Category Archives: taiwan

Back to normal

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I slept until 12:30, but got up feeling well enough to drink an orange juice.  Most of my day I frittered away aimlessly, and it wasn’t until around four o’clock that I left the hotel for the Jianguo Jade Market.  I’d seen some beautiful pieces at a store called “Rich Jade” located in the underground shopping center of the Sheraton hotel, right next to the fatal restaurant, but it had looked a little too rich for my blood and the attendant kept repeating “we specialize in jedi,” so I checked the internet for alternatives. 

The first thing I noticed was the heat.  The market is a large collection of stalls located underneath a freeway with nothing but fans and mist-sprayers to keep the atmosphere bearable.  Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my camera, but I think it would have gotten into my way.  I know nothing about jade, but I know whether I instinctively like or dislike a person, so that’s what guides my purchasing decisions.  I couldn’t find anything particularly wrong about the pieces I was shown at the first stand I stopped at, nor was I unimpressed by the vendor’s lightning-quick jewelry design drawing skills, but I took the opportunity to disappear when an Asian couple showed interest in a jade bracelet and distracted him.  I’m sure that the shopophobes among you will understand when I say I prefer shopping at a booth where the salesperson doesn’t speak English… 

I bought two mangoes on my way home and a dove bar with high cocoa content – the dove bar cost twice the price of the mangoes.  When I picked up my key at the reception, the receptionist took a peek at my purchase and handed me a sharp knife to peel the mangoes.  That’s excellent service – and the reason I shouldn’t ever operate in the service industry, because I hadn’t even thought of how I was going to peel the mangoes.  They tasted – oh, I’ll just advise any visitor to Taiwan to try the mangoes.  Juicy, messy, but unfortunately still fibrous.  The dove bar… I’d bought it because high cocoa chocolate has a constipative reputation, but after eating just a bite of it I had had enough.  Later on I would even move it away because I found the smell disgusting. 

At 8pm I made my way to the tailor’s, where I was to pick up my custom suit.  I realized on the way that (a) the mangoes were still inside me and (b) they weren’t enough, so I went to McDonald’s and had a fine meal of Chicken McNuggets and Coke.  I figured that if McDonald’s is bad for you, but failed to affect my gastrointestinal system, that would prove I had regained my health.  (So far, QED.)  I also learned some Chinese: Kungfu Panda is 功夫熊猫 – which literally translates to Artful Bearcat, or character-for-word achievement husband bear cat.  No wonder Eastern Mysticism has so many followers. 

I got my suit, and took a few pictures of the impressive display of name cards on his desk, including the only one I recognized (thanks to Dave Barry) – Tom Tancredo.  There was also the Governor of Tennessee and the Vice President of Nicaragua.  What are all these people doing in Taipei?  I’m here because of business – isn’t theirs to mind business at home? 

As I must too – so I will stop hunting for more links and give Janet a call instead. 

The Bathtub Is Right Next To The Toilet (and other things we’re thankful for)

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1. It’s just bad food for a big price, not the enterovirus that’s been plaguing Taiwan. 

2. The enteric and parasympathetic nervous system give you advance purge warning. 

3. A book to read. 

4. A bed to lie in. 

5. Rainy weather. 

6. No appointments except for the tailor this evening.  And tomorrow evening. 

7. English-language TV stations. 

8. Being able to keep this secret from the business partner that paid for the dinner. 

9. Feeling better again – even good enough for this short post. 

10. Having a flight home, and having it on Monday – not today.

 

Typhoon

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It looked like Fengshen, the typhoon that tipped a ferry and killed people in the Philippines, was headed my way.  Now it doesn’t anymore.  At one point I prayed I wouldn’t get hit too badly by it – now I’m not sure I like the answer if it involves flooding mainland China instead.  I have a sneaking suspicion Taiwan could handle a typhoon better than China.  (Taiwanese forecast here.)

Again!

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It seems like whenever I’m proud of making reasonable progress in writing a blog entry, Internet Explorer decides it ought to slow me down by screeching to a halt and painfully reminding me of why I ought to save my post every sentence.  (Saved.) 

Anyway, after Stefan and Masami’s wedding celebration and a shortcut to the Zurich airport I boarded my flight to Taiwan, with a changeover in Hong Kong (save).  I barely made it to my connecting flight to Taiwan (save).  On that flight, I only ate one of my dumplings in order not to break my intended 16-hour fast too egregiously, prompting my seat neighbour to ask if I didn’t like dumplings (save).  Thus began a conversation in which he told me about the PengHu archipelago floating by beneath our window, about the Kenting national park which apparently was threatened with removal from some list of national parks due to overcrowding, but which nevertheless is of extraordinary beauty, and about the eastern side of Taiwan and its steep cliffs (save). 

My heavy suitcase didn’t make the short transfer in Hong Kong, so not only did I not have to pay Cathay for excess baggage, but they had to bring my heavy suitcase to my hotel (save).  I also found myself confirmed in my decision not to use a Carnet this time, which I had decided mainly because Taiwan is not a signatory to the Carnet ATA (perhaps because China is) and I would have had to fill in about ten pages of repetitive information (save).  In this situation it would also have forced me to either wait around for my suitcase (and leave my business partner waiting) or write a valid power of attorney on the fly (save). 

I got to the hotel, checked in, told them to just keep the second suitcase until morning, and went to bed (save).  In the morning my business partner, his colleague, and his daughter picked me up, and we walked a couple hundred meters to a fusion restaurant so modern it came with slouching sullen-faced staff and dishes like seared scallop with orange vinaigrette or asparagus crème brûlée (one could barely taste it, but trust me, I know it contained asparagus) (save).  We combined lunch with business discussions and then departed to visit a customer of ours who wanted to discuss projects present and future and the Phoenix Mars Mission (save). 

For dinner my partner, his daughter and I went to a buffet restaurant in Danshui, a region north of Taipei known for its hot springs and its Fisherman’s wharf, where we went to walk off our excess food intake in the sweltering darkness (save).  After dark not much was going on except for the young couples taking pictures of themselves on the Valentine’s Bridge, so we soon headed back for Taipei, where I soon turned in (save). 

Today we left the hotel at 8:00 and drove to the train station, where we boarded the Taiwan High-Speed Rail to Zuoying, the stop nearest Kaohsiung, and took a taxi to a local university, where we met with a potential customer (save).  I’m not sure how much of a potential is there, as he expects to receive this year a budget of about a quarter of what he wants to purchase, but perhaps we can find a solution (save).  We took the train back to Taipei and the car down to Hsinchu to meet with another customer, whose guaranteed funding is less but who might have the ability to get a bigger chunk somehow – it seems like selling in Taiwan comes down to fiddling with budgets (save).  And a little country like this where there aren’t any decent budgets around manages to build – and privately finance – something as useful and cool as the Taiwan High-Speed Rail (save)?  Where’s the Swissmetro (save)?  And where’s a real bullet train in the DC-Boston corridor – is it really on the way (save)? 

Be that as it may, I finished the day doing laundry and writing this blog after another buffet dinner, this time in the hotel restaurant with a 6oz fillet mignon steak (save).  It’s teaching me that not only is the road to hell paved with good intentions, but also lined with all-you-can-eat buffets (save). 

Catching up

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I’ve been back in Switzerland for a week and am already planning my next trip. Today my Frequent Traveller card arrived. It’s a good day to finish what I left undone.

March 5: I forgot to mention that I had jellyfish. It’s a lot like mushrooms.

March 7:

I took the train to Oyumino and showed our microscope to a small group of 7th-12th graders at CCSI (Covenant Community School International). They varied in their enthusiasm, but most of them thought it was pretty cool to see the dots of a CD stamper. It was fun to experience what it’s like to teach and interact with students – after all, this is what many of our customers do for a living.
Judith gave me a ride to the Tobu Narita Holiday Inn where I should have prepared for the seminar on the 9th but instead went for shark fin on rice at the hotel restaurant. It hardly has any taste of its own and has an odd stringy texture that has me wondering why it’s a delicacy and what happens with the rest of the shark instead of sitting in rapt wonder with a morsel in my mouth. My main achievement was to re-pack my suitcase and backpack. I like this hotel for cheap rates and being the closest to the airport. Book on the Japanese site for cheaper rates…

March 8:

I did a poor job, but the Japanese ANA girl let me fly with 26 kilograms of checked baggage. She also took my Star Alliance card number for that flight even though Air Nippon, unlike its mother carrier ANA, doesn’t belong to any alliance. In Taiwan I was welcomed with unseasonably cold 15 degrees °C and pouring rain. After sleeping of travel tiredness in the Welcome Hotel I was invited to dinner at the buffet of the Sheraton Hotel, where as usual I overate. Buffets require more discipline than regular restaurants, and in a place with fresh bread, fresh seafood, Taiwanese specialities, and scrumptious desserts from apple crumble to matcha ice cream I fail the test. The buffet stands in the 12-story atrium of the hotel and I find the atmosphere refined, albeit imposing: the paintings on the wall exceed my bedroom in size. Every now and then the elevators will move and send light reflections wandering across the room like a light show, making the place feel like a rock concert on TV with the volume muted.

I prepared my presentation for the next day until 2 a.m.

March 9:

I got up after four and a half hours of sleep, packed, and got ready for a seminar on our microscopes. A good turnout, good demonstration, and a helpful translator made the event a success. I think especially the simple cantilever exchange had people impressed. I’d never been translated before, and found it a helpful experience. It made obvious to me how often I use long sentences that can be hard to understand; it made culturally embedded jokes painfully clear.

After the seminar, I was driven to the airport, mostly because Taiwan’s new high-speed train was all booked out. There, I compensated for delicious food with a visit at Burger King, the slowest fast food place I’ve ever been to. It amazes me that in an international airport only one staff member of a restaurant speaks English.

The airport, by the way, is no longer called Chiang Kai-Shek but Taoyuan International Airport. The name change happened, according to my partner in Taipei, because Chiang Kai-Shek is a mainland Chinese. In the slightly grungy terminal 1 that Cathay leaves from I passed by a store that sold Taiwanese Aboriginal art and picked up a flier because I had no idea that Taiwan had Aboriginals. Apparently they are the northernmost branch of the Austronesian languange group.

I read through the short flight to Hong Kong, where we docked at the gate farthest from the gate I needed to board at. As far as I could tell, it’s tough to get a longer walk in HKG than from 49 to 18. I sat and waited, still reading in Robert Inchausti’s “Subversive Orthodoxy,” unable to shake the feeling that surely this must be a smart and wise book even though I routinely don’t understand what he’s saying because I lack a lot of background knowledge. It’s the first time I’ve heard of William Blake, for instance, and Blake’s the first guy he portrays. In that subchapter, Inchausti quotes Altizer and Hamilton: “Through Blake we can sense the theological significance of a poetic reversal of our mythical traditions, and become open to the possibility that the uniquely modern metamorphosis of the sacred into the profane is the culmination of a redemptive and kenotic movement of the Godhead.” Aside from the problem that “kenotic” isn’t in my Webster’s nor in my vocabulary, even my relative grasp of the other words doesn’t help me attain to an understanding of what these authors are saying. What is a poetic reversal of mythical traditions? Where do I need to look to see this uniquely modern metamorphosis they mention? I want to understand, but I can’t, due to the lack of background and examples. It seems ironic for him to say, “When human beings use words and phrases, they are not responding to stimuli; they are symbolizing: sharing worlds,” and to fail in his attempt to share his world with me – or at least ironic that the possibility of failed communication isn’t even mentioned in his book, at least not before page 80. But I’ll continue and at least try to get it.

BA had us line up in a giant queue for the flight to London. I slept more on that flight than the night before, even though the lady beside me woke me up to go to the bathroom. (On that note, ladies, please don’t travel on planes in skirts.)

March 10:

Heathrow. Or rather, Hea Throw Up. We arrived at five a.m. and I thought I could simply proceed to the next flight and chill at the gate. Well, no. I was carrying two carry-on pieces of luggage and there were two people whose only job it was to speak the following words: “Only ONE carry-on baggage per person.” Occasionally, they’d branch out: “I have nothing to do with the regulations. All I know is Only ONE Carry-On.” So I went through passport control, round to check-in, where I explained my dilemma of having a microscope and a computer and wanting to check neither. “It’s not the airline, it’s the regulations,” she said. I was to hear that from every single BA employee I spoke to in this matter. She continued: “Why don’t you ask customer service what they can do? They’re down there, at counter H.” I walked down there and waited until a guy whose English was hard to understand showed up. “We have a special belt here where we hand-carry your fragile item to the plane,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee for what happens on the other end.” Then he paused. “Where are you going? Basel? Why don’t you go to Terminal 4, where your flight leaves from, and ask them there.” I walked back to where I came from, the elevators, and decided to try the vending machine for something to drink. Of course, although there was no label indicating currency, the machine only took pounds, and the 80p someone had forgotten in the change return weren’t going to buy me water. I said to the guy waiting behind me: “I guess it only takes pounds.” “Tragic,” he said with a supercilious grin. I made off for Terminal 4, and despite the misgivings of Mr. Customer Service the Terminal Express was already running. At least one ray of hope. At Terminal 4 I tried to figure out where I needed to stand in line, and approached a counter that looked BA-ish and reasonable, but an employee approached me and after finding out my destination pointed me to the only counter that had a long line. I’ll take that as a rule of thumb. I stood in line and well, long story short because I’m tired of typing, I checked the microscope with a heavy heart. Then someone drove a loading vehicle into our plane and punctured the skin and made us walk all across the terminal to switch planes and arrive in Basel over an hour late. At least the weather was nice and afforded a neat view of France.

It’s not the airline, it’s the regulations.

March 15: I was waiting for a friend on the cathedral square in Basel. A guy bikes across it. He has a boom box strapped to his bike, and it’s playing this.