence Inn by Marriott beside my company (fig. 4, 5). Then they served us dinner at San Jose downtown. After that, I finished my first day of business.
Silicon Valley in the U.S. looks similar to Taiwan. So after the second day of working, I drove around the neighboring cities and visited Santa Clara University (fig. 11).

Day 3 (2005-08-28)
We couldn’t travel too far today because of our working hours. So we went to San Jose to visit Stanford University (fig. 17,18,19) and other high technical companies such as HP (fig. 15), EPSON (fig. 16), VMWare (fig. 16), Alcatel (fig. 20), NOKIA (fig. 21), Google (fig. 22)…I bought a lot of nutriments in the super market tonight.

Day 4 (2005-08-29)
Today we worked at Sigma Design, Inc. Our vendors treated us for the whole day.

Day 5 (2005-08-30)
Today was also a working day. After work we went to Santa Clara downtown to go shopping.

Day 6 (2005-08-31)
Today was the same as day 5.

Day 7 (2005-09-01)
Today we worked and went to go street sightseeing when we had relaxation time. We visited Maxtor (fig. 25) and Cisco (fig. 26) neighbor our company. We packed our bag gages tonight because we would go to the next city – San Francisco.

Day 8 (2005-09-02)
Today we changed our plan and we must extend our trip 3 days for support – We have to go to Atlanta for the IBC pre-show demo. We worked hard until 12:30 am.

Day 9 (2005-09-03)
We checked out of the hotel and drove south to Los Angeles. We drove relaxed past many famous scenic spots, such as Santa Barbara (fig. 31~34), Santa Monica (fig. 35~40), and we finally arrived at Los Angeles. We rented a Chinese hotel tonight.

Day 10 (2005-09-04)
Today we took the subway (fig. 42, 43, 45) to go sightseeing L.A (fig. 44). We went to China Town (fig. 41, 55), Universal City (fig. 46), Hollywood Highland (fig. 47~53), UCLA (fig. 56), Beverly (fig. 57), etc. After that we came back to San Jose.

Day 11 (2005-09-05)
Today was the last day in the U.S. After checking out of the hotel, we went to San Francisco (fig. 60, 70). We went to the Golden Gate Bridge (fig. 64), China Town (fig. 61), and UC Berkeley (fig. 66, 67). We walked to Fisherman’s Wharf (fig. 68) and ate crab (fig. 69) in the afternoon. We went to the international airport at 21:00 and finished my business trip.