Taiwan 1 - from departure to hotel

We are now in Taiwan with Hiroaki, 2 Japanese dancers and myself! It will be a rather longer stay this time since we have the quarantine period.

I wrote a lot about remote rehearsals since December and it was all for this. Hiroaki will be choreographing for Taiwanese and Japanese dancers and the new work will be premiered in March. In March we will gather together in the studio at National Taichung Theater for the first time and do about 10 days of rehearsals followed by 2 days of performances.

So that makes it only about 12 days, but our stay in Taiwan is 34 days because of the quarantine. In Taiwan we have to be quarantined for 14 days and even after that there will be 7 days of self health check period during which we cannot do any activities (as of Feb 2021). So in total our quarantine is for 21 days.

Before it was very easy to travel to Taiwan with a Japanese passport, but this time we had to apply for a visa and there were a lot of procedures to follow. My report below is only my experience as of Feb 2021 and nothing more than that.

@airports

There were only a very few people at the airport in Tokyo. I seemed that most of the (few) other people in the same airplane were returning to Taiwan rather than going/travelling there. At the check in counter we were asked to present the certificate of covid tests and the registration for the quarantine system.

The airport in Taipei was also very empty. However as there was a lot to do after getting off the plane/before the immigration, there were a lot of airport staff waiting for us to help with the procedures.

What we had to do at the airport in Taiwan

1. Get the local SIM card
- During the quarantine you will receive phone calls and messages on this number so you always have to keep the phone turned on.
2. Present the registration certificate for the quarantine system then register the local phone number
3. Get Health Declaration Certificate online
- It seemed that this certificate was important. We were asked to present it at the hotel and send it to the theater.

For these procedures there were a lot of staff waiting and they were all being very helpful.

After all these, we finally proceeded to the immigration which was very easy compared to the procedures we experienced just before. Then we were picked up by a driver and all 4 of us headed for the hotel together.

Check in at the quarantine hotel

When we got to the hotel we added the LINE account of the hotel. During the quarantine all the conversations with the hotel staff will be on LINE. Then we were called our names one by one,

did the shoe cover,

disinfected,

and then sent to each room…

The details of the quarantine life will be in the next article!