May 14th

After another great breakfast from the hotel, we traveled over to National Taiwanese Normal University (NTNU).

Upon arrival, we were led into a classroom where teacher Jennifer Huang began to teach us “Survival Chinese.” This, basically, was a crash course in everyday saying in Chinese: greetings, introducing yourself, goodbyes, numbers and proper pronunciation. She explained to us the four different tones that the Chinese us when they speak. One word can be spelled the same but if you use the incorrect tone, the word changes it meaning.

After our Survival class, the NTNU School of Management conducted a welcoming receptions for us. We were greeted by the dean of the school and one of the head professors of the school of management.

And during this reception, we met our “overseas friend.” These were students that were assigned to us, individually, as an ambassador for the school. My ambassador was Zola Li. She was a business finance major at NTNU and she is an accomplished violinist (she's on the left).

After meeting and getting to know our new friends at N.T.N.U., we traveled over to the Taipei 101 Building for a visit to KPMG Taipei, one of the largest professional services companies in the world and they are apart of the Big Four auditors along with Deloitte, Ernst and Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

An accounting firm that was founded by Andres Chang in 1952 in Taiwan, they built a reputation that helped them become associated with Peat Marwick, Mitchell and Co. in 1971, making it one of the oldest international accounting firms in Taiwan. Then in 1987, they became a member of KPMG after the worldwide mega-merge of accounting firms PMI and KMG. They currently are representing multinational companies like Panasonic, Pepsico, Citibank, Nestle, General Electric, Motorola and Microsoft.

The view from their offices.

The view from their boardroom.

After lunch, we visited another large company in Taipei: ASUS Computer company.

ASUS is becoming one of the leaders in technology by focusing on the mastery of technological innovation and design perfection. Starting out by just developing and building computer motherboards, they have branched out to hard drives, graphic cards and even their own brand name laptop. They have won many awards including 3 Year Best Lowest Malfunction by Manufacturer, Best Motherboard by PCWorld and Top Laptop in 2011 by PC Magazine. In fact, ASUS has earned 4,168 awards in 2012 from innovation and design to Tech Brand of the Year. Currently, they are #2 worldwide in Consumer Portable PC sales, #4 in Tablet Market and #1 in Motherboard Brand sales.

One of the courtyards that teams can get together and think.

Since ASUS is a very forward thinking company, they believe that "healthy mind, healthy employee, healthy company." So they invested into some amenities to make that happen.

Basketball court

Weight Room

Swimming Pool

 Therapy and Jacuzzi pool

With all the warm, humid weather that we were walking around in, it was hard to not to jump into that pool fully clothed.