anchor.diff:  
   While you hear about things going on in people's lives, about the places they live, and about issues they face, it's hard to truly appreciate and understand these different perspectives at a distance of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of miles. Visiting them, getting to know them in their "natural habitat", and experiencing some bits of their life yourself, bring you closer to that understanding than anything else.
   
  -An example of this occured when we arrived in Taipei, Taiwan to meet with [Jen-Shin](https://twitter.com/godfat), and got to experience GitLab from the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.
  +An example of this occurred when we arrived in Taipei, Taiwan to meet with [Jen-Shin](https://twitter.com/godfat), and got to experience GitLab from the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.
   
   Seen from Taipei, the European workday starts at around 4pm, and the American workday doesn't start until 10pm, so there is very little overlap with much of the rest of the team. While your mornings are nice and quiet and offer you a chance to concentrate on your work and catch up on emails and todos without interruption, that changes just when your workday is about to end. You get responses to all of the Slack messages and GitLab comments you sent earlier, people start mentioning you on new things, and you are left with a choice: Do I work a little bit more and respond to them now, or do I respond in the morning, effectively blocking them until _their_ morning, a full 24 hours later?
   
  -Being the kind, helpful people we are, we chose the former, and as those things go, before we knew it it was 12am and we had been working for 15 hours straight.
  +Being the kind, helpful people we are, we chose the former, and as those things go, before we knew it the clock struck twelve and we had been working for 15 hours straight.
   
   Turns out it's really hard to stick to regular working hours when most of the people you work with are half a world away. In the end, we did what Jen-Shin had already found as working best for him: we shifted our workday a number of hours to better align with Europe. Other people work in the morning, take a break for a few hours to do whatever it is people do, and work some more in the evening. [Working hours are flexible](/handbook/#working-hours), so everyone finds something that works for them. Of course, as more people from the APAC region join the team, and as our people get more evenly distributed among timezones, much of this issue will resolve itself automatically.
   
  
positive.code: 
  This trip has been one of the most, if not _the_ most, rewarding experiences of our lives. Not in the least because of the insights listed above, but first and foremost because of all of the amazing people we have gotten to connect with at a deeper level, all of the things we have experienced together, and all the beautiful places we have been able to see with them.
  
  We would like to thank all of the people we visited for welcoming us with open arms into their cities and, in many ways, their lives. You (and everyone else at GitLab) are welcome in our homes any time.
  
  We would like to thank GitLab for making these things possible through [the way we work](/handbook/), for actively encouraging trips like this by covering a [significant portion of the cost](/handbook/#travel-to-visit-team-members), and ultimately for having built a company with a [culture](/culture/) and [team](/team/) like no other.
  
  
negative.code: 
  [Marcia](https://twitter.com/XMDRamos), who we met in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, along with [Douglas](https://twitter.com/dbalexandre) and [Felipe](https://twitter.com/FelipeArtur), writes:
  
  > After a few months with GitLab, it was very important to me finally meeting people in person, **it made me feel more human in our virtual world**. More exciting yet, was hanging out with such amazing guys, interested in what we have to share, in what we think about our job, how do we feel about working remotely, what is awesome about GitLab and what we feel is missing. **Such openness makes us feel included, touched.**
  >
  > For our tech-generation, strengthening our relationships is essential, otherwise everything around us ends up superficial; we won’t ever feel fulfilled. As we usually spend most of our time working, it is so important to be with people, to share our concerns, to help, to collaborate, to participate, and to have moments of joy. **I feel so grateful for having met these folks face-to-face.** Thanks guys, and thanks GitLab for allowing us to do this kinda thing!
  
  