Taipei, Taiwan
We flew to Taipei yesterday and immediately I could sense the difference in atmosphere. Maybe it's the heavy security in Manila that tells me it's not the safest place to be. Taipei was the opposite.
At first glance Taipei is like any other big city, except the signs are all in chinese. The city is located northeast of the island of Taiwan. The bottom 2 thirds of the island is made up of steep mountain ranges going from north to south. My friend Heather gave me a brochure of tours we can take to see the island. Guido & agreed on what we wanted to do on Sunday but found out at the desk that a typhoon is going hit us tomorrow (Sunday). Great! My main concern is that I was expecting two other colleagues for this assignment and they were flying in on Sunday. Would not be good if they were delayed.
Our hotel in Zhonghe (on the south side of Taipei) was only a 40 minute drive from the airport. At first glance it wasn't as grand as the Bellevue in manila. I actually had to bring in my luggage! After check in I had to struggle a little to get my huge suitcase along with my rolling laptop bag, and my daypack into the elevator. This was bullshit! Guido was laughing at me because I was a little rusty on handling my own things.
Our hotel room turned out to be very nice! It was twice the size of the hotel room in Philippines and much more modern in style. It was also much more high tech. When I was in the bathroom I could not find any soap to wash my hands. Actually there were no signs of the amenities that you typically find in a hotel room. I looked everywhere and could not find any signs so I called the front desk. I'm thinking they just forgot to stock the room. It took a few minutes for the hotel clerk to understand what I was talking about. Finally she told me it's in a drawer in the bathroom. I had to search for it for a few minutes. Well, there was a drawer with no knob so it looked like part of the cabinet, how was I supposed to know?! That's when I noticed that there are no knobs on any of the doors or drawers throughout the room. Either they are trying to make the decor modern looking or they are just too cheap to buy knobs. Later in the day I found the room to be a little warm and looked everywhere for the temperature control. Guess what, I could NOT find it anywhere! Feeling frustrated I finally called the front desk, again. The first guy couldn't speak english and the second guy took awhile to understand what the heck I was talking about. He must have looked at something to tell me i did not have the ac turned on. I asked if they are controling the room temperature from the front desk. I'm thinking that is so weird. He finally explained that I can turn it on by the black control box by my bed. What? I saw the box earlier but when i first turned it on I saw the time display and thought it was just a clock. Upon further inspection I realized that it's controller for literally everything in the room including the lights and tv. Ofcourse I also saw the ac options! THEN I had trouble operating the room safe but I was so done calling the front desk and asked Guido to help instead. Jeez, I think they need to do a short training session for each new guest! At least at the Kameha hotel in Bonn there was someone who walked us up to our room and explained the different gadgets! Regardless I really liked the room and think it will help in the next two weeks. There were lots of rooms for me to be organized with my laptop and work papers. One wall of the bathroom was in glass so that you can sit in the huge tube and watch tv from the living room. That's just crazy! I think I'll stick to the rain shower which was really nice. Maybe one day I will talk Gary into installing a rain shower in our bathroom. He is too consciencious of wasting water so I haven't had much luck!
Last night the concierge told us about a mall down the street where we can go for dinner and to buy our supply of coke and water. Guido & I decided to do the 15 minute walk to the mall. The hotel was on a main street so we experienced the crazy traffic. Most of the time the sidewalk was blocked by parked cars or mopeds so we had to walk around it and get on the street which made me nervous. It was a good walk though. It was turning dark and the billboards and building signs were all lit up with the chinese characters. I was definitely NOT in phx anymore! On the way we ran into some sidewalk "cafes". Imagine an open doorway of a building and streaming onto the sidewalk were some portable burner with pots and pans filled with food. That was their makeshift kitchen. Then there were small plastic stools that customers can sit to eat their meals. The scene reminded me of vietnam. It looked and smelled really good but I did not want to take chances and get sick on our first day here!
When we got to Global Mall I was amazed at the size of it. The mall consisted of 5 floors. The 5th had a movie theatre and nice restaurants, the 4th had tons of smaller restaurants of different nationality. I laughed when I saw the conveyer belt sushi place. Along the sides there were vendors that sold snack. The 3rd floor had the Dave&Buster types of games. the 1st floor had a supermarket with more vendors that sold dim sum,, roast duck. Ofcourse throughout the mall were the regular mall stores. I was amazed and wanted to eat everything. The concierge recommended a thai restaurant in the mall but apparently we made a mistake and went to another restaurant. The sign only had chinese characters so we had no idea and took a chance! I asked the waitress if they had an english menu. Well they kind of did so decision made! The waitress brought us a laminated sheet with pictures of the various dishes but the description was all in chinese! We pointed to a noodle dish and a meat dish and hoped it was going to be ok. I pointed to the noodle dish and asked the girl if it was pad thai and she said no, then I pointed to what looked like curry and again she said no it was pumpkin sauce. By this time Guido and I figured out we were not in the thai restaurant but it was ok. The noodle dish was a dry thick rice noodle with cooked bean sprouts and topped with chopped beef chunks in a really wonderful sauce. It came in one bowl so we asked for plates or bowls so we could share. The waitress brought us a tiny little sauce bowl! It was really funny but we went with it. The other dish was spicy beef dish that came with little tiny side dishes of vegies. By this time I am guessing that we were in a korean restaurant. I loved my tea smoothie with sweet red beans and tapioca.
Before we left the mall I bought my coke & water. But by the supermarket there was a stand where they sold the dried or preserved fruits (just like that store in santa ana). It all looked so good so I went a little overboard and bought salted dried prunes, dried green mango and some fruit I couldn't identify but it tasted so good I bought it. Then I found a stand where sold dried squid strip. There was a machine where they smoke the squid and cut them up in thin strips. I usually buy these in the store but they come packages. It was so good.
We were loaded with groceries so decided to take a cab. The driver didn't speak english! All he got out of us was the name of the hotel. Then as we were driving he proceeded to make calls. We didn't understand what he was saying but keep hearing in intervals "golden hotel". By this time I figured out that he was calling people to ask where this hotel was. OMG I was picturing him taking us to another city because he didn't know where our hotel was and we would have to pay whatever he wanted. I noticed in his cab he also had a small dvd screen propped on top of the dashboard with a baseball game on! What the hell?! We were going to die because the cab driver was talking on the phone and watching a frickin ball game. What % of his attention is on the actual driving? We made it back fine but I am going to make sure we take a card with the hotel address with us from now on. Also by this time we could not wait for one of our colleague Vivian to get here. Vivian lives in hong kong and typically joins our team on assignments in asia. Now I can see why. It will be nice to have someone who can speak chinese!
I could not wait to sleep in on Sunday! It seem so long since I've had a full night sleep.
Sunday....
I guess the curtains were so good they kept the room dark so that I did not get out of bed until 9:50 am! Went to bed at 1am the night before it was still 9 hours of sleep. I was im'ng with Gary at midnight.
Only had 5 minutes to wash my face before running downstairs for breakfast at the hotel restaurant. Ran into Guido so it was good. They had a really nice spread of asian and american food. I decided to have an asian breakfast of rice and vegies and stir fry. They also had a nice porridge soup and lots of side condiments to add to the porridge. Outside I could see it was raining and windy. Yep we will not be doing any sightseeing today. We both decided that today would be a good day to relax and get some work done. I wanted a chance to get caught up with my blog since I am finding out that once I start the assignment there is little time and energy to do anything else.
I happened to turn on CNN when I got back to my room. Apparently we were right in the eye of the typhoon. This was going to be the worse typhoon of the year! If you are on CNN then it's big news I guess. I turned on the local news channels and although they were speaking in chinese you could see the scenes in the background. It didn't look too good! The reporters were holding on to their hats and screaming into the microphone to be heard because the wind was howling around them. There were trees down and building roofs were flying off. I wish I knew where the heck it was! Things seemed calm outside my window so I don't know if it passed us already or it's coming soon! For the first time I was glad that my hotel window were made of thick glass blocks which I thought was strange when I first saw it. Now I have a feeling it was on purpose to protect against weather like this. I have a feeling Guido and I will not see our colleagues tonight! I went online and saw that they were suspending incoming flights for the time being. Wow, to think that we flipped a coin to fly into Taipei on saturday or sunday. It would have been a pain if we decided to fly in sunday!
Need to prepare for the coming two weeks, this assignment is going to be much bigger in scope and more difficult. Back to work....
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