Tai WANDER YEARS

These aren't the droids you're looking for

2011-01-09T22:09:00.000+08:00

It has been quite some time since I blogged, quite some time since I've done a lot of things, but the last time I wrote I was on a business trip to the Netherlands and as I now find myself in the same predicament, what better time to attempt to rekindle the fire?

Part of my absence from the blog involves simply not having/making the time to do it, but I am in Europe on a Sunday, and guess what? Time stands still! I think you have two choices of activities: blog, or go to church. Neither particularly productive. So far, this trip is awful. I recently went to the States for Christmas, I think it was a total of 30 hours to get from Taipei to Melbourne, FL and I caught a common cold on the flight(s) over and suffered really bad jet lag throughout our trip. After 10 days we came back to Taiwan. I dozed off on the Tokyo -> Taipei leg and literally woke up with pink eye (aka "conjuntivitis"). It's like I was perfectly fine when I dozed off, and 1 hour later awoke to find my left eye totally crusted shut. I had a 3 day respite in Tapei before continuing westward to the Netherlands. It took about 24 hours in the Netherlands before I realized I had a pretty bad flu. I think I've since lost about 5 pounds and haven't slept past 5AM nor 2 consecutive hours since December 17th.

So, is there relevance to all this bitching? I'm wondering if I've quickly become accustomed to life in Taiwan and simply hate being off "the rock". Is this all psychosomatic? I grew up in a city and swore that I could never live in the country. Then after one of the neighbor kids threw a snowball at my wife and called her a "gook" we moved to some affluent suburban areas to avoid overtly racist people and only deal with passively racist people. Our home in the States is in a small town that allows no commercial development, no cell towers, and nothing is open on Sundays. Idyllic, right? I now find myself in the Netherlands cursing the fact that everything is closed except this one coffeeshop, I mean, place that sells coffee, that doesn't even have wi-fi. The malls are closed, boutiques are closed, I can't get cold medicine or a pair of gloves. I can get a joint though, but that's at the other kind of coffeeshop. Not sure if that's the kind of medicine I need for the flu, might help me put some weight back on, though.

I wonder how I could quickly make the switch from small town life in rural Connecticut to life in Taipei, where there are people on top of people, fruit stands that NEVER close, people riding bicycles in typhoons, and nary a coffeeshop or "place that sells coffee" without a free open wi-fi signal. Now I can't imagine NOT living in a metropolis. Am I flexible in adapting or just need to feel a sense of belonging to whatever environment in which I am immersed? Are those exclusive?

Work has been awful this past week. Not much cooperation. I'm supposed to be able to navigate these waters but I've run out of Jedi mind tricks and logic doesn't work against patriotism. I feel like the tail trying to wag the dog. I've been training my Taiwanese staff in some "business English" idioms and remember discussing "Ace up my sleeve". I don't have an Ace up my sleeve. I’m really questioning the European economy. Nothing is closed on Sunday in Taipei. Products are made, services rendered, money changes hands. I enrolled in an MBA program for one semester and thought it was garbage (sorry MBA people). Part of my motivation in taking this job was to learn things about globalization that could only be gathered by being immersed in that environment. A good (non-Western) friend of mine from the States started preaching some Western-economics doom and gloom type stuff about a year ago, citing things he learned in his MBA program. After 8 months in Taiwan and now coming back to work in Europe such predictions are starting to make sense to me. Western economies are crumbling (most recently Spain) and China is swooping in to buy up the debt. OK, maybe some MBA programs aren't THAT bad.

People in Taiwan are upset that the unemployment rate is above 5%. 5%! I had lunch with a Syrian-born guy Friday who asked, "What is America going to export in 10 years?" Internet content? Created in America but coded in India? The Google Tablet is allegedly being developed in a building a block from our apartment in Taipei. Silicon Valley may be calling the shots but where is the real economic impact? I don't mean to sound all anti-American. I realize that the freedom and quality of life there has opened up a world of opportunity to allow me to see things from a different perspective. I worry about how many others will have the same opportunity in the future.

I am scheduled to be in Europe another week but that may be useless if I don't make any progress tomorrow and I may get thrown out of the building if I say what I really think, but at least I can get out of here and back to Taiwan.

One rule in life

2010-09-01T05:04:00.000+08:00

I went back to Antonio's for dinner tonight as I am still in Europe on business and this is the only place in town worth eating at. Because it is the only place in town worth eating at, it is notoriously tough to get a seat. My ex-boss's boss is beyond a regular there and one time a group of us had to douche out and drop his name just to get a table. I sat at the bar alone tonight and everyone recognized me from last time. Alle had a boatload more questions about Taiwan and was thoroughly empressed when I busted out some currency at his enquiry and was able to answer, "That's Sun Yat Sen" when he asked about "the guy on the hundred". To answer to his surprise, I said, "Hey, if I claim I am from Taiwan and can't tell you anything about the money, you'd think I was totally full of shit!"

As a rule, I try to not be full of shit, but I really only have one steadfast rule in life. If there's one thing that the whole Taiwan experience has taught me, it is that rules can be too restrictive. If I really follow "the rules" I would have never made the leap to come to Taiwan. Having one rule is OK. The good thing about having one rule, is you have no excuse to forget or break it. Let it define you. Own it. Live it.

The cashier girl at Antonio's sits at the bar and struck up a conversation with me and we talked throughout the night. She was wearing a shirt that said "Doing 9 months inside" and had a baby in a prison uniform on it. The shirt was covering her bulbous belly of 21 weeks pregnacy with here son "Santiago" kicking from the inside. But my rule, my only rule, is I never ask a woman if she is pregnant. If an old friend shows up stashing a beach ball under her shirt, I will lock eyes with rigidity so as to not even glance at the belly until she reveals that she is pregnant. No way, no how.

Last time I got the Bolognese, this time the clams & mussels. If you can't figure out a rule for yourself, here's a good one: "If even in doubt, get the bolognese." It's the true measure of weather or not an Italian place can make sauce. Anyone with a supply of decent tomatoes can make fra diavolo, but bolognese is an art form. It was a good night chatting with Alle and Nicole. Antonio's is packed every night and come 8:00, they are turning away people left and right. Friends and I have a joke about getting "Nine-thirtied". If you are trying to get a reservation and they really don't want you there, they'll offer a reservation at 9:30. At Antonio's they just say "Nee" ("no") and you are shit out of luck. They offered me a grappa on the house before leaving and as I left, Alle said to stop back in before my flight on Saturday, at least for a coffee if I can't make dinner. I left with a sense of accomplishment. Nicole said that she remembers everybody, some people get tables, some get 9:30'd and some get sent to the Doner stand down the street. I left with a sense that maybe I have cracked the inner circle of Antonio's.

My boss is out here now and he has been trying to set up some dinners, he invited me out to dinner either tonigh, tomorrow night, or both; I'm not sure I chose tomorrow night based the rest of the company on the invite. As I got back to the hotel my boss was in the lobby with a bunch of Taiwanese guys from my company and he asked if I was just out walking around or what? I said I just went to dinner at Antonio's and he lamented, "Why didn't you invite me?" I said I thought he had some big dinner planned and he revealed that he got stood up. One of the other Taiwanese guys practically had his eyes pop out of his head and said, "You can get in to Antonio's!?!?"

At this point I felt like the King of Town.Since it's only good to have one rule in life I broke the rule of being full of shit and totally exagerrated my cred at Antonio's and told him if he ever needed a table at Antonio's to let me know. Not sure I can really do anything about it, but for me, Antonio's is on my list of homes away from home.

Choose Toscana

2010-08-25T04:37:00.000+08:00

I'll often be out and something quite mundane will occur and I'll make a comment to the unlucky soul sitting across from me to the effect of, "Wow, that would make good blog material". In Taiwan that may involve a guy on a scooter with a Chihuahua, live chicken, rice cooker, and a 20' extension ladder bungie corded to his back.

I am working in Europe right now which sort of shifts the scale, but I had dinner out tonight and three potential blog posts unravelled before my eyes and I've decided to just roll them into one long post, arguably only connected by chronology.

Blog fragment #1: Don't be a cocksucker

There is a restaurant nearby the hotel called, Antonio's, a very good Italian restaurant, the likes of which I have yet to find in Taipei. One of the secrets to Antonio's is he employs about a 50% Italian staff which includes my bartender for tonight, Allesandro. Allesandro started out as a hyper-talkative bartender which for me, being from Connecticut, is naturally tough to deal with but by the end of the evening, "Alle" and I were paisans.

Alle quickly asked me where I was from, which for the first time, became a complicated question. Identity is a strange thing (see blog fragment #2) and saying I was an American but I live in Taiwan brought about an onslaught of questions from Alle. Alle knows that the tunnel from the NE coast (somewhat near Fulong Beach) back in to Taipei is the 3rd longest tunnel in the world so I was not in a position to bullshit Alle about Taiwan and he asked a million and one questions. I was somewhat embarassed that he, perhaps knew more about Taiwan than I did, but that's something you learn to deal with being a travelling American. He grew slightly uncomfortable talking about himself and work but said that he wants to stabilize himself and then figure out "what he wants to do with his life". In bartender simplicity, he noted, "The important thing in life is not to be a cocksucker." Aside from any homophobic implications, I think he hit the nail on the head. I took it as similar to saying, "Don't be a jerk off" has nothing to do with masturbation.

Blog fragment #2: Identity crisis

So it seems now when people ask, "Where are you from?", it becomes a complicated question for me. Alle was much more interested in life in Taiwan vs. life in the U.S. I haven't watched American TV since life in Neihu back in May. I "live" in Taiwan, work partially in the Netherlands, still own a house in the U.S., and in some way, don't feel 100% at home in any of those places. I recently attended a series of orientation events involving Shirley's school and found it to be uncomfortably..."western", unlike my work environment. It's not like I'm ready to pull the trigger on changing my name to Bruce but I sort of feel like a stranger in a strange land. Everywhere.

Such must be the case for Alle. He seemed to be quite friendly with the Dutch patrons at the bar, even though he is from the Italian Alps. At one point a male customer came in and some old man rolled out of the back room (watching soccer games on a laptop so I was told) to give the guy the triple kiss on the cheek so it really is an Italian sort of place. I envy the ability to pull off the triple kiss, even just with a woman, not to mention a mention, a man. I had flashbacks of childhood life where on XMAS eve it was a real family fest. There was a sense of neighborhood where when people asked you where you were "from", it meant what part of town which also indicated your ethnic heritage. Now it's effectively like, "So which Starbucks do you go to?" Times have changed. One tough thing with Taiwan is you are ALWAYS on the outside, wei guo wren.

Blog fragment #3: Choosing sides

Choosing sides is an important lesson in life. Only douchebags fail to pick sides. You can't root for the Yankees AND the Red Sox. One great thing about sports, regardless of where you live, regardless of what Seinfeld says, it is critical to pick sides. Teach them young. I asked Alle for a "red wine". He said, "I have a house wine, or I have a Toscana, it costs a little bit more." This is an opportunity to choose sides, you have to pick the Toscana. We spent the good part of 2 hours talking about everything from tunnels to women (ubiquitous bartender topic) to sports betting. Every once in a while, in between the chaos, Alle would duck in to the back room to check the football score on a laptop to see how his 26:1 parlay was working out. One could make a case that sports betting is for douchebags but I wasn't going there, not tonight. I had picked my side.

So these guys sit down at the end of the bar and Alle gives them the house vs. Toscana pitch and the guys insist on the house wine (bad idea) and Alle says, "C'mon man, I need to eat" to which one guy says, "You eat just fine." And at this point I could tell this would end badly. Of course, when it comes to wisdom, bartenders are a step behind Master Yoda and Alle was no exception as he retorts, "You must be German" and you could see these guys faces sink into their house wine. Then Alle looks at me and I started laughing, being one to pick sides and knowing who's side to pick. I thought it was genuinely funny that I was presented the same decision point but realized that there really was no "choice". As Henry Rollins would say, "your choice is fish".

Alle tried to make light of the whole thing but as they were walking to their table, head douchebag said, "nice tan". Living in Taiwan has made me more sensitive to race issues, though I don't think Italian is a "race". It is common in Taiwan to try and be as white as possible. I know in India, men advertise their daughters for "sale" in context of how fair skin they are. I had a Taiwanese guy send me a resume last week in which he indicated his blood type, as the Japanese identified the "feisty" Taiwanese by blood type during occupation and some companies still follow this biggoted practice.

So if identity crisis isn't enough of a problem we now have to worry about exactly how white white people are? I tend to think Germans get a bad rap because of things that happened 70 years ago and then this knucklehead at the bar enforces a "told you so" mentality.

In my fantasy world where people ask me what it is like to be a blogger I confess that blogging involves maintaining a personality that is an exaggerated form of yourself. One where I take real situations and embellish them with wit and sarcasm such as to make it entertaining to the reader but not a total abomination of the truth. I had such a post evolving at Antonio's tonight that then recoiled into a sense of true reality. I watched the line cook put out a plate of salmon and thought a good blog punchline would involve, "Only a douchebag orders the salmon at Antonio's" but the true wisdom in this post is: don't be a racist douchebag when a bartender who is slightly less white than you jokes about you not taking his suggestion, because in the end, he is faking like he's watching football in the back room when he is really stirring your Rumple Minze with his schwanz.

The name game

2010-08-19T02:18:00.000+08:00

Even before coming to Taiwan, I found it fascinated to meet a Chinese guy named "Wesley". Suspecting that, of course, his name wasn't really Wesley, I'd just figure that maybe he's a big Mr. Belvedere fan. But even the biggest fan wouldn't name himself after that little douchebag Wesley.

I've come across my fair share of slightly strange names in the past few months. By that, I don't mean Steven, Frank, Jason, Sharon. I mean names like Lester & Simon, stuff that's not really odd, but a little bit outside of the mainstream. I wonder how they come to pick their "Western" names. At first I thought, maybe it sounds a lot like their name in Chinese, but that's not the case, I checked the database, no resemblance, not even close.

I had a Ghanese friend who's name was "Harrison". When I asked about the origin, I had hoped to hear that his family had some link to someone in the UK with the surname, "Harrison" but my greatest fear was true: as a kid he watched Raiders of the Lost Ark and was instantly smitten by the hat and whip and decided he wanted to be known as Harrison. I met someone last week who had a coworker named "Maverick". I bet Maverick was 5 years older than Harrison. Nevertheless, Maverick is a pretty cool name. I really want to meet this guy; I wonder how much like his Top Gun namesake he actually is. I think I know the answer to that.

I've started to amass this inventory of stupid jokes that I tell to the Taiwanese to gauge whether or not they "get" my stupid sense of humor. We had the pleasure last week of meeting up with one of Shirley's former high school students from the States who is visiting her home in Taiwan. We were out with her and her brother and I thought I'd put my witty personality to the test. I guess under certain circumstances, Westerners here sometimes choose a Chinese name much like Maverick chose his Western name.

I explained that if given the chance, I would pick a name that means a lot to the Chinese people. I would name myself after the most famous Chinese hero, someone powerful and loved by the people, someone who personified Chinese culture and delivered it to the rest of the world. A name that would instantly bring me honor. My Chinese name will be "Bruce". Their puzzled response was, "But Bruce Lee's real name is Jun-Fan."

Tough crowd.

Possessed by your possessions

2010-08-10T06:02:00.001+08:00

Our "stuff" from home was delivered on August 1.

I left for Taiwan on May 1 and during that time, lived with the following key possessions:

4 T-shirts
5 combos of khaki pants/oxford shirts
Useless heart rate monitor watch (forgot the necessary chest strap)
Useless digital camera (forgot the proprietary cable)
Laptop
Atlanta Braves baseball hat (nobody wears baseball caps here unless it's a mesh trucker hat that says "GROPER" on it)
Deodorant
GPS

Since arriving, I had acquired two key things:

2005 Suzuki Swift
Ikea Malm bed, 1 sheet, 1 quilt, 2 pillows

As Shirley was still living in the States for a while we decided that we'd wait until June to pack everything up. The shipping company loaded up a 20' cargo container of belongings from our house and sent it on its way with an estimated 6 week delivery time. For several weeks I lived in the new apartment with really nothing other than a bed and toiletries. Then the morning of August 1 came.

My experience is Taiwanese are never on-time, unless, they have a task to do, after which they are free to go, in which case they will be obnoxiously early, which, I guess, qualifies as NOT on-time. It was no surprise that well before 9AM the phone rang and it was the delivery crew. David, the boss, introduced himself and we maintained a serialized list of all the stuff that was packed. The agreement was that they would bring all the boxes into the apartment, unbox whatever we wanted, stick it somewhere, and remove the packing materials. Our apartment quickly went from empty and stark to this huge mess.

We didn't even send half our stuff. Some was given away, some sold, and the rest donated to charity, which is probably not at all a charitable act as I could just imagine what they'll have to do with some of that junk. Some critical items which I have so uncovered in the rubble:

Belgian waffle maker
raclette maker
George Foreman BBQ grill
poker chips
5 picnic/beach chairs
plates, bowls, mugs, etc. service for 37
enough female garments to clothe Detroit
boxes and boxes of tampons (most scarce item in all of Taiwan)

We're stuck in a chicken/egg situation, we need to clean but have no room to clean. We also have only one closet in our apartment; most places in Taiwan have a freestanding wardrobe unlike the closet-in-every-room approach in the U.S. Having struggled with only 4 t-shirts for several months in the Taiwan summer, I was eager to resolve the clothing situation so we set out to Ikea to get those wardrobes with all the fancy storage drawers in them. Our marriage survived the assembly process and this got us over the hump to make some space.

We stayed focused on only purchasing only things which enhance storage space so we went to Piin this weekend and took advantage of a Father's Day sale. Father's Day in Taiwan is 8-8 because of the phonetics of 8-8 being "baa-baa" in Mandarin like "pa-pa". Oh, my company gave all the guys free movie tickets for Father's Day, haven't used them yet. Piin is like the Pottery Barn of Taiwan but with an Asian slant. We've quickly grown to love the place and ordered up a bookshelf, desk, entertainment center and coffee table, all with storage compartments. Pit stopped at Ikea to get a utility shelf for the balcony. I built it up in the living room and then realized that I had to take it apart to get it on to the balcony. Oops.

We've made a lot of progress this week, but it still looks like the place was ransacked. At least the bedroom is squared away. Also a key item we bought just before leaving the States is a Roomba. We only have it patrolling the bedroom for now but so far, it's awesome. The rest of the apartment is way too filthy. I would expect to come home to find a pile of melted plastic and some gears and springs scattered about.

Shirley has been talking about doing some clothing shopping now that we have some storage space. Considering that the guest bedroom is piled high with clothing, I'm looking for a Goodwill box that says "Detroit or Bust" on the side. With that said, the other day I blurted out, "Since we have a gas stove, I want to get a wok". Shirley said, if we get a wok, something else has to go. I think that's a good policy, like a Conservation Law of Crap.

Preparing for the big one

2010-08-05T17:40:00.000+08:00

Taiwan is no stranger to natural disasters with its proximity to the Ring of Fire and the typhoon season in the summer. Right before I left the US there was a massive mudslide across highway 3 that killed some motorists. People at work told me I was absolutely crazy for going to Taiwan. I put this photo up in my cubicle with arrow pointing to my fictitious "new apartment" on one side and fictitious, "Taiwan office" pointed out on the other. They got a big kick out of that.

We are apparently in the middle of typhoon season now which lasts through September, maybe into October, but no sign of a storm yet. I'm kinda hoping for one as we have this monstrous pile of boxes that need to be unpacked at the apartments and being holed up for 48 hours might be the only fix for that.

I've always wanted to be in an earthquake, but not the kind where the building collapses on top of you. The other kind, where the place just shakes and your colleagues have a panic stricken look on their faces and you cackle hysterically like you are insane. This is typically how I react in extreme turbulence on an airplane. I think it makes uneasy wimps freak out even more. I've always wanted to strap on my backpack and put my ski goggles and helmet on like I'm about to skydive out of the plane but post-9-11 I'd probably get jailed and/or put on the no-fly list for standing up while the fasten seat belt sign is illuminated.

They must have started construction outside my office building because every once in a while I hear a rumble and I think, "maybe this is finally going to be an earthquake!" To alleviate my confusion I installed this Android app called Earthquake! onto my phone. Whenever there is a quake, the phone rumbles and tells me where, when and magnitude. When I hear the rumble outside, and the phone rumbles, I know this is the real McCoy. I was actually in a pretty sizable earthquake at the Ambassador Hotel in Hsinchu in 2009 but didn't even feel it because the hotel must be so well built. Now I only stay in really crappy hotels so I don't miss out on the excitement, but I do miss the amazing breakfast in the atrium.

A (not so) well thought out plan day #2

2010-08-04T15:08:00.000+08:00

Here's a better looks at the weapons of mass destruction our security crew has chosen to unleash on the suds monster. Next to the broom and dustpan is a carpet. I have no idea what the carpet is for but I'm not good at solving murder mysteries, either. Shirley, on the other hand, will watch a CSI episode, see a woman fall off a balcony in the first 30 seconds and yell out, "She was hypnotized!" and be absolutely correct (and ruin the rest of the episode for me).

Maybe the Hannibal Lechter security guard had a dead body in it and the suds involved flushing all the blood down the drain and the dustpan is to dispose of the dismembered parts. As you can see, not much of the suds has evaporated since yesterday. At this rate it will take quite some time. I think this snail could clean up the suds faster than those security guards. We saw this snail on our way home a couple nights ago; it's pretty massive, well, for a snail, which is kinda like saying "jumbo shrimp", huh?

I thought there would be no way a snail could be that far from water but Shirley corrected me that there is some sort of massive land snail. She probably saw it on a Murder She Wrote episode. If only the snail was massive enough to use that dustpan to clean up the suds...

A (not so) well thought out plan

2010-08-03T23:19:00.001+08:00

We have 3 security guards in our building that work in shifts. They monitor the front door, handle mail and packages, and check people in/out of the fitness center, which involves handing you a safety cord to be used on the treadmill. The safety cord is tied in a not to make it even shorter making it so if your concentration lapses the slightest bit you will shut off the treadmill mid-run and go crashing off the front end of the treadmill.

One guard in particular is kind of wacky; he's always laughing demoniacally. One day he insisted Shirley and I follow him down the street so that he could show us where a breakfast place (sesame bread & soy milk) was. That was quite nice but afterwards he insisted that he show us his apartment which was right next door to our building. The inside of his apartment was about the size of our bathroom and it looked like Hannibal Lechter was the previous resident. I thought for sure he was about to chloroform us, tie us up, and kill us slowly. Instead he showed us his pirated collection of James Bond VCDs and sent us home with a stack. This was all while he was supposed to be watching the front door.

I came home from work today to find him and the evening guard in the parking basement with quite a predicament on their hands. Much of the floor was flooded with suds. There is no laundry room in our building so I could not figure out where the source of the suds was but it looked like they had a plan:

You can barely make out in the center of this photo that there is a broom and a dustpan. I don't know what they thought they would accomplish with a broom and dustpan. Talk about bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Coffee at the Cat-fe

2010-07-30T00:31:00.001+08:00

I had noticed a place called Cafe Dogs and Cats several times when entering/exiting the Zhishan MRT station as it is right on the west side. I never thought anything of it until I read an article about the "Cat-fe" culture in Taipei whereby you eat/drink in a restaurant populated with cats. I even heard of places where you rent a cat as your table companion.

So one day I decided to walk by just to see if this was, perhaps, such a place. There is a menu outside, translated into English, and a sign saying there is a ~150NT pp minimum and a 100NT fee if you just want to come in to look. The windows are blocked out but through the seams I peeked in and, sure enough, loose cats inside.

Shirley and I were looking for a place to grab a coffee after dinner tonight and decided to swing by. We went at 9PM and there was only one other couple in there. I asked if they were closed and the apparent owner said they were open until 11 (pm) but only for drinks. I think there are mostly pasta dishes on the food menu but many choices of hot/cold coffee and tea related drinks including siphon coffee, my new favorite.

There were about 10 cats running loose in the place, 1 dog, and a mynah bird. Well, the bird was in a cage. I was once tricked by a talkative mynah into getting my hand too close to the cage and in the blink of an eye, the bird leaped forward and bit me on the webbing between my thumb and index finger. Man, that hurt for quite some time. The cats were all fancy-type cats that obviously required a lot of brushing. Tucker is a pain to maintain I couldn't imagine having 10 long haired cats to care for.

There is a roster on the table with a snapshot of each cat, its year of birth, and its name in Chinese, I think. One was translated as "Gucci", not sure why they didn't come up with English equivalents for the others like my colleagues at work: "Wesley", "Lester" and bunch of other slightly uncommon Anglo names. I had a Ghanese friend who picked the name "Harrison" after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark as a child. I wonder if I'll ever get to take on a Chinese name. If so, I think I will choose to be named after a famous Chinese star: "Bruce".

Although the cats were somewhat aloof, they were not at all skittish. They sell cat treats and I bet that's the key to getting the cats to join you for a catpuccino (ha!) because I crinkled my sugar packet and 10 heads turned really quickly to see what I had. I approached an petted a few most didn't back away, but it's not like they were jumping on my lap.

My blue mountain coffee was quite good as was Shirley's coconut iced coffee, priced at 150/170 NT respectively, the ambiance is somewhat factored in. If you're thinking, "Geez! Where is the health department!?!? How could you possibly have a bunch of cats running around a food establishment?!?!", you probably don't live in Taiwan. Cat piss smells like a bouquet of roses compared to stinky tofu and any danger from cats being around food is nothing compared to the time I was walking down the street and someone in a makeshift parade through a belt of big firecrackers (already lit) between my legs.

If you are a cat person definitely check it out or just go for the novelty. Warning, there is no Claritin on the menu so bring your own.

(yes, that cat is real)

Test driving the dirty "socialist" health care system

2010-07-27T13:03:00.000+08:00

I've had this small lump in my armpit for about 10 years and never had it looked at, at least not by someone with any medical credentials. I do notice that it changes size based on deoderant use, in some way shape or form. After doing some internet research years ago, I try and stay away from aluminum based deoderants. There was a product called "Crystal" that seemed to keep the lump at bay, but it did little for sweat relief.

When I first arrived in Taiwan, I thought the lump had gotten smaller, for whatever reason. Then last week it got bigger, and bigger, and then started to hurt. I hadn't really given much thought about medical care in Taiwan. I do have a National Health Insurance ID card. And I know my company has a 3rd party group insurance plan. I don't have that ID card yet, maybe I should check on that...

But I never thought about where I need to go when I have a very painful golf ball sized lump in my armpit. So I harnessed the power of Shirley's helpful HR group and came up with Dr. Kao in Tien Mu near Mitsukoshi. No appointment necessary, he's in the office Mon-Wed-Fri. I cleared my schedule in the afternoon and headed up there. It's a hundred meters or so up Lane 69 and is clearly marked on the outside; I thought for sure I'd have to walk down an alley and through a butcher shop and then give the secret knock before heading up a spiral staircase... But not the case. Maybe I'm getting too jaded about certain Taiwanese things.

The receptionist was very friends and spoke English well. She handed me a form to fill out and asked if I had a National Health Insurance card. The form was quite simple, where do you live and are you allergic to anything. I sat down and called Shirley to let her know that I was going to see the doctor and before she could even pick up the phone, Dr, Kao opened his door and called me in.

He also spoke English well and must have lived in the States for some time. You can typically tell by the idioms that people use whether they ever lived in the U.S. I explained the situation and his eyes lit up like a kid in a candy store when I got to the part, "I have this lump in my armpit" and he was chomping at the bit to have a look. As I was slipping my arm out of my shirt he quipped, "At least we know it's not breast cancer!"

Check. No breast cancer.

Upon seeing it his diagnosis was instantaneous and I was relieved that he wasn't going to try and squeeze or poke it. He said it was an abscess caused by a bacterial infection and a cyst in my armpit. The heavy sweating in the middle of the Taiwan summer caused things to get worse as the sweat glands are blocked and next thing you know, I'm smuggling a Titleist under my arm. The plan is to treat the bacterial infection with antibiotics and leave the cyst be. We did talk about the potential of surgery to get the cyst out if the problem comes back which I honestly, wouldn't mind doing, to be rid of it once and for all.

They were able to prescribe me an oral and topical antibiotic right in the office, no trip to a pharmacy necessary. He said it would take about 3 days to see an effect. I can't wait for day 3 because on day 2, this thing is quite painful. At least it's growth appears to have been stunted. The cost of the office visit was $6 USD and the 2 prescriptions was $2, total. The cost of the NHI plan to me is about $16/month, I suspect my employer contributes a chunk, too. I spent a total 20 minutes in the office, as a walk-in.

I can only speculate that the biggest problem in the United States is the legal system. Some things in Taiwan are cheaper than in the U.S. but it is not off by an order of magnitude. I can't imagine this health care system working in the United States. Part of the magic of the Taiwan system is supposed to be the efficiencey of processing. My NHI card has a chip in it with all the necessary data and there is little to no paperwork on the part of the doctor office. They just scan the card and computers do the rest. But with all of the efficiencey in the world, think of the burden in the U.S. from the civil legal system. Can national health care become a reality without tort reform?

My visit to Dr. Kao did not unlock all of the philosophical mysteries of a national health care system nor equip me to render expert opinion on the entire scope of Taiwan's health care system, but I can at least say one thing with confidence:

"It's not a tumor!"

July Randomness

2010-07-22T14:53:00.000+08:00

I often see something while out on the street and say, "That would make great blog material!" But it never works its way into any meaningful storyline so it ends up just a photo on my phone's memory card. So I think I will publish a monthly-ish photo album of the stuff that gets lost, but is still significant to defininig Taiwan. So here it goes:

This was at the aboriginal village amusement park near Sun Moon Lake and has to be the largest crane game I have ever seen. If they only filled the holding tank with misbehaved children, it would be a fun game to play.

This is a hot dog stand in Shi-Da. Of significance is that they consider the Chicago dog to be the staple of hot dogs which is a bit outside the mainstream even in the States. Much respect.

Shirley visiting Tucker in quarrantine. She goes 3 times per week. Fortunately, he only has another week left.

On the way to quarrantine you can pass through NTU campus and they have a small wetland sanctuary with this strange looking bird that hangs out quite close to the balcony. This old Taiwanese lady thought it would be entertaining to try and hit him with her umbrella. I wanted to throw her in but there were no crocodiles so it would be pointless.

Here is the Taipei Truth Church. I only had to travel 10k miles to find THE church that is about truth. Phew!

This is a bratwurst and sausage shop that uses a Dachshund silhouette in their logo. Art imitating life?

An entire bakery dedicated to Hello Kitty.

Banana flavored beer. Sounds gross, actually tasted pretty good, if you like bananas. They have some other wacky fruit flavors. Will report back...

This is the end of our block. This guy keeps chickens and lets them roam free during the day. Luckily we are on the 8th floor so we don't hear the rooster in the morning.

This is the next street over. Another chicken farmer.

"Rabbit Rabbit" in Da-An is a popular western style brunch place. Some people take things too far as they were passing around a rabbit mask and taking photos of each other.

In a crowded shopping district there lies a pig pen. Not sure if this was a pet or tonight's dinner.

This was in front of an otherwise normal clothing store. The mascot's shirt says "Looking 4 Poonanie". There is an overabundance of inappropriate slogans on T-shirts and such here. One young girl working behind the counter at a breakfast shop with her father had on a shirt that said "Barely Legal". I wonder if they have any clue what half this stuff means?

There were these large sculptures in front of a corporate building. You can barely make out Shirley in the left armpit.

I have been asked to post more street food related stuff. This place has two offerings. On the left, you grab a basket and some tongs and choose from meats, vegetables and dry noodles. They weigh your basket and then cook it all up into a custom soup for you. On the right, they make a flavored pancake and then wrap it up with egg, bacon, cjheese, ham, kimchi, etc. Quite tasty!

Last but not least, "Essential Beer" from Korea. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Buying a SIM card: the shortest straw has been pulled for you

2010-07-18T21:36:00.001+08:00

A big help with adjusting to life in Taiwan is getting a mobile phone. It's one of the first steps to feeling a sense of belonging, a new phone # that starts with the #9 as do all Taiwanese cell #'s (as far as I can tell). Number nine...number nine...

I was able to get a loaner for myself through my company but it was a pain in the neck and I was hoping for a more independent solution for Shirley. Upon the suggestion of a Taiwanese colleague, Shirley found an old GSM phone from several years ago and brought it with her. GSM phones use what is called a SIM card to establish the network on which they communicate and the actual # that people will dial to call you. In many foreign countries you can buy prepaid SIM cards at the rail stations and airports and that ends up being the most cost effective way to use mobile service when travelling.

So we set out for the local 7-11 to buy a SIM card to get Shirley up and running. I went to the counter and asked if they had SIM cards. The first guy kinda laughed, which is more of a nervous reaction for Chinese than anything involving humor. He looked at the second guy and said something in Chinese. They asked if I spoke Chinese and when I simply said "No", guy #2 ran into the back to put guy #3 on the hook for handling the SIM card transaction. Reminds me of last week when I missed a meeting with my leadership team and they voted for me to be the main presenter to get ripped apart by the sector management team.

#3 grabs some paperwork and heads over to the i-bon machine which is like an ATM for various types of networked transaction such as, buying concert tickets. I knew I would need 2 forms of I.D. to buy a SIM card but I had no idea exactly how complicated the entore process would be. He photocopied my passport and ARC and then cut out the photocopies and pasted them on another form like paper dolls. I had to sign some forms and it as very critical what name I used regarding middle/first and sequence. The idea of nicknames seems to be misunderstood here, which is surprising since most use some phony Anglo name. So I often have confusion over Mike/Michael and whether or not I use my middle name.

After we got beyone the signature, he had to put in a local phone # into the machine, and while I have my own cell phone, we don't use a landline. He had a heck of a time figuring out how to get the phone # to be accepted in the i-bon. I hate phone #'s. Who screwed this system up a long time ago such that you can just have a # that you dial the same way no matter where you are? In Taiwan, the cell phone prefx is 9 if you are calling from a landline, or 09 if you are calling from a cell phone. I haven't even figured out how to dial internationall yet. I'm glad that Fring doesn't create such a hassle.

Eventually we got passed that screen and there was another signature and he had to fax something in to the SIM card security checker people or something, to ensure that I was not using the SIM card for....I don't know what. You'd think the U.S. would be like this but you can just walk into a Target and walk out with n activated Tracfone. We paid 10 bucks for the SIM card which included about an hour of airtime but most importantly, assigns you a # so you can have other people call you. Incoming voice and text in Taiwan is always free so it's a good value if you just want people to be able to get a hold of you.

We left with the SIM card and installed it into the phone and read the instructions which said that it would take up to 24 hours to be activated, assumedly for a security check period. The next questions was, "So what's the phone #?" We looked all over the packaging and there were several #'s that had enough digits to possibly be the phone #. That's another thing I hate, there isn't even a world standard for how many digits are in a phone #. I tried dialing a bunch of #'s and couldn't get the phone to ring but I suspect "within 24 hours" is pretty close to 23.99 hours. So next day we tried again, no ring. Then dialed out from the SIM card phone and were able to just use caller ID to find out the #. Now that I know the #, it's staring me right in the face on the front of the package. At least I passed the security check.

umm...please don't destroy my cat

2010-07-11T08:22:00.000+08:00

After I settled the transaction with my driver and got him to sign my, surely binding contract, I went over to the waiting area to look for the wife. Another shameless Android application plug goes to Fring. It's basically a mobile interface for Skype. While I would love to be using Google Voice I haven't found a way to activate it as they will not cooperate with those of us outside the U.S., at least not in Taiwan. I can't even activate it as it works directly through your mobile # and it knows where I am. So Fring, it is.

I called Shirley's cell phone and after a couple of straight-to-voice-mails, I get a ring. Her plane had already been on the ground for about an hour by the time she picked up. I quickly realized that she was crying and she started saying something about there was something wrong with the paperwork for the cat.

Throughout the process of preparing to import your cat, there are plenty of places where the Taiwan Quarantine Department warns that if anything is screwed up, "your pet may be destroyed". So right away I am thinking, "Oh no, they destroyed the cat!" I'm picturing some sort of bomb squad box, the thing that they put the bomb in for protection and then blow it up...like that but with a cat inside.

I make some sense out of what she's saying and it sounds like, on one piece of paper it says Tucker (the cat) had a "booster" rabies vaccine and on the other document it doesn't say booster. It's like, I met this guy a couple weeks ago, he has one document where his middle name is spelled slightly differently than on another document and he was facing deportation. The same group of people had a get together a couple weeks later and he was not there. Maybe he's gone. For anyone naming children, skip the middle name, it's such a hassle if you ever leave the U.S. I now go through it with everything, even the whole Michael vs. Mike thing is a big pain in the ass.

So, the story is they will let the cat in, but she has to get the USDA to re-issue the import documents using the word "booster" on them. The documents need to be in Taiwan in 7 days, or they will assuredly destroy the cat. OK, that sounds reasonable, well, within the framework of what is Taiwan. She was still on the other side of customs so I couldn't go meet her until she cleared and came into the arrivals hall where I was waiting. They have 2 TV monitors where you wait which show cameras focused on the customs exit doors so you can watch to see when the people you are looking for come out. It's pretty convenient. They also have a newspaper box and the cover photo was pretty funny as there was a brawl in the Taiwanese legislature, which I understand is not at all uncommon.

A few minutes later I see Shirley come out pushing a cart with the cat box on it and the customs lady was with her and directing her to the office. I followed them in and she had the cat parked in the corner along with a couple dogs. They had to wait for the other staff to come in to process the paperwork and told us to come back at 8:30 so we went to grab breakfast. Shirley was still a mess and trying to figure out what to do about the paperwork. We were going to have to get a friend back home to got to the vet, get it done, and make 2 Fedex transactions to get the document here before the dawn of destruction.

After some beef noodle soup for breakfast we were back down to the office to be told to come back at 9:00. It's a very Taiwanese thing to:

A) Be late all the time
B) Say things to appease you that are not true

Saying, come back at 8:30 when they know the guy will not be in until 9:00 meets both criteria. We killed some time with the I <3 Taiwan Tomato Man. So, back at 9 it was and this time the guy was there. Tucker was pretty relaxed yet alert. It looks like he handled the flight quite well, now if he can only survive the next 7 days. The guy came over and said the paperwork was OK and we did not have to mess with the whole USDA booster issues. Shirley almost buckled to the floor in relief and clutched her chest like she was going to collapse. Hopefully someone else doesn't come by and change their mind.

The assigned a courier to travel with us to the quarantine hospital which is part of NTU in Da-An. We loaded everything, and everyone up in the car and were on our way. It's about 40 minutes from the airport to Taipei. They are building an MRT line out there but for now it's either bus or car (or limo if the AC is working). At this point the quarantine people had sealed Tucker's box closed with a wire and that agent is with us at all times to make sure we don't make a break for it with the cat. She helped us get a cart at the hospital and get him up to the 6th floor to check in.

The vet had some wire clippers and let Tucker loose. There were several cats in cages and most seemed surprisingly calm. I wonder what they dope them up with. Tucker did some exploring and then quickly settled down onto the cool tile floor. The vet asked a bunch of routine questions and we had to fill out the same information on several different forms. Tucker has to stay in quarantine for 21 days, they test his blood, as long as he's rabies free, they turn him loose, otherwise, they destroy him. You can make arrangements to visit him three times per week; they keep a planner. We made an appointment to come back on Monday. The charge for the whole quarantine process is about 20k NT or 600 USD. I wonder if you get a refund if the cat gets destroyed, or do they charge extra for that?

A strange story from my driver

2010-07-11T01:43:00.000+08:00

On my last day of this business trip in the Netherlands I once again got to see the Dutch advance in the World Cup with a pretty convincing win over Uruguay. I couldn't keep the fleeting thought out of my mind that under any other circumstances, I would find a way to extend this trip and stay until Sunday for the final against the winner of Germany vs. Spain. All of Holland fears a German victory and with it, the feeling that Oranje is doomed. But for tonight, the streets of Eindhoven were filled with thousands, dressed in orange, smiling from ear to ear, and for the most part, reveling without rioting.

The possibility of extending the trip was out of the question as after living apart for 2 months, my wife and I would be flying to the same place from opposite angles as she was about to board a plane for Taiwan. I would land at about 7PM in Taipei and she was scheduled to get in around 5AM the morning after. As we were getting ready to taxi away from the gate at Schiphol, the captain came on to alert us that the blast shield on engine #3 had "blasted apart". The mechanics were checking things out and we were delayed; he said it may only take 1/2 hour if nothing is wrong. 1/2 hour later the pilot confirmed what everyone was hoping for, no problem found and we were on our way. I'm not so sure this was the best outcome as something must have caused the blast shield to blast off. But the plane has 4 engines so we should be OK with three, right? At one point on the flight (KLM), the pilot said something in Dutch and everyone erupted in cheers. I turned to the guy next to me, "Spain?!?!", yep, quite a surprise. We landed on time and my company's driver was there to pick me up. I was alarmed to find out that he does 90% of his business with us, which is a bad thing as when the business climate turns south, travel becomes very limited. I told him he needs to diversify his clientèle but he's afraid that if he's not available all the time, he will lose the account. Tough call.

He dropped me at the office and I paid him, in cash, as always. On may way from the office to the freeway he called my cell and I couldn't quite understand what he was talking about, something with the money and it being dark. I assumed he was claiming that I did not pay him enough. Then my cell phone died, good timing. I showered up and went out to meet some friends for drinks. I checked my email and had a message from Shirley, she was trying to board the flight in Newark, had been in line for 1.5 hours waiting for the TSA to inspect the cat carrier. If you haven't followed the rest of this saga, we are importing our cat, Tucker, into Taiwan. At this stage, Shirley had 45 minutes until that plane took off and she still had the cat and still had not gone through security. But that was the last I had heard and at this time her plane was in Anchorage , Alaska. They have several phone apps where I can see a live (5 minutes delay) map showing where the plane is. Awesome use of technology, though the mindless paper toss game is kinda cool, too. Fingers crossed that wife, and cat, made that flight.

I left the bar right before midnight when the MRT shuts down and made it home for about 4 hours of sleep before heading to the airport. I checked the phone again and it looks like the flight is landing 45 minutes early so I scurried off. It was absolutely no surprise that two minutes after I entered the airport at about 5:30AM, the limo driver called. He had some story about how his car was having electrical problems and he needed to borrow money. He said he could be at the airport in 10 minutes. So now I'm thinking he's claiming I stiffed him, now he wants to borrow money, is this guy making some story up to pay off a gambling debt before the Taichung mafia breaks his fingers?

He shows up and tells me that the A/C broke, it's 100 degrees out, he has a client to pick up, and he can have it fixed at 7AM when the garage opens. He needs about 8k NT (~250 bucks). I asked him what the story was with the money from last night... He says that I had overpaid him and he was trying to get me the money back and was calling to suggest that he just credit my account for the 500 that I had overpaid. Assuming he was truthful, that changed the whole story.

I scrawled up this contract on an envelope stating that he was borrowing the cash, 8500 in total, and I have no clue if this holds weight at all. But I have one thing in my back pocket...he begged me not to tell anyone at work about this as such a scenario would certainly jeopardize him losing all of his business. I told him, "this is between you and me...as long as you pay me back!" He was very grateful and hopefully off to fix his car. He said he'd wire me the money in a couple weeks. It's probably safe to expect a future blog post about the 8,000 I donated to my driver's gambling addiction that did NOT get paid back. I wonder if he bet it on Holland to win the World Cup. Probably so since the thus far infallible octopus has picked Spain. Now where is that wife of mine?

Le Grand Depart: Day one of the 2010 Tour de France

2010-07-06T05:41:00.000+08:00

In the past couple years I have really taken to cycling and triathlon and have gotten to the point where I can watch people ride bikes on TV for 6 hours a day for 21 of 23 days in the month of July. Last year was the first year that I was glued to the Tour de France, thanks to Tivo, and inspired to some degree by the comeback of Lance Armstrong. I had thought it would be a great bucket list item to see the Tour de France, maybe expedite the trip to catch Lance before his second retirement but for many reasons it would not be in the cards.

I had a brief discussion with a work colleague a couple weeks ago and we thought the World Cup and TdF were intentionally staggered for TV viewership reasons. I can't quite remember exactly when it occured to me after arriving in the Netherlands, maybe in the airport, as I came across a poster advertising the Grand Depart being in Rotterdam. I remember knowing this many months ago (that the start was in the Netherlands) when they revealed the route. For those unfamiliar with "Le Tour", it is typically not entirely in France and is not a contiguous route. They even had part of it in England and in most tours, at some point, the bikes take a plane.

I had a "holy f$@^%ng shiat" moment when I realized I would be spending a weekend here in the middle of this business trip and even though the World Cup was still ongoing, the TdF would be starting in Rotterdam, about an hour away by train! The first day is called the "Prologue" and it is an individual time trial. They set up a short course, 8.9km in this case, and one at a time, the riders take off with a one minute interval between each. There is no teamwork, no drafting, it's man against wind and road for 10-11 minutes of whatever strength he can muster. Being from the U.S., I never quite realized how late the TdF stages start. In this case, the prologue was starting around 4:30 PM.

I got to Rotterdam around 3:30 and as soon as you left the station, there were folks handing you a schedule, a route map, and a sweet bucket hat from Skoda, one of the main sponsors. The hat had a tag on it and just to mock the whole, flatten the brim and leave the tag on your hat thing, I left the tag on. Several older folks gave me grief for leaving the tag on. Not sure if they don't realize that it's some trend or if they think the trend is as stupid as I do. Anyway, the tag is still on. I told one person that it makes it more valuable as a souvenir.

There were signs everywhere directing you to the race course, on the ground, on street poles, and many of them told you how much longer the walk was. The forecast was for mixed rain especially later in the evening and the teams scrambled their rosters to let some of the better riders go early and they were hoping to be able to scout the course for the later riders who apparently would have wetter conditions. Luckily the printed schedule was recrunched to the current planned starting order.

I bascially took the shortest route from the rail station to the course and, to no surpirse, it would be pretty crowded there. They had a jumbotron set up (the Dutch have really mastered the daylight jumbotron) and the audio was blasting, partially in Dutch, partially in French. I could make my way through a chunk of the French but in all my travels here, I haven't been able to pick up much Dutch; it just sounds like sneezing to me and I have to resist the urge to say "gesundheit". Although crowded, I was able to walk up to a railing a basically be in the second row when they announced that Iban Mayoz has just left the starting gate.

Four minutes later, a motorcycle with "Gendarmerie" on it went whizzing by, and a few seconds behind, Mayoz went whipping by as everyone cheered. The great thing about the individual time trial is you really get to see your favorite riders isolated from the pack. It takes about three hours for all of the riders to participate but it goes by very quickly. By the time a rider passes, you scan your sheet to see who is coming next, then you listen for the time of the next rider to cross the finish line, then the Gendarmerie are upon you leading the next guy. Every rider has a lead motorcyle in front making sure the course is clear.

It was a light drizzle and then the rain really started picking up as I was walking the course catching a glimpse from different angles. I sought refuge under a building and then the rain stopped. I went back to my previous spot and it really started coming down again. Turns out there was a storm cloud parked right over that spot so I just continued walking and basically found a drier part of the course. I found an underground passage to get to the infield part of the course which was a great idea as there was now plenty of space where I could be on the railing with an unobstructed view. I cheered for riders in the following order of enthusiasm:

Lance Armstrong
Andy Schleck (should have the best chance to beat Contador)
Anyone on Team Radio Shack
Any American riders
Anyone on Team Garmin (Christian Vandevelde, in particular)

Any Dutch riders (since they were on home turf)
Guys that I just like (Jens Voigt, Cadel Evans, George Hincapie)
Anyone else NOT named Alberto Contador

Lance was scheduled to start about 3rd from last, and about a half hours ahead, I grabbed a hamburger (one of only 5 things available for purchase) and found a good spot. I was next to a rabid Belgian fan who had the whole starting order memorized. After Juan Antonio Flecha passes by you could hear everyone murmuring that Lance was next, then the place fell silent like the calm before a storm. The lead motorcycle came within view and you could hear the crowd in the distance start to roar and it approached like a wave. Lance may be a polarizing figure in cycling, but people are still in awe of his presence in the sport.

Everyone was cheering and some maniac (me) screamed "Go Lance!" as he flew by. I caught a really quick glimpse of his face. He was sucking wind, in a good way, pushing it hard. Most guys just candy ass the time trail because they know they have no chance to win and figure they'll just start a minute back and deal with it. Lance has always been one of the best at the time trial, but on this course, the Swiss Fabian Cancellara was by far the favorite. He followed Lance and got big cheers, followed by defending champ Alberto Contador.

After Contador went by, everyone up and bolted for the jumbotron about 100 yards away so they could see the actual finish which was about 4km down the road. Lance was in 3rd place when he crossed the finish line, but Cancellara would, of course, crush the field. Then Contador, Lance's "enemy" of sorts came down the home stretch and finished 5 seconds behind Lance. The big question is how he and Lance will fare against each other and the rest of the field for that matter, so this was a huge victory for Lance.

Professional cycling is a very strange sport. For me, the most difficult thing to grasp at first, was that you have almost 200 riders in an event like the Tour de France, yet, only a handful can conceivably win the race. There are teams, but an individual winner is crowned. There are riders on a team that are just there to carry water bottles for the leader, they are called "domestiques". Some teams have a sprinter specialist, who could never with the Tour, but on a flat stage, he has a chance to win that particular stage and get the sponsor's name in the media. And that person comes along with the intent on outperforming the field on ony a few stages.

Then there is the community aspect of it. The term "peloton" means "ball" and describes the formation where the riders cluster together to more efficiently share the wind resistance. A single rider can never outride the peloton except over very short distances. On any given stage, a small group of riders will attempt to defy the odds and break away from the peloton but they are most often caught, in the last few kilometers, and passed like they are standing still.

Then there is the timing. All of the riders in the peloton receive the same time for that stage, whether they are at the front or the rear. Anything else would be way too dangerous and within the realm of a 21 day bike race, the safety is more important than a second here and there. In what other sport can the particpant that finishes first receive the same "score" as the one that finisheds 194th?

If you find this at all interesting, read this book:

23 Days in July

It's one of the best sports books ever and goes into extreme detail of the in's and out's of the TdF, as seen in a year that Lance won it.

Experiencing the prolgue was something I will never forget. I totally lucked out with the timing and location of this trip. The next day would be the first stage, from Rotterdam to Brussels and I am thinking I might take the trip down to Antwerp to see the race. I wonder what it's like to see the whole peloton rush by. Must be intense...

Jup Holland Jup

2010-07-04T06:53:00.000+08:00

I took this job in Taiwan for many reasons, one of which was seeking a greater challenge than what I was experiencing in the States. So far, it has exceeded that expectation. This trip is panning out to be quite the challenege as my job function revolves around global sourcing and I am lobbying to transfer work from one location to the other which tends to piss of the "from" location. My boss is flying out on Monday to come try and seal the deal. The new boss is another reason why the job is very challenging. I think it's just a matter of the two of us syncing up. He's a bit more, say, emotional that any previous supervisor I've had. In our business, people usually just look at the #'s whereas he glances over the #'s and looks at the words. I'll have to figure out how to adjust my style.

I slipped out of work early on Friday and did some work at the hotel because the Netherlands was scheduled to play the quarterfinal World Cup game at 4PM. Shortly before then I made my way down towards the square to grab something to eat and find somewhere to watch the game. I would have to look far as they has a jumbotron in the square and thousands of people were making their way there, decked out in orange to support the Dutch. It was literallu, 100 degrees out and sunny. The bars along the edge of the square had awnings set up with flat screen TVs underneath so I grabbed a beer and ducked under to get out of the sun.

It was Holland vs. Brazil which was probably the best matchup to date in this World Cup. The crowd was silenced as Brazil took the lead mid way in the first half on a strange ball that got through the Dutch defense. Typically, at this point, the Dutch hang their heads and just fall apart. But not this time as early in the second half they equalized, and town square went crazy. Apparently, when the Dutch score, you are supposed to just throw your beer on the ceiling. Shortly afterwards, the bartender comes out with a tray of free beer to replenish. I think beer is the cheapest liquid around here as gasoline and water are more expensive.

Then with a header off a header off a corner kick, "Oranje" went up 2-1 and looked very strong with a few more chances that they could have converted. At the end of the match I grabbed this video of everyone just going crazy.

The party lasted for hours. They have a gate at the town square to keep out glass bottles. You can buy beer in plastic on the other side for ~2.50euros, not bad considering what a beer costs at a ballgame in the States. A couple hours after the end of the game, the square was still pretty packed and the trash was calf deep in places. I'll still be here for the semifinal match on Tuesday against Uruguay.

The other tradition is a lot of dancing and singing, in Dutch, of songs which have Dutch lyrics overlaid onto pop songs. One was the Pet Shop Boys "Go West" and despite my best efforts, travelling 10k miles away from Boston and then another 5,000...still had to sit through Sweet Caroline, bamp, bamp, bamp...

Height less 110

2010-07-03T17:43:00.000+08:00

It's interesting how quickly your frame of reference adapts to a new place. How long does it take before a new place seems like "home" and your past life is now foreign to you? I wonder what it will be like to return to the U.S., just for a visit, as after coming to Europe, I have realized that may everyday life is centered around Taipei. Two things contribute to this realization:

The weather: The weather in the Netherlands has been amazing, a little hot for my taste, but blue skies and bright sun are something I have yet to experience in Taipei. Clean air, clean streets, still light at 10PM, I could go on. So far, Taipei is always hazy, cloudy, smoggy, rainy. I hear there is a season where Taipei weather is decent but I get the impression it's like when Steve Martin pays a carnie in The Jerk and is standing in front of a rack of prizes and describes for the winner which prizes they can actually choose from:

"Uh, anything in this general area right in here. Anything below the stereo and on this side of the bicentennial glasses. Anything between the ashtrays and the thimble. Anything in this three inches right in here in this area. That includes the Chiclets, but not the erasers."

Our tour guide in Sun Moon Lake said the weather is nice there in November. I think she went on to qualify that as "mid-November". Chicklets...

I used to travel to the Netherlands and notice the level of obesity being quite low. As and on again/off again marginally serious athlete, I notice these things. This time I thought that the obesity level is high and realized that it has not changed, it's just that my frame of reference is now calibrated to Taiwan, where people are quite thin. One of the ex-pats out at the bar had mentioned that there is a "height less 110 rule" that guys have in Taiwan. That is, take a woman's height in cm, subtract 110, that is what she should weigh in kilos. They all immediately started admonishing this rule and how ridiculously unhealthy and sexist it is. Meanwhile, I'm crunching some #'s in my head... I'M HEIGHT LESS 110! I had better keep quiet about this.

...and the beer is quite good, which leads to height less 105 after spending a week here.

Business trip to the Netherlands, leaving Taipei

2010-07-03T05:50:00.000+08:00

I've started work on a project which required a trip to the Netherlands. I almost got involved with something that would have involved extended amounts of time in Singapore but I'm glad I weaseled my way out of that scenario. One thing that sucks about Taiwan is you can't get too far on a direct flight and with KLM, I had a layover in Bangkok. Had I known it would be an old 747 with no VOD system, I probably would have gone with China Airlines or Cathay Pacific. I always try and take a redeye because I sleep pretty well on planes and I would rather just land and head straight to work. Most people think I'm nuts but I find that if I head out a day early I end up sleeping when I shouldn't and jet lag is worse.

It's about three hours to Bangkok; the plane was freezing cold and they had no blankets. Not sure if it's just cost savings or what. The one good thing about the flight is they have a strange setup on the KLM 747s where there is an Economy Plus cabin which is half seats, half galley (behind the wall) and they give you more space. My company usually flies us in Plus, though with a full-fare ticket, I was hoping for a business class upgrade which never materialized.

They tossed us off the plane in Bangkok; I'm pretty sure we got back on the same plane. It was a weird process where we went through another x-ray, up some stairs, then down some stairs to the gate. It seemed like our boarding passes were checked several times. I stopped at the gift shop and got some dried Thai pepper crackers that had some fishy/shrimpy type substance in it. It was gross but spicy and salty so I ate all 2,000 calories. And my breath must have stunk like rotten fish.

Back on the plane, this segment I had a free seat next to me which I surrendered to a dirty backpacker because he was stuck in the middle of three and hoping for some more room. As I said, I sleep on planes and I can't smell backpacker stench while sleeping so I didn't hesitate to share the space. Even if you are a stinky backpacker, I can still relate to being stuck between two other stinky backpackers so I figured I'd fall on a grenade.

After landing in Amsterdam I came upon my second and third mistakes at the rental car counter. Mistake #2: an International Driving Permit is NOT a licenese, it's just some hokey translation. You still must carry your state license with you, which I tossed in some closet in Taipei thinking I would never need it again. Luckily, the guy still gave me the car and said, "Don't call me when the cops arrest you", or something to that effect.

Then I asked for a GPS. My company has a policy that GPSs are free for us via our partnership with Avis, but I didn't check the "GPS" box on my travel req because it would have required the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sign it and I was buying tickets at the last minute as it was. Avis wouldn't even let me pay for a GPS - no foreigners allowed. He suggested a map at which I chuckled, kickin' it old skool.

So I had this map which would get me in the general vicinity of work. I've been here a bunch of times, but when you have a GPS, you pay no attention to where you're going. "At the next roundabout, take the 3rd exit", OK, left turn, Clyde. Luckily I was able to find my way. Oh fourth mistake, didn't check that the AC actually works in the car, which it does not. There some metal on metal screeching in that compressor and it was literally, pushing 100 degrees on my way home from work today.

The one thing I did do right was further check the car for damage and found several scratches. It's not like it really matters as my company insures the cars and I've sideswiped 2 concrete barriers in my work travels. The car is a Opel shitbox and Avis has gone downhill in every way over the years. But so far it has gotten me to work in one piece though I'm tempted to crash it in to something just to show it who's boss.

Up late watching the World Cup

2010-06-28T00:45:00.000+08:00

I find that my sleep schedule has shifted quite a bit in the move as I have become more of a night owl than I have been in quite some years. To begin with, my company's work day starts a bit later here. Back in the States, I would roll in at 8:55 and be the last one in the building. Here, I roll in at 8:55 and I'm among the first. Just a difference of work culture, I think.

Considering that my commute in the States was often >1 hour and now that I have a car in Taipei, I can count on 30-35 minutes pretty consistently, which translates into leaving home at 8:15AM. I also find that I naturally wake up around 6AM here. I think it's the early sunrise coupled with a rapid change in temperature in the bedroom as the A/C attempts to catch up that always wakes up, typically only for a minute or two.

Add the World Cup on top of that and it has not been uncommon that I'm up until 1AM on weeknights. I am surprised at how many bars there are that have been showing ALL of the games, which means a start time of 2:30 AM for the second game. As far as I can tell, there is no "last call" either so as long as the bar is willing to keep staff on and power the TV set...game on! On Tap and the Village Cafe have been my soccer hangouts as of late. Each has had a good mix of expats from whomever is playing, England, AUS, US, even some Dutch.

Tonight I found a cafe of sorts which provided a non-alcoholic venue for the England/Germany match. There were only a couple Westerners there (unlike the pubs) and surprisingly, the Taiwanese were rooting heavily for Germany. The place was called Lattea, near the Shilin MRT, and they had this one extremely popular specialty drink which was an iced tea latte made to look like a pint of beer. The place was packed, they had several TVs showing the game, and they were serving these up as fast as they could make them.

Switching topics...one thing I really like about the location of our apartment is there is a huge fruit market 2 blocks down the street which is open surprisingly late as they capture some of the traffic from the Shilin Night Market. They sell many kinds of fruit, no vegetables that I am aware of. They cut up some of the fruit and sell it in a container with a fork to eat on the run which is great for me as I do not have a knife or a cutting board so for things like pineapple and watermelon, I have an option. Also, since it's just me, I can't possibly eat an entire watermelon before it spoils.

I came home at about 2AM after the Brazil/Portugal game and was shocked to see the market still open. Then after the last U.S. game, it was already daybreak by the time everyone spilled out of the pub around 5AM. I thought for sure I had the market beat this time, but no way. The market was still open at 5:30.

I wonder if my impression of Taipei nightlife is being falsely bolstered by the World Cup. Will all these pubs be packed at 2AM next month when Tour de France replays aren't exactly the biggest hit?

Getting a cell phone

2010-06-25T12:47:00.000+08:00

First of all, this post will hopefully be beneficial for those with no clue about smartphones or how to get one in Taiwan. If you read Engadget all day long, go hang out at a bar in Redwood City waiting for an Apple employee to drop their iPhone 5.

I arrived here with my Verizon phone (LG Dare) from the States which was the hot thing 2 years ago which means it now has the sophistication of a paperweight. It actually works in Taiwan on a roaming network and I don't even want to know how much that costs so I quickly wanted to get some sort of cell phone action going over here. Due to some corporate technicality, I had to get someone high up to sign for the company to give me a loaner phone. In Taiwan, you don't pay for incoming calls or SMS and I'm explaining to the IT guys, "Look, I just need some sort of phone until I get an ARC at which point I can get my own. I'll pay the company for all of the calls I make ($0.00)!" I just wanted my wife to be able to get a hold of me in an emergencey. After a week they gave me this old candy bar phone, which was fine.

A suggestion...get any old GSM phone before you come here and you can just buy a SIM card at the 7-11 and be up and running for cheap. One of my colleagues said he had a stack of old GSM phones at home (from NE2 upgrades) but as a matter of principle, he wanted me to duke it out with IT. In mean time, I was trying to figure out what to do.

2 issues:

Language barrier
Residencey barrier

I guess they get nervous about foreigners bailing out on contracts so they usually have you prepay nearly the entire contract amount and then debit that account every month so you don't pay again until it runs out. One thing I found strange relative to the States is back home, you typically choose which provider you like, go into their store, and they handle the whole thing.

Here, it's more of a mom & pop operation. In Taipei you can often be in view of 4 or 5 different small cell phone stores; I don't know how they all stay in business. The two major carriers are Chunghwa Telecom and Far Eastone and I know with CHT, you can find company run stores, like I described from the States. I was trying to figure out a strategy and one of the IT guys came by and asked if I need help with getting a cellphone. I think HR notified him when my ARC came through.

I was a bit hesitant because I already started doing some research on phones and was looking at an HTC Desire which is an Android based phone. In the world of smartphones, you're basically either an iPhone person or an Android person, or maybe a Blackberry person but I think most people who have BBs get them provided by their employer. Maybe there are some Windows Mobile folks out there. While I respect what Apple has done, I hate all of their products so I was really hoping to get something Android based. I was afraid the IT guy was going to say your choice is either this candy bar phone or an iPhone. I went by his office and he had the Far Eastone website up and he asked what kind of phone I wanted.

He started scrolling through some cheap options and when I said,, "Do they have the HTC Desire?" his eyes lit up like a kid in a candy store. Five minutes later we had it all picked out. He's been playing with my phone a few times since. When his partner in IT set it up for me (language-wise) he handed it to me like it was a Faberge Egg. From the time we placed the order it took a couple days to get the SIM card and a few more days to get the phone. With SIM card in hand I was able to swap the SIM card into my company candy bar phone so I could at least start using my own permanent #.

One of my colleagues called me to help me find the shuttle bus stop and she said, "When I called you, it started playing a song, and I wasn't sure if I had the right number." I asked, "Was it a good song or a stupid song?" She shrugged. That means stupid song. It has some sort of Ring Back Tone that plays Chinese covers of American pop songs instead of a ring. She gave me her phone and called me so I could have a listen. It was a Chinese version of "I just called to say I love you". I instantly remembered in horror that my boss had called me at that # earlier in the day. How embarassing. The entire shuttle bus got a good laugh at my expense. I had to contact Far Eastone directly to get them to elliminate the service from my account.

The phone is awesome. Before even getting into the Google vs. Apple debate, I'll at least say, if you are a foreigner in Taiwan, get one of the two, it is so useful. The GPS function with Google Maps is something I use virtually everyday. The other day there was some confusion in a taxi and I just showed the guy my destination on the phone. How often have you been wandering a strange city and stumbled upon an interesting place only to never be able to find it again? Just fire up Google Maps and save your current location as a favorite.

When you give it access to Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, it automatically populates you phonebook with all the info it can find on your contacts, which is a lot. It all works pretty seamlessly; if you can find someone's name, anywhere, you can probably email, SMS, or call them very easily. An app called Fring allows me to make voice calls at very cheap rates through Skype rather than pay my mobile company for international calls. There's an app which streams dozens of NPR stations and categorizes them by music, talk, news, etc. Fordham University has a good alternative station which serves as a substitute for Pandora as that is blocked here, by Pandora.

Most American media providers only have contracts to provide in U.S. and maybe Canada, so things like Hulu fall under the same situation. One thing that sorta sucks about Google vs. Apple is you cannot buy apps in the Android market from Taiwan. They haven't worked out the whole payment system for some reason. I have only come across one app so far that I considered buying (a PDF scanner) but it's actually a piece of crap so I actually lucked out, but it's just a matter of time before I'm cursing the Android Market.

The 5 MP camera is so-so in low light and really no substitue for even a point and shoot digital camera but it's good at grabbing candid shots when someone passes out face first on a table at the bar.

Once you have a iPhone or Google phone, you will wonder how you ever lived without it. For a while I was dragging my laptop AND GPS around Taipei with me; for most purposes, the Desire has replaced them both. Now if I can only figure out how to make a voice call on this thing...

Taiwan car shopping

2010-06-22T18:33:00.003+08:00

Two of my goals in life are to live without a car or a TV. I've owned or possessed a car pretty contiguously for 22 years. In 1996, I had to surrender my first car, a '77 Pontiac Grand Prix (monster) to a junkyard when leaving Florida (was only road worth by Florida's standards) and soon after got my hands on a used Chevy Caprice (also a monster) after moving back to CT. Then there was the time, in said Chevy, that I was in a head on collision with a lady who veered into my lane and left me with no where to go but through her and her car. She survived, at least long enough to inform the authorities that she had no license or insurance. Neither car survived the crash...

When arriving in Taiwan my company set me up with a rental which they provided for a period of time so that I could get a permanent car. In the meantime, a friend of mine was trying to sell my Tacoma back in the States. It's difficult for foreigners to get car loans here so my plan was to sell the truck, get the cash here and then buy a car. I swore I would never buy a new car again but I had my heart set on the Honda FIT as the whole "magic seat" idea seems really cool and I need to be able to haul a bike around. The FIT has only been in Taiwan for 2 years and the residual is so great with Honda it almost makes no sense to buy one a year old as it's not much cheaper than a brand new one so why take the risk? I've owned a Pontiac, 2 Chevys, a VW and a Toyota. My wife once had a Honda Prelude with 220k miles on it that drove perfectly fine the day she donated it to charity and got a Mini Cooper. A set of plug wires for that Honda was $21 shipped to my door! What a great car. So I am a real fanboy of Hondas and Toyotas, even though sometimes the gas pedal stick on Toyotas but that's what they make airbags for, right?

If I ever buy another German car I give you permission to restrain me and check me into a psycho ward. Upon arriving in Taiwan I had a Toyota Altis which is a Corolla, of sorts. For those that don't know, the selection of cars in different countries is not equivalent to the U.S. I had people suggesting cars to me that were shocked that certain models were not available in Taiwan. Europe is similar. In some cases they rename the car, in other cases it's just not available. After a few weeks in the Altis it was getting expensive as I was now bearing the 800NT/day cost, which is actually not bad for a rental, but I found out that my company has a shuttle from downtown Taipei for 50NT each way which is only 10NT more than the toll so it's almost free, other than the fact that I need to take the MRT to get downtown. But I arguably need a car, long term, for many reasons; pretend that they are valid for the sake of this story. Oh, I have to pick my wife and cat and quarantine inspector and luggage up from the airport, how's that?
The thing that sucked about the shuttle bus is I lost at least 1.5 hours of my life each day due to the commuting time and the inflexibility of having to live by the shuttle schedule. Once I had some cash on hand I set off for the Honda dealer in Beitou to check out a FIT. I walked in and there was plenty of staff standing around at 8:05 PM but I was informed that the sales staff goes home at 8. There were 3 or 4 people in Honda polo shirts hanging out and chatting so they weren't mechanics. How do you operate a business that sells stuff and send home all the people that sell the stuff and keep the business open? If you would find this as frustrating as I did, you will find such circumstances all over Taiwan. It's the land of 100% employment. I will gripe about this in many future posts, get used to it.

I came back the next day and made sure to get there a bit sooner. I went to the same desk of Honda staffers and they brought me to meet the salesman, who introduced himself as "Mr...", a bit formal, especially since he was only 25 years old, has been with Honda for 3 months, and this is his first job, ever. Typical for Taiwan so I'm told. This poor kid was shaking and terrified from the moment he laid eyes on me; it was the "oh no he's going to speak English to me" reaction. He was constantly apologizing for his poor English. I thought the Honda dealer would have a sales rep with strong English since being able to lie fluently is a key trait for a car salesman and I would think being able to lie in as many languages as possible would increase profits. He instantly asked me if I wanted to look at a CRV. I guess most Westerners must go for the CRV.

Oh, by the way, I am kinda surprised that big cars are common here. Gas is pretty cheap by world standards and only a bit more expensive than in the U.S. I asked to look at the FIT and he showed me the showroom demo car. While it's kinda neat that the seats fold flat, it falls quite short of worthiness of the term "magic". Make it disappear into the floor; now, that's magic. We messed around with every feature in the car and I asked him if we could go for a test ride. He said I need to have an International Drivers License to be able to go for the test ride and I know I spoiled his night when I pulled it out of my murse. I thought he was going to vomit.

He was practically shaking when he handed me the keys to the test car. I wasn't sure if it was because Americans are bad drivers in his mind or he was feeling the weight of the responsibility of being in charge of the test car or what. But near the end of the test ride, after trying to informally chat it up with him to ease his nerves and maybe give him some English confidence, I asked, "So does anyone ever crash the test car?" He said, "very often". Now that I think about it...there's no way you could get me to take a job riding around with random Taiwanese people. The only Taiwanese I ride with are bus and taxi drivers and I figure, they must be the cream of the crop. They may drive like inconsiderate maniacs, but they can handle the vehicle, unlike those who crash on a Honda test drive. I think he was just shell shocked about the test drive regardless of my nationality.

Overall, I was a bit disappointed. The car barely has any features to it. The knobs and fixtures seemed a bit cheap, and the car isn't even made in Japan but rather, Taiwan. There were none available for immediate purchase, the sticker price was 630k NT and it is supposedly non-negotiable, and I couldn't even get free money out of the deal as they were dead set on 4.5%APR (if I could get a Taiwanese guarantor to even get the loan and put 40% down or thereabouts). I basically decided I was NOT going to pay $20k USD in cash for THIS car. I suspect it's still a quality car even though it's made in Taiwan but knowing that they are getting some sort of kickback from Taiwan, it's a tough pill to swallow to give them THAT much profit. I decided to focus on a used car.

There is a good website for used car searching in Taiwan at http://www.ocar.com.tw/. One great thing about it is the menu system is all ASCII based so it functions well within Google Translate and allows you to filter by many options including region. The problem is almost all of the cars are in Taichung and many have testified that those prices are false advertised just to get you to come down to Taichung for some bait n switch action. You'll see in those ads that the dealers are all to eager to come pick you up at the rail station and then drive you to their lot. Sounds to me as painful as a timeshare where they haul you away somewhere and then don't let you leave until you buy some condo across the street from the beach with some crazy management fee.

Another option was: our company uses a guy who handles corporate leases, rentals, etc. and sometimes offers the leftovers up for sale. I had a colleague contact him to get the list of what was currently available hoping to strike gold but there was nothing with less than 100k mileage (or is it called "kilometerage"?) and I would be hesitant to buy a rental car anyway as most people beat the crap out of them. This guy claims to let you know the pedigree and lists which ones were rental fleets and which were lease to corporate types. We have also had leases within our company get transferred as a sale coworkers leave this division, which is the safest bet but only comes along every once in a while. I also was really set on a car that could transport my bike with some ease and most of this guy's cars were Toyota Corollas. My boss said I might be able to get a good deal through this guy on a 5 series. Does he know how much he's paying me?

My next option was a guy that I got in contact through the Taiwan web forum http://www.forumosa.com/ who is a professional vehicle sourcer/inspector. He charges an up front deposit and then a finders fee when you actually purchase the car. If you tell him the car you are looking for, his job is to find it (typically on a used car lot), inspect it, negotiate, and do everything else to seal the deal.

So I contacted him and had some discussions and honed in on the Nissan Tiida (aka Versa in the States). After a few days and reading some reviews on the Tiida, I switched over to the Suzuki Swift. The Swift being a little more stylish, a little cheaper, and perhaps a bit better equipped for the price. After about a week the guy had found 2 models that he thought looked nice, a 2005 and a 2007. We made plans to go look at the 2005 as it seemed the better bang for the buck. He conveniently picked me up at the Shilin MRT and the lot was close by. We gave it the once over and I gave him the thumbs up to do the full inspection. He brings along some tools, a jack and jackstands and does it all right there on site. Very thorough, not just major mechanics but he goes through every electrical feature down to the radio. He quickly found that the driver door power lock mechanism was broken but everything else looked really good, save for the wiper blades which the dealer replaced.

Since it was Dragon Boat festival holiday they couldn't get the lock fixed so we made arrangements to come back in a few days so it would be ready to go. He also handled haggling over the price as he's fluent in Mandarin (and fluent in "car salesman") and the amount he was able to haggle off exceeded his fee so unless you think you are going to successfully haggle with a Chinese speaking used car dealer, his service pays for itself. We came back and squared away the financials, reinspected the repaired door lock, and made arrangements to come back again the next night to talk insurance.

On top of the price of the car is tax, registration and insurance at about $10k NT for the rest of the year but the insurance laws here are really lax. So I'll talk with an agent about actually getting insurance that may be of use. I was advised not to wreck the car tonight, wait until I have real insurance.

It was nice to be able to drive to work again and not take the MRT all over Taipei to get a shuttle bus to backtrack to work. Costly, but nice. The one mishap I had was fumbling with the key-less ignition. You have a fob that you carry somewhere on your person. The car senses it and you can just press a button to unlock the door. The ignition looks much like a regular ignition except you can just turn it with your hand. But you have to press it in, turn it until it stops, then release the pressure, and continue to turn it in the same direction and the car will start. Took a few times to figure that one out as it was already started for me when I drove it off the dealer's lot.

Things I like about the car:

It's Japanese (at least in some fashion)
Unlike my rental, the head unit can play MP3/WMA CDs so I can get back to learning Mandarin on CD
Has a live fuel mileage that reads in km/liter so I get a good workout on my metric math skills
You press a button and the side view mirrors automatically fold in so they don't get sheared off in the mechanical car park
60/40 split rear means I might be able to come up with a scenario to transport my wife, cat and quarantine officer from the airport to the vet hospital that doesn't involve strapping the cat carrier to the roof
Key-less entry means I can just stuff the FOB in my murse and not have to worry about forgetting my car keys but instead, forget all my other keys now that I'm desensitized to keys
Better gas mileage than any other vehicle I've owned
It has climate control and I can pretend that I actually think it's that much different than just adjusting the coldness and fan to a setting that makes you comfortable.
Like my cell phone, it's not available in the U.S. I can always get a Versa or a FIT when I get back. Actually the Swift is supposedly coming to the States in 2011 so I can accuse anyone that gets one back home of being a bandwagonner.
And the best feature of all, when you open the door there is a chrome rail along the floor that says Swift on it, and it lights up! But that's not all. There's a button in the console that allows you to change the color of the light!

Wouldn't it be great if they had that feature where the entire car body lit up and you could change the color? I bet such a car would be road legal here. I talked to the shippers yesterday and it should be about 5 more weeks before the TV shows up so I can continue to live half of the dream... With that said I'm headed out to find a TV at a bar tomorrow night to watch the U.S. World Cup game.

Beer Chug Photos

2010-06-18T17:18:00.001+08:00

If you don't know what I'm talking about here, read this post first.

So here are the photos that one of my coworkers brought to me on a memory stick. He was elated that he was able to capture this.

#1 - I'm the first knucklehead up there and I have no idea what I've gotten myself into. I'm not really as angry as I look. Moreso terrified. But if I have to put on one of those inflatable sumo outfits I am so outta here.

#2 - This guy is trying to tell me that I should win because I am American. The guy on the far left almost booted on stage in round 2 and ran for the bathroom.

#3 - My teammate behind me is translating the rules and saying I need to scream the company name samurai style when I finish my beer.

#4 - Start Drinking

#5 Here's where I had to do the stupid scream. I should have gone psychotic Bruce Lee style where he like freezes, flexes and stares as he releases a long, "Woaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!" And then kick that mowhawk MC (see pic #2) in the nuts. The guy that took the photo said he liked the fact that my "dance" was so vigorous that the action was blurred. I think #9 in the "TORRES" soccer jersey has it on video. I have to find him. And take a magnet to the memory card.

Hey, no wonder why we lost, look at my partner, he's standing there laughing at me. He should be halfway through that beer by now.

Company Outing Day 2 - no beer chug contests today

2010-06-16T22:13:00.000+08:00

On day 2 of the trip we were told that wake-up was at 7AM and breakfast was from 7-9:30. The tour guide advised that we get up early to take in the beauty of Sun Moon Lake. I had workout gear with me and checked the schedule of the hotel gym. It didn't open until 10AM. What gym isn't open in the morning? So I had my fingers crossed for slightly-terrible weather so I could enjoy a run around the lake. At 7AM the wake up call arrived, set up by the tour guide, not me, and I was not all that surprised to peek outside and see it was dumping rain. So I went back to bed and got up just in time to throw down some free breakfast and pile back onto the bus.

The destination was the Formosan Aboriginal Cultural Village, which was basically on the other side of Sun Moon Lake from where we were. There is a gondola that runs from Sun Moon Lake up to the Aboriginal Village, across an amusement park and down to the parking lot. It's a bit of a strange combination of attractions. The amusement park is clearly left over from the early 80s, with a couple of upgrades. One of which is called the UFO. It is a ride where they lift you up a big pole and then release you so you "free fall" to the bottom, hence the name of perhaps, the original one at Six Flags in New Jersey. The line at the UFO was nil. They basically held up the ride until it filled and then let it go. You could ride it over and over. I rode it twice. My work colleagues were all terrified of it. I couldn't convince any of them to ride ANY of the ride that had a significant amount of motion. How do you ride a scooter through Taipei where your fate is put in random hands, yet you are too risk averse to go on a "thrill ride". Maybe I'm blindly foolish to believe that the engineers and the inspectors and the theme park have enough sense to create a safe environment, but come on, versus a scooter! They were even a bit nervous riding the gondola.

The aboriginal village was actually quite nice and fairly newly built, by a Japanese company. I think it's kind of funny that the Japanese occupied Taiwan, probably oppressed the aboriginals, then built them a theme park. Despite being built by the Japanese, the workers at the park seemed to be actual Taiwan aboriginal people and the displays were quite interesting. They some some artisans like this woman making colored glass beads. The best part, though, was the archery range. I have never shot a bow & arrow in my life, expect those suction cup tipped plastic toys. My coworkers were encouraging me now to try anything after I relented to the beer chug contest so I gladly grabbed hold the bow. They actually gave you some explanation of how to use it, someone nearby helped to translate it. I wonder if it is a "real" bow, I have no idea. I shot a pistol for the first time last year. I'm a lover, not a fighter.

Again, being American, my Taiwanese coworkers have high expectations from me when it comes to drinking and using weapons so all eyes were on me as I grabbed hold of the bow. You got 20 arrows for 3 bucks and if you hit somewhere close to the center of the target or pop a balloon or something, they give you another arrow. First shot, dead center! I swear I've never used one of these before. After just a few shots, my arm started getting sore and I was so-so from that point on. I think I just got lucky, no shooting apples off anyone's head.

Back in the amusement park there was a indoor section of cheezy rides and cheezy games. One of the rides was called "Space Mountain". It was an indoor roller coaster in the dark, much like the one at Walt Disney World but smaller. There was the cheezy game where you whack a mallet on a lever and launch a rubber frog into the air aiming for some rotating lilly pads which are on water so when the frog hits the lilly pad it tilts and the frog falls off and you lose, since the goal is to get it to stay on the lilly pad. There was a bunch of hoopla surrounding this game and it was funny to watch the overreactions of the guy on the very left in this video.

There was a aboriginal dance show which we were encouraged to attend by the tour guide so I made sure I went so as to not get yelled at on the ride home. I was just glad that I didn't end up being part of the show, unless it involved chugging a beer.

We packed it up at 3:00 and headed for the buses. It rained on and off all day with only a few periods of hard rain so it was manageable. On the ride home we stopped in Taichung for a bathroom break at a place that sells pineapple cake. Much like at the "winery", the tour guide encouraged us to spend some money here as this is a local specialty of Taichung. The sizes that they had available would last me months if I could find a way to prevent it from spoiling. I'm just to really into sweet things except for a snack here and there. At least the bathrooms in the pineapple cake showroom weren't too disgusting. I wonder how much of a cut of the pineapple cake sales the tour guide gets?

Company Outing Day 1 - The house of drunk experiencing

2010-06-15T23:31:00.000+08:00

My company is celebrating a 25th anniversary of the founding of the corporation this year so each site is having some sort of celebration. Back in the States we rented out part of a country club for the day and had an outing with food and games, golf and tennis for those who wished to play. I was disappointed to find that it was scheduled for about a month after my departure so I would be missing out on all the action. I was hoping that I made it to Taiwan in time for their outing.

On the first or second day of work here in Taiwan someone commented at lunch that we have until tomorrow to register for the "outing". Ooh, maybe I made it in time! Turns out I did, but I had to sign up quickly for one of four dates as they could not accommodate all of Taiwan in one event. Here was our itinerary (via bus tour):

Friday morning pickup at the office
Head to lunch in Puli
Visit Puli "winery"
Head to Sun Moon Lake
Dinner
Spend the night in the hotel
Saturday head to aboriginal village/cable car/amusement park
Get back to office Saturday night

I blindly selected a date as the deadline was drawing near and didn't sync up with any people that I knew so it was a total crap shoot. The event was for all of Taiwan, not just my office so I actually know a slim % of those in attendance. It's been difficult to go from knowing, seriously, about 400 people to maybe a couple dozen, if that. But that's part of the excitement of the opportunity to meet knew people instead of seeing the same old faces every day.

The first presentation I received said we leave the company at 8AM. Then I received an itinerary that noted, 8:20-8:40. In the week beforehand I emailed the tour coordinator and asked, "What time does the bus leave?" and got back 8:20-8:40. That's way too vague for me. The problem is, I am without a car right now and am taking this shuttle to work that arrives at ~8:50 AM so that won't work for 8:20-8:40 so I had to take the subway to the freeway bus and then cab it to the office to get there in time. In time for the bus that didn't leave until 9:20AM. To date, nobody here has ever been on time for anything. Yet they sell watches in every market. Just a fashion statement, I guess.

But we were off to the first stop: lunch. We had 3 buses and each had a tour guide with a microphone to tell us what our plans were and some history of Taiwan and the areas we were visiting. Our bus had 4 non-Chinese speakers, myself, a German guy and two Korean guys. So our tour guide was at least bi-lingual. She also studied Spanish and lived in Spain but said she had a really hard time with the language and the tenses; but, she was very good in English, albeit, incredibly repetitive, especially when telling us that we should spend our money at the places we were stopping. I swear the tour guide must get a cut.

We stopped for lunch in Puli before the winery visit and we only had 4 people show up at our table (assigned seats) and the lunch was prepared for 8 so we had loads of food. It was a traditional Taiwanese meal where there is a lazy susan in the middle and everyone shares dishes. We did the best we could and then off to the winery. I knew there was no way the winery was a winery and I was correct. It was a distillery, but, OK, details, details. I didn't buy any booze but there were some nice local crafts on site to and I picked up some souvenirs. On the craft floor they had a room with a slanted floor and the doorway was labeled, "The house of drunk experiencing". Then we were back on the bus to head to our hotel at Sun Moon Lake. It's in the center of Taiwan and named for its appearance in the shape of a sun and a moon.

I laughed when she said to be prepared because it frequently rains in the center of Taiwan. Like the constant rain in the north of Taiwan (Taipei) would make us unprepared for the center of Taiwan as it has been raining every day for quite some time. I saw a guy across the street with a stockpile of wood. I think he's working on an ark. Checking in to the hotel went quite smoothly and the room was very nice. We all had lake view rooms and there was a Japanese room with sliding screens and a deep tub with a view of the lake. There was some master technology panel which controlled the TV and all of the lights. Oh, and there was a TV in the tub. We were allowed to bring friends and family but I was travelling solo, unfortunate since it was on the company's dime.

On the ride up we were told that we had several options for the event immediately after arrival:

Option A: Bus tour around the lake - the guide recommended we not choose this one as something about the storm and the road and the bus would be weaving and we might get sick to our stomach. If I can handle pig guts soup, I think I can handle the bus.
Option B: Boat tour around the lake at an up charge of $6 (USD). She recommended this option. I was a bit hesitant because of the weather and figured I would see how it looked when we got to Sun Moon Lake.
Option C: Hang out at the hotel

About 30 seconds later she made her way up the aisle with a checklist and an envelope and made everyone choose right then whether they were going on the boat. This should have been of no surprise to me as this is very indicative of everything I have experienced in Taiwan. If someone is going to describe some choices to you, you must choose right away. The part of this that most makes me an outsider here is the fact that I was even going to size up the weather as a deciding factor. Weather is never a factor for the Taiwanese. They carry an umbrella at all times and just go with the flow.

The boat was covered. That's another thing about Taipei, in particular, there is a lot of coverage. Most of the sidewalks have an overhang to shield you from the elements, be it sun or rain. The tour guide says that Sun Moon Lake is covered in mist in the morning and fog in the evening. I think that's just tour guide speak for, "It rains all the time at Sun Moon Lake."

The boat made two stops, one was at a temple a top a hill with a nice walking path to get up to the top. There were a lot of people here and there was a rock overlooking the lake which made for a scenic photo op. I think this video is very Taiwanese. If the Japanese are known for taking photos of EVERYTHING, the Taiwanese must be known to take photos of themselves, IN FRONT OF everything. This turned in to a scene which looked like paparazzi lined up at the red carpet. There were even people taking photos of me taking a video of people taking photos of people standing in front of the rock. Check out the way they each strike a pose at the rock:

We barely had time to check in before it was off to dinner. This time the other 4 showed up so we would at least to be able to eat most of the food. We joked that they let us down at lunchtime and left us with a lot of food to eat. Dinner was almost the exact same meal as lunch but there would be "games" afterward. They started with bingo which was actually good for the sake of learning my #'s in Chinese which I am actually doing pretty well with because you need to pay for things and that involves learning numbers. Though I did almost get into an embarrassing bingo situation where I mistook 30 for 13. In Chinese, thirteen is the equivalent of "ten three" (10+3), thirty is "three ten" (3*10) and when the guy was quicly rattling off numbers, I got confused, but the guy next to me straightened me out before I called a false bingo.

There were some activities with kids on the stage and then a new game started and the tour guide lady volunteered me for the game so I went up on stage, in front of about 200 people. One of the bus tour guides who must be an aspiring DJ or TV host ran the show and we were setting up in teams of two. Now flashback to a week ago:

I was at my desk and had to log in to the HR site for something about the Dragon Boat Festival and noticed that there were some presentations about former company outings and I was taking a look and came across the budget for a "beer drinking" game. I'll save you the details since you already know where this is going...

So I am now on stage for the company tradition, the beer chug contest. There are about 10 of us and "Arco", standing behind me, informed my that he was my teammate; I chug first and then he goes. First team to finish wins. Oh, another thing, when I'm done, I have to flip the mug over and yell my company's name, like, samurai style as demonstrated by the mow-hawked MC running the event. One of the other competitors asked what country I was from and when I said I was American, I think he slipped off stage to place a bet on me with his bookie. About 200 people were fixated on me as I was one of two Westerners in the entire room and the only one on stage with a glass of beer in his hand.

But it could not be so straightforward and easy, right? We each had to put a straw in the glass and drink through the straw. At this point I knew I was doomed. I strengthen my Chinese comprehension on this night as it relates to games. "Eee, err, san" ("one, two, three") will forever be burned into my vocab. At least I knew when to start drinking. I sucked as hard as I could while still remaining conscious and actually finished my leg in 2nd or 3rd. I don't think Arco ever finished his. After the team chug they picked two guys to stay behind and chug a tall boy of Taiwan Beer out of a bottle, no straw, no time limit. One on one. Neither finished and one bolted off stage to the bathroom. Mind you, there was no other alcohol at this event. No even I could have swigged down that beer.

Next there was some sort of line dancing game and thank goodness I was not involved in this train wreck. Entertaining, though...

After dinner we took the bus back to the hotel and the tour guide advised that we get some sleep for the day tomorrow and have really nice dreams. She said, if we have nightmares, they will probably be about HER. I think I might have laughed a little too loudly at that one.

...but it's not all the land of silk and money

2010-06-08T23:52:00.000+08:00

Since I've been doing a lot of raving about life in Taiwan I don't want anyone to think that I've stumbled upon some Shangri-La, or that I'm a shill for the Taiwan Tourism Board. There are many negatives to Taiwan that one must take in stride in order to cope. Shirley's school sent her a guide book on living in Taipei and it discusses a multi-step program to overcome Taiwan depression and I've already met a few colleagues who have gone through some cycles of discontent.

In earlier posts I've covered the notion that simple things can be difficult and there is often some cumbersome process in place to accomplish the simple things. If you need to credit your parking token before sticking it in the machine, then why doesn't the machine just reject an uncredited token instead of swallowing it whole and require you to either crash through the barricade or phone the parking lot company? They certainly have that technology.

Some other issues:

Pollution: air quality here is pretty bad. I swear all the postcard pictures are Photoshopped. Taipei 101 is always in a cloud of smog.
Weather in Taipei tends to be rainy, especially in the winter. Summers are hot and humid with blistering sun. Typhoon season is starting; they can get 6 typhoons in a year. Mudslides are common in the more rural areas or hillsides. Earthquakes are common if that sort of thing bothers you.
Cleanliness: On top of the pollution, it can be dirty. For some reason they don't like leaves. They'll hire someone to pick leaves off the ground individually with a pair of tongs, right next to an area that is littered with plastic bags, bottle and broken glass. But the trash is on the opposite side of some line of demarcation.
Traffic: On top of being slow and congested, it is insane and lawless. Mandatory insurance coverage is very slim so if you get run down, who knows if you will have financial recourse. Today, for the first time, I saw the aftermath of someone going down on a scooter. It could have been a lot worse. Parking is always a challenge and good luck getting out of the spot you get into because they park so tightly, you may have to do a 10-point turn to get out.
Sewage: The sewer system is questionable. Between the smell on the streets to not being able to flush toilet paper in certain areas and they still have squat toilets in some places: a porcelain hole in the ground with the ability to flush. Carry your own toilet paper in public just in case!
Luxury of internet: I miss not being able to do much online. A big part is the language barrier but it is also the culture. People tend to go into banks here. I've been to my home bank once in two years, and that was to use their notary service. I have to pay my utilities at 7-11. In the U.S. I can buy a car online,have it delivered to my door, with insurance and registration already taken care of. My experience so far here is most business is conducted in person. Mostly in cash.
If you're into that American sense of freedom, I think you may have issues here. I'm talking about the "pry my gun from my cold dead hands" mentality. You will have no guns here. You will be recorded on the highway. If you break the law you may get a ticket in the mail. Doesn't matter if you were not the one behind the wheel.
I see some people complain about being a foreigner and getting stared at in public. I have NOT found that to be the case. I get more looks from Westerners who are, no doubt saying, "Holy Shit, another Westerner!" I think locals are afraid I might shoot them if they stare. We were joking at work that in the American pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, they exhibits would all be centered around violence. Maybe gun violence now joins jazz music as the two things most uniquely American. I realize that it's not just America, there are other unstable countries prone to junta that share this problem.
I haven't started travelling yet but getting off the island seems a bit expensive compared to North America or Europe. For the cost of getting off the island, you can fly coast to coast in the US, and hit most of the EU capitals from central Europe on Easyjet. So there is a bit of claustrophobia.
It hasn't bothered me yet but there is a difference in the level of personal security that you have here with the potential for conflict with PRC and issues on the Korean peninsula. I get a lot of Taiwan vs. China jokes from friends but I think the economics serve as the ultimate peace keeper.
If you're a capitalist and proud of it, you may struggle with the economics. It's heavily socialized, heavily subsidized. Other than the foreign retail store (Ikea, Costco, SOGO, etc), I can't think of anything that appears to be economically sustainable without subsidy. Actually, scratch SOGO, I don't buy it. There is an army of employees in this department store. Every 10 feet there is an employee standing there to greet you. The cosmetics section is unbelievable as it is loaded with sales personnel with nothing to do other than text and play with their hair in the mirror.
Pizza sucks! Don't even try and convince me that Alleycats is real pizza.

I don't know, is that enough? I just want to make sure that someone doesn't show up here and hate it and blame me. I also want to document my observations and see how they change over time. I've done a decent amount of travelling and if there is one utopia; it has to be Switzerland. Taiwan ain't no Switzerland. You'll be lucky if you can find Swiss cheese here.

a week in the new digs

2010-06-06T01:20:00.000+08:00

I moved into the new apartment on Monday. It has almost been a week. I did some major upgrades today:

bath mat
trash can
pot (not the herbal kind, the steel/teflon kind)
2 bowls (not the herbal kind, the ceramic kind)
pair of scissors

So far I love the neighborhood, and the neighbors for that matter. Everyone I share the elevator with says "Hi". The security guy always says "Hi", or "Hey". We're in a new high rise building mixed in with 5-6 story buildings constructed in the 70s. That's what you get in Taipei. It's pretty black and white. I'm a bit put off by being in a haves vs. have-nots situation but it's not really that way. There are a few westerners in my building but mostly Taiwanese. The ex-pat community here is not big enough to make it an economic demarcation line, outside of Tian Mu at least.

There is a park that runs through the middle of our street with a Buddhist temple in the middle. Older guys in the park play mahjong or cards. You get a couple homeless people camping out at night, but the vagrancy situation here is quite low. There is a big fruit market at the corner and another market at the other end of the street that I haven't really checked out yet. 2 blocks away is the Shilin Night Market, perhaps the most famous in all of Taiwan. We're in a perfect situation where we get no noise from the market but the convenience of great food a 5 minute walk away, every night of the week. Near the night market is an arcade type place with a basement bowling alley and a mechanical bull. They make you wear a helmet and face guard when you ride the bull. No fun.

The bus (15 minute ride) for Shirley to get to work is 100 yards away and the MRT (subway) is another block away so we can get to anywhere in Taipei very conveniently. There is a bigger park a block behind the building and they have an 8 lane 50m outdoor pool. An 8 story YMCA is about a 10 minute walk; I haven't had the chance to get there yet. If you head a couple blocks away from the market and MRT line you hit the river and there is a network of paved trails along the riverbank that you can run/walk/cycle. So, it really is a great location. It's also pretty close to the highway and my commute to work has been about 30 minutes which is a nice relief compared to the Sherman to Wilton commute of 1hr+.

The only reason I bought the pot is because I took home a bowl of oyster noodles from the market last night to eat the next day and realized that I don't have a microwave...

The answer of keeper

2010-06-02T23:30:00.000+08:00

Now that I have an ARC and a paycheck, I was trying to scramble to leave work to get to a Honda dealer to look at buying a car. I'm stuck in this expensive daily rental until I buy my way out of this situation. I first checked the rental place as some people at work have gotten really good deals on buying a long term corporate rental from this guy's fleet. He sent me th roster and they have some great deals on Corollas with 100k mileage but I'm looking for something newer. I hears stories of people getting lucky and scooping up a 5 series or Lexus for cheap but you have to be in the right place at the right time.

Then I get a reminder from my dept. secretary that we are having a meeting of our entire division at 9:30 and everyone must be punctual. My experience is, the Taiwanese are never punctual. Not once has anyone showed up for an appointment on time. But, OK, I'll be the first one there and then wait 5 minutes for everyone else to trickle in late. I had read that being fashionably late is not part of Taiwanese culture. Pfft...

To top it off, I then get a letter from HR that as a "new hire" I need to make some personal introduction in front of the entire company tomorrow. Grrrrreat.

And when you thought it just couldn't get any worse, nor more bad movie cliche, I grab my stuff and go in to the elevator and as it arrives at the first floor it just stops. Door doesn't open. At first I thought, maybe it's still moving. And I waited, and waited, and waited. Nothing.

So I hit the button for the second floor. Elevator went up. Bell went "ding". Door didn't open. Unlike my company in the States, here they are more into standardized start/top times. 9-6. Back in the States it was very staggered by job function with people starting the day anywhere from 6-9:30A. But here, there is a mass exodus around 6-6:30. Luckily we have two elevators since one was now dysfunctional but even so, my elevator was now being called floor to floor. It would go to the floor but the door would never open. I wonder what the people thought on the other side.

At one point it seemed stationary on the first floor and I tugged on the door a bit but some automatic voice came on and admonished my in Chinese, maybe. All the elevators talk here, FYI. So I pressed "this emergency call button for the answer of keeper". Th keeper didn't speak any English but I was hoping that he at least realized that whatever I was saying, it was coming from the elevator, and that something was probably wrong.

When I was in college, we had this "science tower" and the top floor was a posh lounge that was used for entertaining and fundraiser events and such. There was a key hole in the elevator that allowed access to the "7th floor" and my roommate heard that if you are between floors and you rip the elevator door open and trigger the safety mechanism bringing it to a halt, you can then shut the door and select the button #7 and a glitch in the matrix will then give you access and send you up. We just had to try it and sure enough, it worked! Then some idiot who isn't me decided he had to turn the light on, at night, and some security guard a half mile away saw it and came up and busted us. He relayed some Barney Fife story to the Dean of Student that got translated as, we climbed into the elevator shaft and were "surfing" on top of the elevator cabin. WTF?!?! We explained to the Dean that we cracked the code for the magic 7th floor and were sitting on the sofas flicking the lights on and he actually thought that was kinda cool. The next week he got arrested for soliciting a male prostitute and he was never seen or heard from again, but I digress...

Point being though, I'm not afraid to rip open the door of a moving elevator, been there done that. So not willing to entrust my freedom to the keeper, I got it to pause at the first floor and just clawed my way out of there. I was standing in the doorway to prevent the elevator from taking off so someone else didn't get stuck and was trying to get the attention of the security guard at the desk. Then the keeper came around the corner and realized that I was the stuck guy speaking English. I tried to convey to him that he may want to perform some routine maintenance or check on the elevator so someone else doesn't get suck but the language barrier was way to thick and he wasn't that concerned about people getting stuck in elevators. I don't know what other function he has in our building.

I made my way home and then up to the Honda dealer by MRT. I showed up at 8:15 and there were several employees in there but none were willing to sell me their product. Sales ends at 8:00. I don't understand why people are paid to man a desk of a company that sells cars but they are not willing to accept revenue. I can't see what other revenue they are generating for Honda but such a thing is no surprise in Taiwan. Maybe they are the elevator keepers. It's probably all for the best anyway as I wasn't on any sort of lucky streak today and buying a car in this state is probably not a good idea. So I settled for some teppanyaki chicken and a TB at the market. Sat next to a dog.

Move-In Day

2010-06-01T00:13:00.000+08:00

Even though my lease doesn't start until June 3, my landlord was keen to letting me move in as soon as the lease was signed and he got his deposit so I planned with my RE agent to move in today. Our stuff from home isn't scheduled to be picked up until June 10 and will take 4-6 weeks to arrive so I have quite some time with an empty apartment. My RE agent advised that I need to get a bed.

I went to fight the crowd at Ikea this weekend and barely managed to get a cart with the bare necessities through the checkout line.

Bed frame
Mattress
Sheets
Blanket
Pillows
Towels

At one point I had a single serving set of plates and silverware but left that behind as the bag started getting heavy. Ikea charges $40 flat fee to deliver any order >$400 and they will deliver next day with your choice of three different time slots. At the delivery counter I gave him my address in pinyin and he said he needed it in Chinese. Luckily I had a photocopy of my ARC and he was able to pull the address off of that, otherwise, I may have been in trouble. I had my RE Agent, Hope's card with me so I gave them her info as a contact in case they needed to speak in Chinese.

I left the office at mid day as we planned to meet at the apartment at 2:00 to hand over the keys, go through the rundown of how the place works, get the bed delivered, and most importantly, get the internet set up! No TV, no landline, just internet. This weekend I also got a router at the Gangguan Computer Market which warrants its own separate post in the near future. I met Hope at the building and the internet guy was already. Hope set it up through KBRO. It's supposedly 10Mbit for $20/mo. So far I am getting actual results of 8Mbit so that's pretty impressive. Such bandwidth in the states at that price in unheard of.

When I arrived Hope asked where I parked and I told her I was at the commuter pay lot down the street and she questioned why I didn't park in the garage. I said, "You know it's not so simple that I can just drive that car into that garage..." She relented that I was right, as a radio signal device and a padlock stood in my way of getting into my parking spot at this point. We took care of the cable guy first; router was plug and play and he was done in all of five minutes. Trash and recyclables are on B1, my parking spot is on B2, and the gym/pool is closed on Mondays for cleaning. Those were the vital pieces of data.

Then the Ikea guys showed up. 6 pieces comprised 1 bed, 1 mattress. Hope asked, "Where's the rest of the stuff?"

"In the United States."

"You guys can get by on so little stuff."

All I need for now is a bed, the means to shower, and internet.

Hope left and I hung out in the lobby to meet the landlord, get my official set of keys, and get access to the parking space. He brought his daughter to translate, she spent 4 years at University of Tennessee. I said, "So you're a Volunteer?" She said, "No. I actually am employed as a counselor." I was like, "No, no, no. Go Vols!" And she embarrassingly realized what I meant. If I had any reason at all to be suspicious of her credentials, I would have sworn there is no way she went to Tennessee.

We went up to the apartment and the landlord laid out this unbelievable set of keys. Granted there are some duplicates but there is the radio device for the garage, the mailbox key, a skeleton key for the apartment door which activates 4 bolts in series, a RFID scanner for the front door and elevator, a tuning fork thing to activate the panic button in the bedroom, and keys for each bedroom door in the apartment. Phew!

There is also this security system near the door where I can pick up a phone and a little video display shows live footage of the front door and I can talk to a guest at the door and buzz them up. There is a button to call the security desk and then the video display switches over to the security guard station. And there is...another panic button. The day shift security guard and the manager were actually very nice. They constantly laugh at everything like they are punch drunk. They probably ARE punch drunk.

After I finished with the landlord I got my car out of the lot and moved it into the basement at my building and hauled my Ikea accessories up to get started on the bed. I also picked up the FIX, at Ikea, which is every tool you need to assemble every piece of furniture at Ikea. Actually, I think you can construct an entire Ikea store from this tool kit.

It took about an hour to get the bed together and then I bolted over to the Shilin night market for something to eat. The night market will certainly get several blog posts of its own; you could actually write an entire blog on the essence of the night market.

Afterwards I had a nice comfy bed to jump in, though not much else. I technically am still in the other apartment for two more days though I'm hoping to gather my belongings and check out after work tomorrow. I actually now have three residences. If I could only sell one of them, I'd be in good shape.

Sunset provided some nice views from the apartment. We are up on the 8th floor.

Farewell, My Musical Taste

2010-05-30T23:50:00.000+08:00

I arrived on the island with an older CD with several albums of MP3's burned on it. While I won't try and say that I don't listen to a lot of crap, I think I have a little bit of integrity when it comes to music selection. That all went out the window when my car rental agency called to say they needed to switch my car. I know I was supposed to be in a smaller class car, yes, smaller than a Toyota Corolla, but they gave me an upgrade due to availability. So I had to go meet the "new car" out at the curb one morning and didn't realize I was looking right at it because it was the same exact car, same color, just with a bit more mileage. They had someone come along willing to sign a one year lease so I had to switch into an older vehicle. I would soon realize that the real downgrade would be that this car's stereo could not read MP3's.

Now I'm stuck listening to iCRT, the local English language station. It actually has decent news, but the music and D.J. banter is quite awful. I am not exaggerating when I say on every segment I drive, I hear Lady Antebellum and Rhianna, and am embarrassed to say that I can't get either song out of my head. I decided I needed to do something about this and came across an upcoming performance of Farewell My Concubine performed by the Taipei Chinese Orchestra at Zhongshan Hall in Ximen. The first challenge was getting tickets.

I went online to their website and for some reason, on the Englisg version of the website, this particular performance did not show up. If I switched to Chinese, then it showed up. So I tried to work through it using Google Translator and got stuck when I needed to create an account, I forget exactly why. But being concerned that I wouldn't even be able to get them in the mail or select "Will Call", I thought it better to try and get them in person. They broker through the Eslite Bookstore so I stopped there on my way home from work.

I went to the main store in Xinyi and went down to the customer service desk in the basement. Not knowing what the language barrier might be, I printed out the webpage for this event in Chinese so I could at least show them what event I was looking for, then worry about selecting tickets. They ended up speaking English very well and I chose a seat in the 4th row orchestra, pretty close to center, for $15! At this point, I was wondering how cheezy this might be as you'd be lucky to get into a crappy Matthew Maconahay movie in NYC for 15 bucks. And there was no nonsense service charges on top a la Ticketmaster. Fifteen bucks out the door.

The ~1100 seat theater is located a couple blocks from the MRT station. The program was 5 pieces, the last of which was Farewell My Concubine but it had a very interesting build to it. The first thing that struck me during the first piece was that the orchestra was predominantly Chinese instruments. That may seem like, duh, but I've never seen an entire orchestra composed in such a way. I've seen that lone guy in the subway playing a "Chinese violin". The first piece showcased a woman, Kemei Jiang playing the jinghu and she was amazing.

For the second, Wu Wei, a Chinese guy from Berlin was playing the sheng, which is a handheld instrument with vertical pipes and 27 valves. I was so close I could hear the percussive sounds of his fingers tapping the body of the instrument. Wu Wei was often smiling and jumping around on stage, really getting into the performance, not like my experience with classical musicians.

The third piece was the most interesting as it featured Huun Huur Tu, a quartet of Siberian "throat singers". I couldn't even attempt to describe it other than to say their instruments looked like they were made 2,000 years ago, held together with rope. You'll have to see for yourself. They were playing a solo gig the next evening so they were worked into this program but they meshed really well with the orchestra.

There was an intermission after which a Finnish cellist, Anssi Karttunen took the stage for a Stravinsky-esque concerto for cello. Maybe he was just sandbagging, or maybe Finnish classical music isn't my thing, but his performance here paled in comparison to the climax, Farewell My Concubine.

This piece is meant to be a duel between the male and female characters of the opera. Kemei Jiang rejoined the stage to battle it out against the Finnish cellist and it was fantastic. He really came to life in this performance and it served as a great climax to the entire night. I'm very excited about the opportunities to see world class musicians within minutes of my home for the cost of a pizza. Now if I could only find a pizza here worth $15.

Maybe I should have gotten the Attack

2010-05-29T11:22:00.000+08:00

I've been trying out different flavors of ramen every time I pick up some supplies at the quickie mart and on my last trip, I found myself heavily debating the "kimchi" flavor vs. the "Spicy". I already had the kimchi and it was good. I figured I'd try something new with the spicy and that turned into an experiment gone awry.

It was very hot. Maybe a bit hotter than typical Thai or Vietnamese broths but I managed to put it down with a handful of tissues at my side. About 10 minutes later I felt like I was going to vomit. Fortunately that subsided and I was able to get to bed early as I have a long day planned for the morning, that is, until I woke up in gut wrenching pain! I had some antacid tablets and quickly choked one of those down with some yogurt drink and put the TV on because I knew it would take a while for any relief to kick in.

I found an English language Taiwanese news station and they ran a story on laundry detergent and how they have found harmful levels of nonylphenol ethoxyltae in various brands on the shelves in Taiwan? A doctor came on to explain that it is potentially "harmful to the testicles". So I'm watching them yanking the stuff off shelves in the stores and it looks like the same stuff that I have! Keep in mind, other than the fact that it comes in a Tide-orange bottle, I cannot accurately identify any similarities or lack thereof.

At least the doctor on TV didn't say, "After the testicular damage, you will immediately experience gut wrenching pain." Then I would really have a problem.

Time to fold laundry...

57 Channels (And Nothin' On)

2010-05-24T23:19:00.001+08:00

I am moving into my permanent place on Monday and will likely be without TV. My intent is to live off internet based media and just connect my laptop up to the TV since it has HDMI out, not that my TV will be here before August. I get a lot of questions about, "What is TV like in Taiwan?" and it actually IS an interesting question, or interesting response.

I have cable TV including about 100 channels in my current place. I'm not sure if I have the "foreigner package" or anything like that but I'll starting with English language TV, I get CNN, BBC, HBO, Discovery (sometimes dubbed in Chinese), Nat Geo (sometimes dubbed in Chinese), and several mediocre American movie channels, like "Hollywood". I haven't watched much beyond CNN and BBC and have come to the conclusion that there really is only 20 minutes of marketable news on any given day. BBC is just as bad as CNN in running the same stuff over and over. And it's not even the Headline News version, has our collective attention span gotten that short?

So on to Taiwanese TV. The great thing is it is very predictable which means I can get great bog material any time of day. The following programming is available 24/7. I kid you not, I just took all of these snapshots in sequence and I knew I would get each and every one of them.

1. Baseball - Baseball in on all the time. I couldn't get Yankee baseball back home through Dish Network nor MLB.com because of blackout restrictions and Steinbrenner family vendettas but I can always get the Yanks here. Live on up to 3 stations and replayed throughout the day. You can also get local Taiwanese pros, aka CPBL (See my previous post on Tian Mu Stadium). They also show the Dodgers and Red Sox quite frequently.

2. Annoying women selling stuff - It usually revolves around skin whitening cream or some weight loss supplement or non-cardio fitness type thing, like that vibrating band that shakes your whole body into weight loss. No joke.

3. Puppet Shows - I can't tell you how many attempts with a cell phone camera it took for me to get this shot as the puppet shows are all about crazy fight scenes which resulted in a pink and purple blur. Think Final Fantasy but with puppets.

4. Monk TV - Not the OCD detective, Buddhist monk TV. At least 5 channels at once. They all look like they are filmed in someone's basement. Think Wayne's World, but with monks.

5. Stock Market TV - There are always at least 4 or 5 financial channels and they all involve some printout of box plots with hand written notes and a guy holding a pointer. It really is that cheezy. For a society that is supposedly so high tech, there are a lot of anomalies.

6. Cartoons - There are several adult-ish oriented cartoon channels and even a Chinese Cartoon Network with Japanimation. You can also catch Sponge Bob dubbed in Chinese and subbed in Japanese. As you can see in the photo, Sponge Bob himself is not subbed because he's always too stoned to say anything intelligible.

7. Corny soap operas with crying dudes - this comprise about 20 channels at all times of day.

OK, so there was one thing that is not on all the time. I only saw it once and scrambled to grab the camera:

Japanese Women Wrestling - This is not like the women's wrestling that I grew up with nor any Chyna like nonsense. These women are nuts, extremely athletic and brutal. In this pictured move she grabbed the other by the legs and spun here around like a helicopter about 10 times, getting faster each time and then just let go and hurled her like a rag doll. Insane!

In my plan to get TV/movie entertainment there is a big hurdle:

Most legit web based video content restricts access to those in the United States. I'm not sure if Guam gets in on the action but Taiwan can't access Hulu, Netflix or even Scrabble on Facebook. There is a loophole: you can log in to a proxy service which will route you through a U.S. server to make it look like you are in the States. I was using a free (advertising based) service that worked for a few days but Hulu just caught up with them.

There are pay services which are supposed to be better and stay one step ahead technologically against Hulu. I may give that a shot once settled in; I wonder if it will work. I'm willing to pay Netflix and just use the video on demand service rather than pirate movies but that is also restricted to those that can convince the Netflix servers that they are in the U.S. There is so much other stuff to do here, I'm hoping to divorce my TV. I always liked this T-shirt:

Foraging

2010-05-23T16:46:00.003+08:00

I've heard a common complaint among the Westerners at work that coming up with a strategy for dinner can be difficult; it all depends on what you are looking for. Luckily for us, lunch is free in our cafeteria. The first day I ate in the cafe was a Friday and I did what I find myself doing often, and stood off to the side to watch someone else go through the drill. There was a counter with women behind it putting food on plates, assembly line style, and our employees would just walk p and grb a plate. Then off to the soup line which had two choices and some fresh fruit. Then they went and sat down.

I scanned the room for a cashier. Nothing. Was there a separate exit through which you were charged? Nope. People seemed to just eat and go. There must be some high tech mechanism. Do you scan your badge somewhere? Not that I can see. Maybe my office chair has a strain gauge in it and at the end of the month I get billed based on my weight.I grab a plate, you have 2 choices of a set meal and it tends to be a mix of Asian/Western. Like a chili-garlic chicken breast, or teryaki salisbury steak. After eating I followed someone out, no option to pay. I was embarassed to ask anyone, as if it is free, I don't want to be the one to suggest that someone would be willing to pay for it, and potentially ruin it for everyone else. Maybe the boss forgot to install the cash register in the master plan.

So I waited until Monday and asked a colleague which whom I can confide who replied, "Yes Mike, there is such a thing as a free lunch!"

So, what to do for dinner in Taiwan?

My goal is to never go to McDonald's unless I'm legitimately craving Chicken McNuggets, assuming they even have them here. If the menu at McDonald's vs. the USA is anything like Starbucks vs. the USA, I may be missing out at McDonalds as I've found the food at Starbucks in Taiwan and Japan to be much better, though they no longer have the Raspberry Crepes they did a few years ago. So here are some approaches that I've taken since I've been here:

If you go out with a local and you like a particular dish, have them write stuff down in Chinese or grab a take out menu and translate over the top. You can later come back on your own and use your written translation.

Restaurants that have an English name out front like, "Mango Tango", probably have Enlish notes on the menu and there are probably a few employees with decent English skills.

There are a lot of Vietnamese/Pho places. If there is not an English menu, there will at least be a Vietnamese menu. If you never imagined that you could read a Vietnamese menu, such things will seem quite simple once you are struggling through traditional Chinese as Vietnames is at least romanized so you can read the words. Look up a Vietnames menu online and you can write down about 15 vocabulary words to get you through the menu. Beef/Pork/Chicken/Shrimp/Crab - Rice/Noodle/Soup is about all you need to know to get a great meal at pretty cheap prices.

Photo Menus - there will be a lot of places with photo menus; this saved us in Japan. It can be a challenge to tell what you are really looking at, especially in a bowl of soup or if something is breaded/fried like Tonkatsu, which is popular here. If you are feeling slightly brave, just point and eat.

Street Food - Taiwan is well known for its street food. In the evening, propane fueled carts roll out to the street side and crank out some amazing food at rock bottom prices. Pho looks like an extravagance compared to cart food. In Japan it is considered bad ettiquitte to stroll the streets eating food but it Taiwan there is no such rule, not even remotely. Here's the problem with street food: the cart vendors typically don't speak a lick of English, and it can be quite difficult to tell what they are cooking. I once ordered something that at first glance looked like grilled chicken on a stick and the guy was basting it with a teriyaki sauce. I ordered one and in looking at the price ($1) was thinking, even in Taiwan, no way can chicken breast be THAT cheap. I am pretty confident it turned out to be Tofu, but I'll never know for sure. Dumplings are very good as long as you ar enot too concerned what is inside them. Pork, chicken and vegetarian seem common and I haven't run across anything exotic at the dumpling stands. So, speaking of exotic...there will be many stands containing grilled, basted, umm...innards, I guess? One of the guys at work has a "food survival guide" of sorts and he explained that there is a Chinese character that is a predecessor for anything that includes innards, so once you learn that character, you can be on the lookout. I inadvertenly had pig's feet and intestine in Japan, both of which were quite good, neither of which I would have ordered voluntarily.

Traditional Taiwanese Restaurants - this is a big challenge so far. Local restaurants typically do not have English menus nor English speaking staff and if you want to have a nice, cool, sit down meal, you will have to learn to navigate these waters. A guy on the train taught me to say in Chinese, "I'll take your best dish". He said to call the boss over and ask for "the best" if I don't know what to order. I'm still a bit untrusting to do this, maybe, only because if I'm the boss and a Westerner strolled in and did this, I'd be tempted to see what I could get this poor sucker to eat. So, I'm hoping to get some help from folks at work in both written and spoken Chinese to be able to navigate the menu a little. I think this is the one thing that will force me to study some written language rather than just spoken. One option is if there is a local place by you, grab a take out menu and bring it in to work to be translated, then go back with your personal menu in tow.

Buffet - there are some nice buffets here and this can be an easier way to get mroe traditional local food without dealing with Chinese. Some charge by the weight if it's more of a cafeteria style place but there are also some nice restaurants where you can pay one price andit's all-you-can-eat. Some of these are stashed away on the second floor of a mixed use building so ask the locals or check guide books to find out where they are.

If you really get stuck there is also KFC and Pizza Hut in most high traffic areas and you can seek out a TGI Fridays or Outback steakhouse for something better.

I wonder what vegans, vegetarians or people who avoid pork and/or shellfish do. That can't be easy. I did eat at a place called Minder Vegetarian in the Taipei Main Station that was very good, buffet style. Any other vegetarian recommendations would be highly appreciated.

As for prices, at the local place by my temporary home, a combo fried rice (chicken/shrimp/pork) goes for $2.20. A big tofu egg drop soup meant for two is $1.90 and a Taiwanese snack that I love, scallion pancake, is $1.90 or $2.50 if you want it made with roast beef, which was awesome.

At the Vietnamese restaurant near the office, we usually end up paying less than $10 each for many plates to share including spring rolls, salad, soup and stir fry.

At a fancy Thai place in downtown Taipei, rice, seafood stir-fry, lemongrass iced tea and a beer was $21 including tip.

My experience is tipping is not customary in Taiwan except at fancier restaurants where they automatically add 10% to the bill. So you can just pay whatever it says on the bill and you are good to go. Prices include tax. The guy on the train said it is much cheaper to eat out than it is to buy food an cook yourself. Having no real cooking supplies here, I haven't crossed that bridge yet. There is an open air market right outside the door of our permanent apartment so I am looking forward to moving there, getting our kitchen stuff shipped over, and cooking with locally bought ingredients rather than big box supermarkets back home that ship everything in from South America.

I also notice a lot of Shabu-Shabu and Mongolian Grill type places which will be great to try once Shirley arrives or if I can get a group to go out but doesn't work well dining solo.

Hygeine can be an issue that you will have to get used to. I have eaten in some really dingy looking places and have yet to see a cockroach, which I did see at a really nice restaurant. Right now, I am writing this at Starbucks and am watching a monster cucaracha sitting on top of an empty chair across the aise. There are 4 people in close proximity, I'm wondering who will notice it first...if anyone.

Gangsta's Paradise

2010-05-21T23:28:00.000+08:00

I have a bank account! I feel like I'm somebody!

One of the HR reps came to my office yesterday to deliver my ATM card and gave me some instructions. I must go online and change my password for online banking within 30 days. I must also go to a First Bank (my bank) ATM within 30 days to change my PIN. Deal. I immediately logged in to the website and changed my password. I also tried to find a list of branch locations but that did not exist.

Websites here are absolutely terrible. Even if it's in Chinese, via Google Translate I can tell it's terrible. And by that I simply mean function not aesthetics. For example, a bank that doesn't allow you to search for locations. So I went out for dinner tonight into a busier section of town and figured, on the way home I'd keep a look out for a First Bank ATM to change the PIN.

I saw every possible bank known to man. Take a look a this table below. If you pick one from column A, one from column B, and one from column C and call that the name of a bank; I saw it.

Then right as I was about to come to the end of the strip of businesses and turn down a pretty vacant road toward my building, there it stood in front of me, a First Bank branch! I wrote down the default 6 digit pin on a Post-It Note (actually a patent violating residue free sticky paper - more on that in the future) so that I could change it at an ATM. I was hoping the card reader on the machine was one that you just swipe and not one that sucks the card completely into the machine because I was sure that would be the end of my card.

Unfortunately, the ATM had jaws, in went the card. The first screen asked me to select a language, Chinese or English. OK, this is off to a great start. Then I see the most amazing thing I've ever seen at an ATM:

The screen says, "Attention! The gangster may use the English operation interface to cheat you!" I have no idea what this means, but now, not only am I neurotic about losing the card in the machine, but I'm looking over my shoulder for "The Gangster". I don't think they mean Steve Miller's Gangster of Love. I'm actually more worried about getting cheated by this ATM than I am about the gangster.

I went to the "more options" section of the menu and found the choice to change PIN. Now, if you've read any of this blog you know there is no way this is going to go down smoothly; I am not going to feel a sense of success walking away from this ATM. It's either going to eat my card, or something else will go wrong, right?

This ATM card is a VISA Debit card with 2 technologies built in. It has a normal magnetic strip, and an RF IC device that you can just wave by a sensor at some cash registers. So when I say I want to change my PIN it asked if I want to change the IC PIN or the Magnetic PIN. Clutched in my hand I have a 6 digit default PIN. As I attempt to change the magnetic PIN, it only allows me to input 4 digits and soon after I fail to change the PIN. Luckily, it doesn't eat my card and allows me to switch over to change the IC PIN which is a success. Where the heck do I get the magnetic PIN?!?!

Upon returning to the hotel, I find the original printout from the bank that the ATM card came in and it's in Chinese except for the PIN # and it appears to me like the default magnetic PIN might be 1234. So when I'm in the city tomorrow I may try that if I can find a First Bank. Watch, this time the card will get eaten.

Not that it really matters. My account balance is $0.00. I'm just glad I was able to get the account opened before the first payday as I could just imagine what the process is to recover from a failed direct deposit.

Brass Monkey, that funky monkey

2010-05-21T19:22:00.001+08:00

There is a web forum focused on ex-pat living in Taiwan called Forumosa, I have been reading it extensively for the past 8 months or so, ever since I started thinking about coming to Taiwan, so perhaps even longer. Within the postings you can find answers to everything and people are really quick to help answer your questions, as long as they haven't already been asked a bunch of times and you are too lazy to use the search function. Pretty much like any other forum.

Through the forum the moderator announced that there would be a happy hour meetup of the "Forumosans" (as they call themselves) at the Brass Monkey, which happens to be on the MRT line which runs past my building, well, withing walking distance of my building, as long as you can walk far. So I decided to be the new, friendly Mike instead of the old, Connecticut Mike and show up, even though I wouldn't know a soul. There is something a little freaky about the whole thing, OK, a lot freaky about meeting "virtual" people in person but I think that is the wave of the social future, weaving online interactions with personal interactions, much like my meetup last week with the blog readers.

I get the sense that there is a network of local bars and ex-pat bars, the latter of which the Brass Monkey falls into, can't you tell by the name? I showed up and it was a near ghost town. I met the manager of the bar, Matt, who was from Boston and had a good chat about the place and how he ended up in Taiwan. Thats the ubiquitous first topic that always comes up, but it is very interesting to hear of the different paths that people took to get here. There were a handful of "Forumosans" there. In walking up and introducing myself I felt kinda like Dorfman in Animal House when he says, "Excuse me, sir, is this the Delta House?" While there were no Blutos there, at least not on this night, I did feel like it was a "Sure, come on in..." welcome.

It was interesting to meet people with differing backgrounds sharing a strong common thread. I was surprised that it wasn't just teachers, but also people in publishing, restaurants, and software industries. Time blew by quickly and I had to rush out so as to not miss the last train home at midnight. If you live in Taipei and read Forumosa, you should come out to gathering. One other surprising thing, most people I met had been in Taipei for years, some 15-20 years. I thought it would be more of a transient community. So there must be a lot of lurkers at Forumosa that haven't been out to an event. Come on out!

Take me out to the ballgame

2010-05-18T04:00:00.001+08:00

It was only a matter of time before I made my way to a ballgame. My other travelogue pastime involves being part of a group of friends that has seen a game at every Major League Baseball stadium in the United States. It took ten years to accomplish and maintaining that status will be a work in progress as from time to time, new stadiums will be built and new stadiums must be visited. Publishing the stories is an incomplete aspiration but some of the experiences can be seen at Ballpark Roadtrip.

I had the pleasure of seeing a game at "the Big Egg" in Tokyo which was just insane. If you think baseball is borning, in a lot of ways you are right. But don't let that stand in your way of going to a game in Japan. The environment is more like a European football/soccer match than an American baseball game. I wasn't quite sure what to expect in Taiwan, but I headed down to Tian Mu Baseball Stadium to see the La New Bears take on the Brother Elephants. Also like Japan, the teams in Taiwan are corporate named.

So what is pro baseball like in Taiwan? Take the spirit of Japanese baseball and shrink it down to the scale of the Minor Leagues in the U.S. Tian Mu stadium holds 10,500 fans and there were about 4,000 in attendance for a Sunday evening game. The price of a ticket close to the field is 300NT ($10) and a bleacher seat can be had for 200. The food selection included fried mushrooms, grilled meat skewers, Taiwan sausages, some Pizza Hut thing in a box, and of course, hot dogs. The price of everything except the Pizza Hut box is about $1.50. What is also $1.50? A tall boy of Taiwan Beer. Even at the minors in the States, you can't touch a beer for under $5. Some will argue that Taiwan Beer is swill, but people pay $8 for an Old Style at Wrigley Field.

When you approach the ticket windows, you choose a line based on which team you are cheering for and the stadium is split down the middle with home team fans on the right, vistors on the left. This is the same as Japan. I wasn't aware of this in Japan and was amazed to see a sold out game, 50k+ fans in Tokyo, with the stadium precisely split right down the middle. I had a friend hook me up with tickets in Tokyo so I didn't understand how it happened, but it was obviously by design.

The fans in Taipei were equally as rabid as those in Tokyo, allbeit in smaller numbers. There were a couple guys waving huge flags right behind the dugout and a guy with a microphone leading the home crowd in cheers. There was a guy with a trumpet helping the cause and this later morphed into a 4 piece brass section. Everyone except me seemed to have some noise making device along the line of "thundersticks" with the Elephants logo on it. There was a specific beat to which they banged the noisemakers together in unison and there were Chinese songs. Though the visiting Bears used the melody of Popeye the Sailor Man as their theme.

Although they use the DH, from what I've seen on TV and at this particular game, it tends to be more of a National League style of play. They actually bunt, they actually hit and run. It's also a fast paced game, no acting like an OCD goofball in the batter's box. Just stand there and get ready to swing the bat! They have a halftime of sorts at the end of the fifth. The grounds crew comes out and the players clear the field and do some stretching and warming up in foul territory. It's probably a solid ten minutes. I haven't yet noticed what they do on TV during this time. They have a solid fence along the wall to screen you from sharply hit foul balls which was pretty surprising since their scooter use isn't quite characteristic of being risk averse. At the end of the game the players all lined up side-by-side along the foul line and bowed in unison to the crowd. Then a couple guys with purple mohawks and a guitar took the field to play a song and had a Milli Vanilli -esque audio malfunction, the crowd seemed neither surprised nor disappointed.

New blog feature - Map

2010-05-17T22:17:00.000+08:00

If you look to the right you can now access my Taipei Places Google Map.When I mention significant things in the blog, I'll put a marker on the map, so if you're local you can find out where it is. Or if you're not local, you can reference the map to figure out if I'm living in a country that the evening news is reporting is under siege, junta, revolution or general civil unrest. Since not everyone knows what a Taiwan is...

Driving in Taipei

2010-05-17T18:45:00.002+08:00

I'm sure bellyaching about the driving in Taiwan is quite cliche but I'll at least make some comments about it since many ex-pats may be debating whether or not to get a car here.. My company is outside of Taipei and the MRT line out that way is not complete yet (2013) and since my wife will be working in Taipei, one of us needs a car. Part of the whole point of coming here was to enjoy a big international city and the excitement that comes with it so we have chosen to live in Shilin which is equally convenient to MRT, highway, and bus line up through Tian Mu.

Therefore, I will be commuting 22km by car to work. I have never driven in the Far East before. When my company sends us to Korea or Taiwan, we are highly discouraged from attempting to drive. They have no problem paying for taxis and limos to take us wherever we need to go. But since I'm here for the long haul, I must take on the task of driving.

If there is one succinct rule of thumb I would give about driving in Taiwan it's, Do not look at the lines on the road, ever. Like the points in Who's Line Is It Anyway, they just don't matter. You know how when you are speeding through a corner with a jersey barrier on the side, you're not supposed to look at the wall, otherwise you'll hit it? Same thing, follow the lines and you will hit something, because nobody else follows the lines. Cars and scooters intertwine and basically follow the path of least resistance down the road. If there is an opening in front of you, you take it.

The layout of the roads by the traffic engineers is merely a suggestion. On my way home from work I am on a main road, you need to make a left to get to the highway, the road has four lanes, 2 marked to turn left, 2 marked to go straight. During rush hour, all four lanes turn left. And once you come around that corner, all four lanes of traffic need to fit back into two lanes. The crazy thing is, it all seems to work. Very rarely do you hear a horn honk, people just let each other in, and I haven't yet seen a real wreck. A couple rear-end fender benders, but that's it.

One possible reason that there aren't accidents on top of accidents is there is extensive traffic monitoring, remote speed cameras, stoplight cameras, and cops on the side of the road running camera based radar traps. You get a ticket in the mail and you pay it at 7-11. You do EVERYTHING at 7-11 (more on that in the future). I didn't quite realize the photo enforcement scenario until I read it on someone else's blog a couple days ago. Now I know why every so often, the GPS makes a "BONG" noise and something red in Chinese flashes on the screen. It's probably alerting me to a known traffic cam. I guess I'll be paying a visit to 7-11 soon.

Speaking of GPS, before leaving the U.S. I wanted to have a GPS in hand that would work in Taiwan. Since Garmin is based in Taiwan, I figured that would be a good choice. I previously had a TomTom, which was OK, but support is nearly non-existent. After buying a Nuvi 765, I was surprised to find out that Garmin refuses to sell me a Taiwan map for a U.S. serialized Garmin. There are ways to pirate maps, and I am not advocating piracy, but I attempted to pay for the map and my money was denied so I boarded the plane with Garmin in hand. Be warned, there are Chinese maps and English maps for Taiwan. If you are reading this blog, you probably want the English maps. Taiwan City Navigator 8.63B works well, if you can get it.

I noticed in my rental car agreement that it would come with a GPS so I had that as a fallback plan not knowing if mine would actually work. Upon delivery of the rental car, I looked through the favorites stored in the Nuvi 205 and it already had my apartment and my office stored in its database, nice! I used it to make my way out to the office and it worked fine. After using it throughout Taipei for a couple weeks I have noticed a few issues which may be generically applied to GPS in Taipei:

Inputting an address can be an issue due to the different forms of romanizing Chinese, that it, converting from Kanji characters into words that look more like English. There were different standards used which result in different spellings, Chung, Zhong, and Jhong can all be the same thing as far as I can tell so when you attempt input an address, it may be spelled differently than what the Garmin will recognize.
Another issue is that the Garmin does not treat Taipei as the "city", you must further input what we would refer to as the neighborhood, for example, Shilin, which in Garmin is spelled Shihlin (note above bullet point). Often you will find an address in a guidebook that will not specify which neighborhood it is in so you may have to guess. One saving grace is the POI database is quite extensive and you can find most things, from big department stores to small mom & pop coffee shops.
Navigation itself can be troublesome. First of all, the technology of GPS is not accurate enough to always figure out what street you are on in Taipei because the streets are so close together. A variance of 30 feet can easily put you on 3 different parallel roads.
With narrow streets, tall buildings, and cloud cover, maintaining a signal can be difficult. It also takes time to lock a signal and when coming out of a parking garage right into traffic, you may be on your own for a few turns until the GPS can acquire satellites. I have found the Garmin 765 to be much better than my old TomTom GO 700 in this sense. That TomTom would require you to sit still for a minute before getting a fix on your position. If I just drove out of my garage, I could cover 10 miles without locking because I could get that far before a long enough pause in my travels.
Couple the previous 3 points together, and once you deviate from the intended route, the CPU speed in the GPS is sometimes not fast enough to easily get you back on track. By the time it recalculates the next route, you're already 3 turns past where it wanted you to go and you have to cross your fingers for a red light.

All in all, the GPS will get you to your destination. I also find it great for walking and the Garmin has a pedestrian mode. You can plan on visiting a certain neighborhood and load up some destinations from a guidebook and use the GPS to find you way around and most importantly, not get lost when you get twisted around in small narrow alleys. I'm hoping to soon replace the pedestrian value of the GPS with a smartphone and Google Maps. Unfortunately you can't get turn by turn directions in Taiwan via Google Maps on a phone yet.

If you can handle driving in New York or Boston, you should be OK in Taipei. If those places make you white knuckled, you will have a hard time, at least that's my opinion after a couple weeks driving here, I'm curious to see if that changes over time.

Meeting other ex-pats through blog

2010-05-15T19:04:00.002+08:00

I have been contacted by a few people through my blog with questions and comments. It was particularly rewarding to get an e-mail from a couple who is basically in the same boat as us, a couple months behind us in the process and also from CT. She is an actuary and he is in education so there is even some similarity in careers, and they have a cat.

They were in Taipei on a house hunting venture before they start the transition in August so we met up for dinner. Food can still be tough for me here; I am trying to strike a balance between the easy way out (McDonald's) and navigating a restaurant entirely in Chinese. So what's the middle ground? I had found in Japan that you can often find places with photos on the menus, that doesn't mean you won't end up with pig feet, tongue and intestines (as I think I did-all were good), but you will at least be able to get some protein on the table. You can also search around for menus with English subtitles, the availability of which seem dependent on location, neighborhoods with more foreign business travelers will be easier. Neihu is a little challenging in that sense.

Folks at work recommended the Breeze Center on the second floor of Taipei Main Station which ranges from food court to decent sit-down restaurants. It is also appears to be segregated by food types: Indian/pita/kebab type stuff in this corner, noodle stuff in that corner, Japanese together, etc. We ended up at a Japanese tonkatsu style place with a very strange sign on the front door, the least strange of which is you apparently can't bring cats, but dogs are OK? If anyone can explain the ban on astronaut bulls you win a prize.

Department store basements and train station areas tend to be easier to get by in English; we ended up with a picture menu and the staff was actually pretty good in English. It was fun to have other ex-pats to share similar stories with. They are struggling a bit more with finding a place. They were focused on living downtown and the spaces seem to be quite small there. Hopefully things work out!

Mechanical car park

2010-05-13T22:18:00.000+08:00

You've probably heard me do some whining about how difficult the simple things can be in Taiwan and the mechanical car park is the perfect yin & yang situation, the sweet and sour. On the day I was about to receive the rental car, I went to the apartment manager and asked what the parking situation was. It started with a response of, "I don't have a parking spot available" and I eventually worked it to, "I don't have a spot available in this wing of the building right now but if you come back at 2PM I can set you up in the wing next door and move you over to this wing on Sunday." I liked the second answer much better as for a brief moment I had that sinking feeling like, "What the hell am I going to do with this car?"

After learning the drill with parking next door, on Sunday I went to arrange the switch. I thought I would just exchange swipe cards and she would tell me my new spot #, but it could not be that easy. She said to go get the car and meet her curbside in three minutes, three, not five or ten. I scrambled to get the car and she met me on the ramp heading into the garage below my wing. Earlier in the week when I was out apartment hunting, one of the landladies noted that her building had a "real" parking garage and not a mechanical car park. I didn't know exactly what she meant but thought a parking attendant must take your car and bring it somewhere else where cars are stored on top of each other like you see in some places in Manhattan. I was partially right.

The reason why the apartment manager had to take me down to explain it to was that the garage in my wing is a mechanical car park, and there's a system to it. First of all, you turn from the street down a ramp, and unlike the other garage where you had a sensor mounted in the window to trigger the gate, at this one I need to press a button on a remote control on a keychain. Right beyond the gate is a metal garage door that covers the entire entrance. A different button on the same remote operates this door.

She motions for me to pull up to one of two garage bays and to put the car in park. Then I have to get out and use a new scanner card to walk up to a sensor by the garage bay door and swipe it. The light above the door turns red and it takes about a minute to open. I then have to drive the car into the bay and into a specific depth at which point a sensor indicates the car is in the right spot. The manager tells me I need to fold in the side view mirrors, if I don't they will probably get sheared off. How long before I forget? There's actually a button in the car that automatically moves the mirrors. With the car in place I can turn it off and lock it up.

In the meanwhile the garage is talking to me, a female voice in Chinese, perhaps telling me that the car is in the right spot or "Don't forget the mirrors idiot!" In English, automatic voices are typically female, soothing and pleasant even if frustrating, i.e. "Press one for this, press two for this, press three for this..." There's something about Chinese that just sounds mean, especially when you are being told what to do. Shirley and I were at a dim sum place in Boston once and one of the cart ladies shouted, "Cheezy Mussel" at me. I was so scared I took the cheezy mussel. Who would ever think it was a good idea to put cheese on mussels? I guess as long as I'm in the restaurant, there's a market for "cheezy mussel".

So after the car is all buttoned up I have to step out of the garage and reswipe the card. The door closes and I can leave. What threw me for a loop was, the manager pointed toward two garage doors on the other side of the parking facility and said, "When you need to leave, you go get the car over there." For some reason, I had a hard time wrapping my head around that. How does my car come out over there? Where does it go? How does it find it? Are there elves behind that door running this operation?

The mechanism comes up, grabs the car, takes it down into a multi-level parking grid, stashed the car on a shelf, then comes back to get it out, and sends it op a different elevator into a different garage. I left the car there for the night and the next morning went to get my car. I swore there was no way that car was showing up. Especially since she told me if I had a problem and the garage attendant wasn't around I could go ask the lobby security guard for help. I swiped my card, a low and behold, the door opened and my car was there, pointing outward nonetheless.

I love you, mechanical car park!

OK, so some things aren't that tough

2010-05-11T23:02:00.001+08:00

About the second day in the car I looked at the fuel gauge and realized it was only a quarter full. I think I remember in Europe there is no concept of returning the car with the tank full, you can just coast in on fumes. So now I'm wondering, how to you get gas. It can't possibly be self serve because that will involve less employment so I went to scout out a gas station across the street after the scallion pancake dinner, and sure enough, attendants at the pump.

The next morning I went out to give one last check over the apartment we chose and I remembered to ask Hope, the real estate agent what I need to say at the gas station. First you tell them the octane level. For 92, you don't say the equivalent of "ninety two" it's just "nine two" or "jeo er". And "fill it" is "jia mon", kind sounds like saying "yes" to a Jamaican.

On the way to work after the meeting with Hope, I found a gas station near the office. The lingo I got from Hope worked perfectly. As they hand me my receipt, they asked if I wanted a Coke and handed me a liter bottle. I guess if you fill up you get free Coke, sweet! Many people will ask how much gas costs; I think it works out to about $4/gallon, not insanely expensive, considering there are only a few places where gas is cheaper than the U.S.

If you ever catch me bitching about how everything in Taiwan is a hassle, remind me about the EasyCard as I have found nothing else in Taiwan so aptly named. The subway system, MRT, in Taipei is great for several reasons:

It is very clean
The stations are laid out in a very standardized manner such that once you learn to navigate one, they all seem the identical
The entire MRT system map is on display showing the cost to each stop from where you are
Inside the subway car, there is audible instructions telling you which stop you are coming to
Inside the subway car, there is a map of that line with a light showing which stop you are coming to and you can basically see your line, and there is a map of all the other lines
Everthing is in English
On the platform, you have lanes to stand in as you wait for the train. When the doors open, the lanes are located such that everyone can get off first without interfering with the queue, then everyone gets on in an orderly fashion. Pretty much.
On the platform, it tells you how long until the next train will arrive.
The EasyCard

You can buy this EasyCard in a vending machine at the station. You pay NT500, 100 is a deposit for the card, 400 is the available balance to use for your fare. What is great about for MRT newbies, is you don't really have to worry about what the fare is to get to your desired station, as long as you have a great enough balance.

What is also great is it has some sort of passive RF type technology where you don't swipe a magnetic bar. You can just leave it in your purse or wallet and hold it up against the sensor and it reads it!

I have yet to prove out this application of the EasyCard as I haven't conquered (or been conquered by) the bus system yet, but I know it involves fares based on how many zones you travel through. I'm not yet up to feeling defeated by totally screwing up the bus thing. So I'll just stick to MRT/walking.

Eating out - cracking the code

2010-05-09T15:13:00.000+08:00

I worked with a Russian guy back in the States who upon learning about my move commented regarding the language barrier, that my survival skills would kick in and the first situation I would be forced to resolve, be it verbally or non-verbally, is finding food. It can be intimidating and the problem here is pointing is risky, as you often cannot tell what something is.

Cooking for yourself is easier. Yeah, there are some meat looking products at the store that are hard to identify, but you can make your way through it. I'm not really well equipped to cook in this hotel-style apartment with a small kitchen and I haven't even had my Slap Chop shipped from home, yet. So I have been trying to eat out in between cooking up some ramen.

On the way back from the MRT the other day I noticed a restaurant that had some dishes on a shelf looking like you could just pick whatever you want so I thought that would be a good spot to try, knowing that I am not in a touristy area and English menus are hard to come by. I walked over to the place after work. Most of the restaurants here would be perceived as quite "sketchy" back in the states just based on appearance and cleanliness. You quickly get over that here, otherwise, you will starve to death.

There are 3 odors I find prevalent in Taipei:

Carbon monoxide fumes
Smell of food cooking at the street side carts - part soy sauce smell, part cooking oil smell
Rotting corpse

They eat something called "stinky tofu", the likes of which I haven't tried yet. I am told that stinky tofu is the source of the rotting corpse smell. I still haven't accepted that someone will stick that in their mouth and there is not, in fact, a rotting corpse nearby.

Luckily, the little restaurant by me does not smell like rotting corpse so I slipped in and took a seat. The mama-san came by and gave me a slip of paper on a clipboard with a pen. It was much like the menu at a sushi bar when they hand you a pencil and have you fill it out yourself, except that it was all in Chinese. If you're not familiar with Chinese, there is the traditional written language with fancy characters, aka "kanji". Then there is a version which is "romanized" or translated into what to us is normal letters, this is known as pin yin. Unfortunately for us Westerners, it is not widely used which makes it much more difficult to get your grips on the language. If you take any Spanish/French/Italian class, you can get through menus in much of Europe, or you can at least re-recognize a word once you've figured out what it means. Even in Dutch and German, once I order it, I can later recall the word even though it isn't a romance language.

So when they says, "it's Chinese to me", that's how I felt looking at this menu that was meaningless, except I could make out what the prices are because they use Arabic numbers. There was a dotted line separating the top section from the bottom section and the prices on the top were less than the bottom. I figured the top might be appetizers and the bottom, main dishes. I also looked at the prices and know that a meal in this place can run about $4 per person so I decided to pick the first item from "column A" and the first from "column B". They added up to four bucks so I was hoping that was the correct quantity of food.

The items on the shelf appear to be cold side dishes and I saw some people grab them on the way in. There was also a self-serve drink cooler with some soda, beer and bottled water and tea. Nobody here appears to drink anything. I think that is because bottled beverages are relatively expensive, compared to the food.

In only a few minutes mama-san brought me a scallion pancake and a combo fried rice. Score! Scallion pancake is awesome and I don't know that I've ever had it outside of Taiwan. I thought about grabbing one of the items off the shelf but this ended up being the perfect amount of food. So now that I love the food at this place, I'm figuring out a plan to decipher the menu.

I'm not sure the mama-san will let me take the ordering paper home as it has a carbon copy backing and she saves them all and I don't want to break any of the rules and get blacklisted. Now that I know what item #1 from each column are, I will likely venture to item #2. I'll bring a pen and paper and start redrawing the menu and translate as I order each item. I wonder if I will be able to get through the entire menu in 3 weeks. I feel like I'm trying to crack Kryptos.

I left this place with a real sense of accomplishment. Especially since the food was so good, and cheap. At the end of the meal, mama-san was asking me a question while pointing at the bill, first item 1, then item 2. I thought she was trying to say the amount of money I gave her didn't cover both but after she returned my change, I determined she was asking which I liked better.

I subsequently added "han hou che" to my vocab which I could have said, meaning "very good eat" and is something common to say in approval of the meal. I'll use that next time so she doesn't think my opinion was so-so, quite the contrary.

House Hunting Day 2: Have faith in Hope...

2010-05-07T23:26:00.002+08:00

On Wed I was scheduled to house hunt with a totally different RE agency. Apparently, my company likes to get 2 agents on the hook, I guess to cover more territory and maybe not get pigeonholed in one area or a building that they are in cahoots with. I was supposed to keep this secret but each agent knew the drill right away. In general, there is not much secrecy in Taiwan and in any conversation it has taken less than 20 questions to get to the fact that my wife is bi-racial, aka "half-half". This is a BIG deal here.

But back to house hunting... Hope, the next agent, met me at my temp apartment. She brought a driver along which was very convenient because she didn't have to search for parking and then sideswipe a lamp post after stashing the car in a precarious spot (David). She quickly figured out that I had been out with David on Monday and wanted to know where I had been so that she doesn't duplicate coverage. She was very well prepared, had emailed us some listings in advance to see what we thought, and brought some printouts along with her; each had the details of the property, some photos, and some blank space to take notes.

The most restricting criteria was: location, location, location. We wanted to be near an MRT line, close to the highway, and close to the buses that Shirley can take to school. Hope focused on the neighborhood called Shilin, near the Jiantan MRT. David was focused a couple stops up toward Tien Mu and didn't really have anything that fit our criteria. The architect place was nice, but we were hoping for more of what they call a "luxury" building which typically includes:

lobby/lounge and 24 hour security
some sort of gym facility
private trash service
underground parking

David basically told us this was out of our price range and then showed us stuff that was not only out of our price range but nasty and in the middle of a junkyard. Hope was a lot of fun to work with and I felt really comfortable telling her what I really thought of places. When she asked what the places I saw with David were like, I said, "gross". Somehow her English is quite good for someone who never lived in the States.

After the first place I saw with Hope, I had confidence that this was going to be a much better day than Day 1. Shirley and I were hoping to find a 2 bedroom place so that we could have guests stay with us but were willing to settle for a one bedroom. We were knew the size would be much smaller than what we expect in the U.S. And speaking of size, it's measured in "pings" which is the size of a tatami mat. The first place had a lot of potential, but it just wasn't that well taken care of. If we were looking to buy a place, it might be perfect as we could remodel it ourselves and could probably get it at a discount. Even Hope steered me away from getting a place with a landlady who doesn't really take care of it.

The second place was in the same building and was very Japanese. In the rooms that had more than a tatami mat, it had some goofy furniture and Hope wasn't sure if he was willing to get rid of it. She said, "I don't know if he'll want your cat around his furniture." To which I replied, "I don't want his ugly furniture around my cat!" She thought there was potential to negotiate our way out of the furniture so we kept it in the running.

The third place quickly went to the top of the list in my mind. It had a garden/pool area out back that reminded me of Caesar's Palace and there was a glass walled small fitness center off to the side. The apartment was being remodeled and essentially brand new, the building was erected in 2008 and I don't think the apartment has ever been occupied. It was a 3BR/2BA which was a little bigger than what we needed and was a little more expensive than what we were looking to spend.

Long story, short, that's the place we ended up picking. The street that it is on has a park going right down the middle so it's a bit of an "urban oasis", as much of an oasis as you can have in Taipei. We'll only be a 5 minute walk from the MRT and it's pretty close to the highway. Shirley can take her choice of 3 different buses from the MRT station to school. My company is processing the paperwork now and we should be locked up by Monday. I'm not too afraid of jinxing it because there are 2 identical apartments, one on top of the other, owned by the same guy - and both vacant.

After the first day I was a bit worried but Hope did an awesome job and filled all of our criteria. Although it was a bit of a stretch to our budget, Hope did some negotiating and when you factor in that it includes parking and I may save some of the cost to pay for a private gym, it's within striking distance of what we were hoping to spend. At 42 pings, it's quite spacious for Taipei.

Since Shirley is still in the States and I wanted to include her in the process, I took many pictures and notes at each place and the next morning, had a Skype call with Shirley. By sharing my desktop, I could walk her through the photos and talk about all of the apartments. At one point I had Shirley on Skype and Hope on the land-line and we were debating the options. In the end it all worked out quite well. Oh, and it has those Japanese style toilets with all kinds of crazy buttons. I'll have to seek out an owner's manual. For a toilet...

First day at work

2010-05-06T13:07:00.000+08:00

My company is located about 15 miles outside of Taipei, which can be a 40 minute drive depending on traffic conditions. Fortunately, its location was already stored as a "Favorite" in the GPS. I quickly got onto the highway and traffic was smooth heading out. My only blunder was I got trapped in the wrong lane at the toll booth. Apparently all of the tolls are 40NT (~$1.35) and I could figure that I didn't belong in the ETC line as that might be some sort of EZ Pass. I got stuck in the middle in the "Ticket" lane. You can get a book of tickets each valid for one toll. I didn't have such a ticket.

I had $40NT though so I just begged for forgiveness and after making it clear that I was in the wrong lane, the toll booth operator accepted the $40NT. Lesson learned: keep your eyes out for the "Cash" lanes. I actually should get the EZ Pass thing as soon as I can get someone in the office to explain to me how to get one.

I didn't have a local security badge yet for work and tried to enter the parking lot which had an automatic gate. I pressed the call button on the device, but there was a caretaker type person near by who motioned that I need to scan a badge and he pointed back toward the front of the building. So I parked the car in what I can assume is the visitor lot.

At the front security desk I asked for my HR rep who came down to greet me and lead me upstairs. We went in to her office and she explained that she had some documents for me to sign. She whips out a pretty good stack of papers; it felt like the closing of a house, where your lawyer sticks a 10 page document in front of you, gives you a 10 word explanation, and says, "sign here", and repeats this 10 times. There was the form to open a bank account which we both joked was a high priority as it would be nice to be able to get paid.

The funniest part was when she handed me a single sheet to sign that indicated that I had read our "Ethics Policy". Then she went to a shelf and plunked down a 200 page document. We both started laughing. She explained that I didn't need to read it right now. We talked briefly about applying for my ARC (i.e. green card) and decided that we would wait a few days until I found my apartment so we could use my real Taiwan address on the application. I'm a bit anxious to get that done as I need it to get my own car and probably get a cell phone and such.

Speaking of cell phone, I have my Verizon phone and am roaming over here and have no clue what it would cost to use the thing so I'm a bit handicapped, especially when it comes to dealing with the real estate agents. I went over to the I.T. department and asked if I could requisition a cell phone. I knew this would shape up to be a hassle because the policy is, we only get one when travelling. When local, we have a plan by which we file for partial compensation for our personal cell phone if we agree to also use it for business. The I.T. guys were talking in Chinese and I could gather that they were coming to the conclusion that it is against HR policy. I explained that I'm not looking to scam a free phone but since they haven't finished my ARC paperwork I can't buy a cell phone and I have to work with the RE agents before I can start putting in full days at work, it might be universally beneficial to just let me borrow a phone that is otherwise collecting dust. The faster I get an apartment resolved, the fast I can get to work. The kicker is, in Taiwan, you don't pay for incoming calls so it would likely not cost a dime. They agreed to file an electronic request but I would need my boss to sign it off who is travelling on business. One of the local guys has a stack of old cell phones at home and he said he'd bring one in and I could just buy a prepaid SIM car at 7-Eleven and be on my way. I haven't been back in the office to pick it up so I am still without a local phone. I at least know Shirley was able to text me but one of the local RE agents was not successful.

One impression I have about Taiwan is things can be very rigid. There is an exact process to everything; if you think about the issue with getting me from the first floor, to the second floor, and then up to the apartment to the process with the parking garage. From all of my dealings through the job search process, I have found this to permeate society. There seems to always be a script. Shirley called the airline about getting Tucker a reservation on the plane. They needed to know what size his carrier was before they would reserve a space. We wanted to get him a bigger carrier for the plane ride and hadn't yet picked one out. Shirley asked if there was a size he would recommend, then we would get that one. He could only comment on the sum of the sides must be less than some #. So we went online, ordered a carried, wrote down the dimensions, and called back and booked the flight.

I was able to secure an office, no badge or laptop; they're working on it. The building is quite nice, I think it was built from scratch for our company. The space is much more open. I haven't yet seen the cafe or fitness center. Our place in the States is an old building, built like a prison. It was fun to meet the handful of people I knew from business trips or just emails and phone conferences. I spent enough time in the office to get through that Ethics Policy and HR was glad that we got that out of the way. The Ethics Policy covers the entire corporation so, unfortunately, there was nothing uniquely Taiwanese in there. After work one guy I had previously met took me out to dinner with his wife.

On the ride back I at least made it into the cash lane. I paid with a big bill and they paid me back with some cash and a book of tickets for the balance. These tickets are the ones that I was expected to have when I mistakenly got in the "ticket" lane.

Rental Car

2010-05-05T19:57:00.000+08:00

My second day of house hunting was cancelled as David didn't have anything else to show me and encouraged me to explore other options with RE Agent #2, Hope. I was scheduled to receive my rental car which was to be delivered to my building and needed to figure out some parking solution. There is a garage entrance right below my building but I can't tell what the deal is. Can you pay by the hour? Or are the spots all private? Such things can be difficult and frustrating to figure out.

I went to the management office and there was a different person working there. Luckily she was pretty good in English because this situation is a little complicated. I asked where I can park a car and she asked, "For how long?" I explained that I need to park this thing here for a month. At first she said no spots were available and I said something like, "This car is coming in 15 minutes and I need to put it somewhere. Is there a public lot anywhere?" She quickly jumped on the phone and said that she had a spot available in the building next door that I could use until Sunday. On Monday, she would move me to a spot in my building. She told me to come back to the office after 2 and she could show me how it works. I think I again explained that this car is coming in, now, 10 minutes. What can I do? She directed my to a public lot down the street that charges by the hour. Perfect!

The car guy was on time and brought along the GPS that my company had requested. They didn't have any 1.5-1.8 liter cars available so I was upgraded to the 2.0 class, a Toyota Corolla. I hopped in the car and drove it to the public lot down the street.

I went back down to see her at 2 and she said to go get the car and pick her up in front of the building. I grabbed the car, pulled around and scooped her up. She directed my into the garage where there is a gate and a guard. She put a transmitter device on the dashboard that automatically opens the gate and she directed me down, 4 floors below the ground level. I have been assigned a particular spot. We parked and she directed me to get out so she could show me how to get back out. She handed me another keycard device and a remote control. The keycard device allows me to unlock the door to enter the stairwell. From there I use the same keycard to access the elevator up to the ground level. She also explained that after midnight, this big metal gate closes off the entrance and need to use the remote to open that gate.

I went back to the room and grabbed my stuff to head out to the office, for the first time. It was now about 2:30 and I figured traffic would be light and I could ease into Taipei driving.

Attack! - A tip to the grocery store

2010-05-05T19:33:00.000+08:00

Since my RE agent on day one lost track of his schedule and we started later in the day, I took the opportunity in the morning to go to the "supermarket"; there is a Wellcome store right behind my building. It's not quite "super" by American standards but it is quite adequate for what I need right now. My impression is that it is not that common in Taiwan to whole heartedly cook at home. Kitchens are tiny. Some have one burner. Very few have ovens. So you can't quite cook a Thanksgiving feast. Therefore, I don't think there is a need for supermarkets like we have in the states will you will go and buy enough food to cook a meal a day for an entire week. Instead, it may be a combination of street carts, restaurants, and meat and veggies bought at local markets.

If you have never shopped for ramen in Taiwan, you haven't truly shopped for ramen. And, Yes, I mean shop for ramen. Even in a 7-Eleven in Taiwan, there is a daunting volume of ramen to choose from. You can sorta tell from the photo what flavor it is, but sometimes it is more complicated. They actually have ramen that comes with sliced steak in a foil pouch, stable at room temperature. I had it once and it was just a little creepy for me. Even the meatless ramen typically comes with at least 2 packets, one the spices and the second is usually some oil or paste.

After much deliberation, I settled on a few varieties of ramen for a quick meal in the apartment. I have a water boiling pitcher so it is quite fast and convenient. I also grabbed some fresh pineapple (which was awesome), apples, and a yogurt drink. Yogurt based drinks are quite common.

I was also determined to get some laundry detergent as I have a washer/dryer combo device in my room. It washes and dries the clothes in the same device, which looks like a small front loading washer. It was somewhat challenging to decide what to buy as the detergent labels were all in Chinese except one that was called "Attack!" I guess I was a little intimidated by the name and was afraid it would unleash an attack on my clothes so I settled for the Nice brand White and Shine laundry detergent. I haven't opened the bottle yet and have no idea what's inside but I predict, in a couple days, I'll be blogging about my first clothes shopping trip after destroying everything in the washer. I wonder if I should have bought the Attack!.

House Hunting Day 1

2010-05-05T09:23:00.000+08:00

My HR group had scheduled me for 4 days of house hunting with 2 different RE agents, they said to keep it "secret" - that there are 2 agents involved. I guess they don't want me to be limited by one agents stomping ground or perhaps they might be in cahoots with certain landlords. My HR group had asked each agent to meet me in the lobby at 8AM. Both agents had contacted me in advance about what our preferences are and the second agent said she could not meet me until 9:30 Wed.

The first agent, David, never responded regarding the schedule so I wasn't surprised that even by 9:30 or so, I had heard nothing. Once I got my computer set up I reverified the schedule and appointments and called him up on Skype as I don't have a local cell phone yet and have no clue what the roaming costs are. He was very apologetic that he misread the appointment and thought I was coming next week and agreed to meet me at 2:00 PM to get started today and we could finish on Tues.

Things got off to a rocky start as he ignored my budget constraints and thought I was on some unlimited ex-pat expense account and lined up a bunch of 4 bedroom places in Taipei, even though I said we wanted a 1 or 2 bedroom. The first group of places were simply gross. Big, but gross. I think a small gross place is less, well, gross than a big gross place. What I found most gross was the layers of mold and mildew in the bathroms and general musty smell, indicating that the apartment might not hold up well in a typhoon. And the views out the back can be a challenge, too.

We were limited in neighborhood by our desire to have easy access to the highway for me to drive to work, easy access for Shirley to get the bus to work (without too many transfers) and our desire to be near the MRT so we can explore Taipei without having to drive. When he realized I wasn't looking to pay NT$70k (about $2300USD/mo) for a bunch of grossness, he hopped on the cell phone with home base to come up with some alternatives.

He said from the start that he had one place in mind that he thought was really nice, but was a 5 floor walk-up with no elevator. An elevator was on our list as a high priority. I guess we just didn't want to walk up 12 flights of stairs and assumed that any building without an elevator would be gross, but as I had already determined, an elevator may just get you to the grossness faster. The owner met us at the 5 floor walkup and it was actually very nice. He owns the entire building and the 2 apartments on the 5th floor are available for around NT$50k. They are about 37 pings (~1300 sqft) and are very well decorated. There is a 3 bedroom, and then a 1 or 2 bedroom which he architect wife took some creative liberty with. There is a second room with glass walls with a wrap around curtain such that it can be used as a guest bedroom when needed.

We were originally looking for a place in a "luxury" building with a gym and concierge desk, etc. because looking on Craigslist, it looked like such places were within our price range. I looked at a few with David, and the problem is, they are just way too small. The price is OK and if I could get 2 of them next to each other and knock out the walls, it might work out. I asked if there was a 2 bedroom available in the building at twice the price and he said "no", they are apparently just geared toward single people.

After talking with Shirley, the apartment above is the front runner from my trip with David. At the end of day 1, David said he didn't have anything else to show me so we would skip day 2 rather than waste time. I was a bit disappointed but he wasn't well prepared to begin with so I was looking forward to working with Hope, the second agent on Wed. While the architect apartment is definitely do-able, I think it's prophetic that agent #2 is named "Hope".

corporate schwag

2010-05-04T12:01:00.000+08:00

Flashback about 5 years...my company was rolling out the opening of this facility in Taiwan that I will be working at and my new boss came to the States on a recruiting venture. There was this engineer, Ray, that we worked with who was quite old and everyone joked about when this guy would finally retire. He was old to the point of legend, there was always debate over how old he was as though there was no means of record keeping at the time of his birth. My new boss was giving the pitch about getting people from our U.S. division to move to Taiwan and this guy, Ray, pointed out that my new boss had his facts mixed up regarding the history of the Portuguese and Dutch presence in Taiwan. Ray had grown up in Taiwan...

So I departed the plane into Taoyuan Airport wearing a backpack with my company logo on it that we received for an "end of year" present a few years ago. We typically get some sort of schwag imprinted with the company logo. As I passed one guy, I heard someone call out my company's name, I turned and looked at a guy with a baseball cap embroidered with a golf course name.

He removed the cap and said, "I worked for the Connecticut division".

I said, "You're Ray!"

My company is big enough that you don't know everyone and like I said, this guy was a legend, so I knew him but he didn't know me. He was shocked that I knew him and we had a good talk about how much he hates retired life. He was a workaholic type that was probably encourage to retire. His wife came by and he introduced me.

She was also surprised, "You know Ray?" To which I responded, "Ray's famous!" She had a look as though all I need to do is pad his ego even more. I noticed they exited immigration through the "Diplomat" line. Maybe he's senile. Or maybe his fame has transcended the workplace.

Getting through customs was a piece of cake and I strolled along the line of limo drivers looking for my name. Not there. I wrapped around the exit line and walked over to the group of drivers and asked if anyone knew/saw my guy. Nope. So I wait for a few minutes and then break out the laptop as I didn't have his # handy, assuming that I wouldn't need it. I got a hold of him and he was strolling around the airport looking for me. He said most people from my company exit to the left when coming out of the immigration hall so that's where he was, not with the other 40 drivers to the right. He even said he saw me come through the door and thought it might be me, but didn't track me down.

He thoroughly interrogated me on the ride to the temporary apartment and made it through much of my life story, and my wife's life story. When he picked me up, he indicated that he wasn't entirely sure where my apartment was. Again, I was assuming that he would be there and would know where to go so I didn't have the exact address handy, but I could have pointed it out on Google Maps in a second. Luckily he was able to find it and parked on the curb with his hazzards on. Parking in Taipei seems to involve walking a fine line regarding what will or will not be tolerated. This may supersede what is/isn't legal.

We went into the lobby which had a security guard behind a desk. The driver got into a detailed conversation with the guard that I could tell involved much frustration. This was at 7:45 or so in the morning and I suspected it might be an issue to check in so early. So the driver explains that they have no staff available to check me in now. OK, no big deal. Here's the drill as he explained:

The Spring Apartment lobby is on the second floor, we are on the first. The lobby is not even open yet. I must sit in that chair over there and wait for the guard to tell me it is OK to proceed to the lobby on the second floor. I can wait in the lobby until 9AM when the staff will come to check me in. OK, no big deal, I took a chair and fired up my laptop. No Wi-Fi. Oh well.

At about 8:21 the guard called me and sent me up to the second floor. He came with me and told me where to sit and directed me to the English newspaper on the rack. At about 8:30, the girl that works the desk on the second floor came in wearing street clothes. The guard must have briefed her on why I was there and she fired up a coffee grinder and made me a cup of fresh espresso. Awesome!

Before I could even finish the coffee, the next lady came by. She spoke English quite well and said that we would move me into my apartment. We first went to her office on the 12th floor where she took care of some paperwork and gave me a security badge, that scans the lock at the front door and the elevator. We went down to my apartment on the 11th floor. There is a big iron door in front of the regular door, it's quite impressive, if for no other reason than being quite heavy and a bit noisy. The regular door has a keypad with a cover. She opened the door and then set it up so that I could input my own 4 digit pin. You slide the cover up, punch in the pin, then slide it back down, and the mechanism electronically opens. The apartment is about 26' long and 10' wide with a nice sunny view out to the street and a nice shower stall with glass walls that affords a view of the TV. It's small but nice.

Just to explain the situation: it is in a building with various businesses. The guard on the first floor controls a good chunk of the building. On the second floor is the lobby of the Spring Apartment, which is just part of the building. Then on the 12th floor is the lady that controls the 11th and 12th floors which is the ex-pat section. Hence, the hierarchy of the people I had to deal with. I realized that I had plugged in the camera charger in the lobby, the first floor lobby with the guard, that is. So I grabbed my security badge and headed down to grab it. After coming back up, I couldn't get the pin # to take. So I was off back to the 12th floor for the boss lady. We went down to the 12th floor and as we were getting out of the elevator she said, "you pushed the cover back down, right?" Well, of course NOT. I apologized and she said not to worry as many make that mistake. Sure enough, pushing the cover down unlocked the door and I was back into my home for the next month.

The flight over

2010-05-03T20:10:00.000+08:00

Everything went well on the flight and I was fortunate to get a lot of sleep. We departed at 11:30 P.M. and soon after take-off, the crew started serving dinner, which was pasta with chicken. The food was pretty bad; I was surprised they served western food on an Asian airline (EVA). I think Chinese food holds up better to being served on an airline. Even the food in coach on Cathay Pacific was pretty good. The best coach meal I've ever had was on Swiss Air back in ~2000, it was fantastic.

Criticizing airline food is quite cliche so I'll at least say that the service of the staff was fantastic as they were literally running up and down the aisles with trays of drinks to keep everyone well hydrated. Perusing the in flight magazine (fourth best?), they described the rankings of the flight attendants. There is a chief-purser, purser, associate-purser and a peon staffer. They alert you how to identify them by the stripes on the cuff of their shirt sleeves. In the section of tchotchkes for sale, they had action figures of each ranking of flight attendant with a modeled portion of the plane, say, the galley. It gave a description of that FA and described attributes like how beautiful and well-spoken they were. There was definitely no equal opportunity employment involved here as they were all quite stunning and executed several wardrobe changes, no malfunctions, though. There were probably 30 FAs on board as there is a mid-flight crew change and not one was male. I'm not complaining...

I slept about 3/4 of the way to Anchorage where we landed for a refueling. They toss everyone off the plane, not sure why, but since I'm usually complaining about being stuck inside on the tarmac during delays, it's not fair to complain. The ANC terminal is a bit old and all of the signs are in English and Chinese. There was a display case highlighting the zoological impact of traditional Chinese medicine which leads to the hunting of bear and other endangered/protected species. I was surprised that the Chinese influence in ANC was so significant; it's obviously a common stop for flights to Asia. I was told that there is a stuffed polar bear in the airport that everyone gets their photo with but all I came across was a mountain goat. Maybe it's in another terminal. There was a self serve tea/coffee setup in the terminal for us and after about 45 min, we re boarded the plane and went back to our same seats.

After sleeping about halfway from ANC to Japan, I watched the movie Brothers with Natalie Portman, Toby McGuire and Jake Gyllenhal. It wasn't quite what I expected. It was a remake of a Danish movie and was very slow but had a really good ending. I love movies that are: climax -> roll credits. The only problem on this segment was we hit severe turbulence over most of Japan. I was somehow able to play Luxor on the AVOD system without barfing. As we were nearing Taiwan they offered us omelet or congee for breakfast. The congee was pretty good and came with a pouch of spiced shredded tuna. Shelf-stable meat is something I have a hard time getting my head around but it is quite common in Taiwan, and the congee was quite good. Upon landing I noticed Uni Air wasw parked next to us. A whole airline dedicated to sea urchin? What a country!

Time to go!

2010-05-02T10:58:00.000+08:00

This past week was so hectic; I had much to blog about but no time. I woke up Monday morning feeling ill and blamed it on the party the day before and the sequence of: beer, red wine, sake, champagne, Chimay and Duvel. Tues morning I woke up with the same feeling and realized I couldn't blame the booze, I was just starting to get that feeling of impending doom. It never entered my mind that I was making a mistake, it's just that when you plan for something so intently for so long, there's something about coming to grips with the fact that it is actually about to happen!

It was similar to training for 7 months for my first triathlon. I felt well prepared but it was still an eerie feeling the last couple days before the race. There is a part of triathlon called "transition", this is where you switch sports, from swim to bike and from bike to run. So you'll exit the water, exhausted, and the goal is to get onto that bike ASAP. As you walk up the beach you start unzipping your wetsuit, slip your arms out and pull the top portion down to your waist, all while moving as fast as you can while trying to catch your breath. Then you have to find your spot in transition among hundreds. Then you will have some sequence by which the wetsuit comes off, you redress in any cycling gear, get your shoes and socks on, sunglasses, and don't forget the helmet or you get penalized.

A key rule of thumb is, never make any decisions in transition, you are just not mentally capable. Have a plan. Follow the sequence. Don't deviate.

As I got pretty close to departure, I started to feel more relaxed, less decision making, just follow the plan. I'm about to hop on the flight. Everything is going smoothly so far. Upon arrival in Taipei I have a driver taking me to my apartment. Then a RE agent is supposed to pick me up for house hunting, and the car rental outfit will deliver my car to my apartment. Time to board...glad an aisle seat opened up as I was originally stuck in the middle.

Finally getting all of my travel plans sorted out

2010-04-28T00:35:00.001+08:00

Once I came away from TECO with a sense of confidence that my visa would be ready on Tues I gave my travel group the "thumbs up" to book our tickets. I'll be taking the redeye Sat night on EVA from Newark through Anchorage on to Taipei. It will arrive Monday morning 5:55A local time, and I will somehow make my way to work to settle in; that's my plan, anyway. When travelling intercontinental, it works best for me to just go straight to work. If I try to rest up for a bit, I end up crashing out for 16 hours and it just takes me even more time to get over the jet lag.

The other reason why I took this flight is Shirley will be travelling with the cat in July and she will take this same flight for several reasons:

A connection in a foreign country, say Hong Kong, with the cat is just asking for trouble. I would guess that would mean more paperwork and I'd be worried about something going wrong.
China Airlines does not allow pets other than guide dogs so that rules out travelling with them through LAX or SFO.
EVA will allow you to check a pet as extra luggage. The good thing about the Anchorage flight is they only stop to take on fuel (and maybe some cargo), so there is no plane change and we don't need to rely on the cat being transferred from one plane to the next.

So I figured I would take the same flight and see how it goes. It will also allow me to get in early in the morning rather than mid-day like the Cathay Pacific flights that were available. Unfortunately you cannot fly direct from New York to Taipei.

Friends of ours threw us a going away party on Sunday which was awesome (sushi, wine, cheese and bacon-everything is better with bacon) and we got to see some more friends and family before leaving.

My HR group in Taiwan has been working to shore up my arrangements in Taipei and have confirmed a temporary home at The Spring and they got me a taxi from the airport to the apartment. Now I have to work with them on a car.

This afternoon I'm heading back down to TECO to pick up my visa.

Vegas, baby, Vegas!

2010-04-25T03:24:00.000+08:00

We were briefly panicked by the notion that I needed to have a "legalized marriage" certificate before entering Taiwan but I actually only need it for Shirley to apply for her ARC and she is not coming until July so we have some time, luckily, because he have some issues...

There is a process by which some documents need to be "legalized" before they can be used in Taiwan and they prefer that you do this in your home country. Someone from TECO translates the document into Chinese and then notarizes it. Mark, at TECO, was very helpful and said his office can do this. When I said I needed to get a marriage licesnse legalized he asked, "Where did you get married? What state?" When I said that we had been married in Nevada he quickly retorted, "Las Vegas!?!?" Yes. I thought he was going to ask if we were married by Elvis but he avoided that one. Unfortunately, he can't help us, we have to deal with the San Francisco TECO branch as they follow jurisdiction.

Shirley got a hold of someone equally helpful at the San Francisco TECO branch who fortunately was a veteran in dealing with Vegas marriages and she quickly asked that we take the marriage certificate out of it's frame and examine the back. Upon examiniation it was apparent that this was a "replica" marriage certificate and that we need to file with the Clark County courthouse to get a certified original mailed to us. I guess not only the Eiffel Tower is fake in Vegas. This is shaping up to be a bad Ashton Kutcher movie, as if "bad" and "Ashton Kutcher" is not redundant. I wonder if we're even married. If we find out we're not...I want our marriage penalty taxes back.

So the process is, pay $15 to Clark County to get a real marriage certificate, get it in 7-10 days, mail to SFO TECO, pay ~$15 + $29 shipping for them to send it to Taiwan. Then we can file for Shirley's ARC.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

more people [need to] go with Visa

2010-04-23T23:52:00.000+08:00

I got my paperwork filed to have my company's travel dept. book our flights and the agent said she needed to get a round trip otherwise I would be denied entry. My initial reaction was quite arrogant and I scoffed to my group admin, "Just tell her to book a one way, I've been to Taiwan on a passport before..." or something equally obnoxious. In the next 15 minutes it would quickly unravel that for reasons involving me getting an ARC in Taiwan, I do need to enter on a resident visa and without a return ticket, I, in fact, may be denied entry. Luckily my travel agent knows a lot more about travel than I do.

Something was lost in translation during my emails with our group in Taiwan that handles documentation and our "IA" group that was supposed to get me a visa either doesn't exist, or doesn't care. I was advised by my HR contact in Taiwan to go see my local HR rep to get help from them in securing all the documents.

I don't want to say anything that will get traced back to me and get me fired. let's just say, if I walked into HR and they said, "I can assist you with that..." I would have quickly been on my way to solving my own problem. So...an hour of aggravation later, I was off to solve my own problem. I think I am the first one from my division moving to Taiwan so maybe I need to cut them some slack.

Taiwan doesn't have a "consulate", assumedly because of the whole Taiwan/China thing much like the US maintains a fake embassy in Taipei, but there is a TECO office in NYC which serves the same purpose. I called several times with no answer and left a message. Frustrated at the end of the day (TECO closes @ 4:30), I emailed everyone (Taiwan HR/US HR/travel agent) and said, "I'm just going down to the consulate tomorrow with or without an appointment!" At 5:05, Mark from the consulate called and even apologized for the tardiness of the call. He had all the information right away, turns out I have all the documents necessary for my visa, and he said to just come down in the morning, no appointment necessary.

The TECO is a block away from Grand Central Station so I took the train down. There are no gargoyles or iron gates like the embassies in the Bourne Identity; it's just an office building. You enter the lobby and check in the with guard who gives you an ID sticker. Head up to the 4th floor and right outside the elevator door is a clerk who asks what you need and assigns you to a window. I approached window 97 and told the female clerk that I need a "resident visa". Even the Taiwanese seem shocked every time I say that I am seeking residencey in Taiwan. What am I in for? Should it be setting off alarm bells when I meet Taiwanese living in the U.S.? Sometimes I want to ask them, "What's so bad about Taiwan that you need to live here?" I'm not sure that I can convey that with a sense of humor and I'm sure when I'm in Taiwan, locals will be thinking, "What's so bad about the U.S. that you came here?!?!"

A guy instantly jumps up and says, "Are you Michael?" It was Mark. He said, "I will have you work with the most beautiful clerk in the office!" I wonder if I'm in a KTV? We went through my documents and I paid $131 cash for the visa. She instructed me to come back Tuesday after noon and present my receipt to get my passport and visa. Awesome. Very efficient, I was out of there in 5 minutes.

There was some confusion involving needing a legalized/apostille marriage certificate before I come but that is needed only before Shirley comes in July so we have some time to work on that. We'll need the time...stay tuned for the marriage certificate fiasco.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

I can assist you with that

2010-04-22T05:09:00.000+08:00

I've been waiting to get my travel request approved by in Taiwan so that I am authorized to have my company's travel department book my plane tickets. I emailed my HR relocation coordinator and after not hearing back I emailed my new boss' admin. She informed me that the relo coordinator is in the hospital and my req has been approved for a week.

So she sent me copies and said I should book with my U.S. travel agent. I am attempting to book a one-way ticket for each of us and the travel office said they're not supposed to book one-way tickets for international travel. I quickly remembered that in most cases when entering a country on a U.S. passport you need a return ticket. I started with, "But I have a Taiwan work permit..." and then quickly realized that I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm now thinking that a work permit and a visa have no relation. The travel group advised me to call CIBT and see what they think as we contract with them for Visa/travel issues.

After making a couple menu based selections I received a human operator at CIBT and the conversation was something like this:

Me: "I work for so and so and we contract our travel with so and so and they told me to contact you with this acct # for some help regarding entry into Taiwan."

Operator Lady: "I can assist you with that. What is your specific issue?"

Me: "I'm moving to Taiwan next Monday. I have a Taiwan work permit. I don't yet have an ARC, residency card. I need to buy a plane ticket. Do I need to buy a round trip or can I get in on a one way?"

Operator Lady: "I can assist you with that. We do not handle relocation issues, only temporary travel."

I wonder what part of "assist" I don't understand! OK, I get the first "I can assist you" but the second time was just a lie. It doesn't bother me so much that I didn't get the answer I wanted but moreso that there is a humanoid on the end of the phone that is preprogrammed to say, "I can assist you with that", apparently no matter the request.

Now that I think about, whenever I've called a company and the operator immediately says, "I can assist you with that", they always have to transfer me to someone else to actually get help. I think that's really humanoid code that translates to, "look, I just answer the phone here".

When the robots come to conquer earth and demand, "Take me to your leader!", I'll say, "I can assist you with that."

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Selling the truck

2010-04-21T04:57:00.002+08:00

I changed the oil in the truck this weekend as I am close enough to my departure that I can offload it. I had this guy, Dave, lined up at work who really wanted it and we loosely kicked around some #'s regarding price. I even had it washed on the way into work yesterday and the car wash attendant was asking me how much I paid for it and said he wants one. I should have tried to sell it to him right there, might have saved $23 for the car wash.

I got in to work and emailed Dave and got an autoresponse that he's out until April 27th. If I was sure he would pay something reasonable for it I would hold off but I really don't want to leave Shirley with any extra work so I'd like to sell it before I leave. I listed it this morning on Craigslist.

I visited several sites when attempting to derrive a selling price. Kelly Blue Book, NADA and Edmunds had different values with KBB being significantly lower. I also scoped out some Ebay, Bargain News and Craigslist ads to get a feel for the market and listed it @ $10,500, which was very close to the Edmunds price. If I can get high 9's I'll be happy. It's a 2002 Toyota Tacoma, 4WD, which should be an easy sell around here.

In the first year of living in our house I often got stranded at the bottom of our driveway in my VW Jetta during the winter. The next fall I decided to get the Tacoma. It has served me well and has been very reliable (knock on wood). I hope it will be a quick sell. If not, I can probably fall back on Dave taking it off my hands. I wonder what sort of creeps Craigslist will stir up...

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Farewell tour

2010-04-17T05:05:00.001+08:00

I think this week I felt an escalation of the inevitability and consequence of the move. I have to go to a wake tonight for a co-worker who died this week (way too young @ 59) and I am stopping in to visit my childhood next-door-neighbor and goombah to my sister, maybe for the last time.

I'll come "home" once a year but Connecticut is effectively no longer my home. Florida will probably serve as our base as that is where we go for XMAS and our largest density of relatives lies there. My brother and sister live in Boston and NYC, respectively, but I can envision us convening in Paris or Tokyo or Costa Rica rather than the northeast. My mom is in Canada which has geographic consequence in itself.

So begins the farewell tour:

Last of the regular poker games at our house tomorrow night
Last softball games Mon/Tues
Going away luncheon at work next Friday
Friends throwing us a going away party next Sunday
If I'm still around May 1, last meeting of a non-profit board of directors I've been serving on for 6 years

It will be a rough two weeks until I leave, lots of goodbyes, some people I will never see again, but that's an expected consequence. Was it Lennon/McCartney who wrote:

"You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have: the facts of life"

...this man at the wheel is my attorney

2010-04-16T05:00:00.003+08:00

After getting that tree cleared out of the driveway it took just a bit more work to get our house ready to list on the market. Selling this house is by far the most significant obstacle in the way. It's been listed for a week and we haven't had any action yet, though the Realtor (c) open house and regular open house are yet to come.

We live in a town that is highly desirable but it is a small town and only transacts about 50 properties per year so you have to be pateint, waiting for the right buyer to come along. It's been a pain in the neck that we actually have to keep the house clean, all the time, but it's also nice actually having a clean house!

Since I'll be gone before the house transacts, I needed to assign Power of Attorney to my wife so she can sell the house on our behalf, and then move to the islands with the lawn guy. Here's how that works:

Our lawyer drafted up a document assigning her POA. It has a list of things she can do (i.e. sell a house, open up a bank account) in my name and I can cross out any or none of them. I then bring it to a notary public; my bank did this for free. The notary and two witnesses (bank employees) watch me sign it and then emboss a stamp on it. That's it. My wife didn't even have to be there.

The next issue will occur if Shirley leaves before we are able close. Then she can assign both of our Powers of Attorney to our friend, Lumpy, who can then sell the house on our behalf. In thinking of Lumpy as my attorney, I am reminded of Duke and Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing..., just the notion of referring to him as "my attorney" is kind of funny. I hope Lumpy doesn't run away with the lawn guy.

Another milestone is putting our other Basset Hound, Ozzie, into foster care. We were about ready to pull the trigger and then he had a lump on his eyelid that got worse and started to infect his eye so we took him in to have it surgically removed. Now he has to wear the "cone of shame" for 2 weeks and go back in for a checkup. Once cleared he'll be off the DL and into foster care. He's absolutely miserable but once the mescaline wears off and we get that cone off he should be fine.

As of now I'm waiting on my travel request to be approved in Taiwan so I can arrange plane tickets. It's not at all uncommon for this to be done at the last minute. I wonder if the flight I want will still be available by the time it get's approved.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Your documents, please

2010-04-10T05:06:00.001+08:00

After signing my contract with my employer the next step was to apply for a Taiwan Work Permit. I need to have this in hand when I arrive in Taipei. I guess, so I can enter as a worker and not a tourist. I filled out a simple questionnaire with my employer, provided some document copies (passport, etc) and had to provide 2 photos. I asked if I could just email my HR group a JPEG and let them print it out but, no, they wanted hard copies.

And, of course, it's not exactly the same size requriement as a US passport photo so I'm at work with a tape measure and a paper cutter trying to get the size just right. I thought about having my company's shipping department send the photos over but I don't trust them so I just put them in an envelope and went to the post office. It's just about a dollar to mail an envelope to Taiwan, but it took almost 3 weeks to get there!

They finally confimed the photos were received and I received notice about 2 weeks later that my work permit was approved. They FEDEXed it to me and I got it a couple days ago. It's all in Chinese except my name so for all I know, it labels me as communist party scum and alerts Taiwan immigration to detain me indefinitely. It's got this fancy calligraphy on it though:

I wonder if that's the part about "detention".

The next step is to apply for an ARC, "Alien Resident Card" which will allow me to stay in the country for an amount of time but is also required for many business transactions, opening bank accounts, getting loans, etc. I won't need to apply for this until I arrive in Taiwan but I've already started to gather the necessary documentation. I think I need 8 more photos for this. What's with all the photos?!?!

Also, before I leave, I have to get an International Driver's License which can be obtained for $15 from a AAA office. Then I have 30 days to pass a test and get a Taiwanese Driver's License. Would you believe there is one state in the U.S. from which you can just instantly get a Taiwanese license? No test... No international license...

Oklahoma. I wonder how Oklahoma has ANYTHING to do with Taiwan.

A boy and his dog

2010-04-09T11:04:00.000+08:00

As if our recent run of bad luck couldn't get any worse after the Canada tire incident and the tree incident, my Mom called Saturday night with horrible news: our dog Kramer died, only a week after moving him up there. He had a stroke and Mom took him in to the emergencey clinic where he had two seizures and she did the right thing and put him down.

I've been thinking for days of what to make of a blog post about this incident and how I feel about it:

Confused: I don't understand why I was perfectly OK with departing ways with Kramer to leave him with my Mom yet feel a deep sense of loss over his death.
Relieved: That he passed without getting sick and putting a burden on my Mom to care for him and avoided pain & suffering upon himself.
Thankful: That my Mom was able to do this and I didn't have to.
More-confused: I can't fathom how any parent can send their kid off to fight in a war and die in the name of the cause.

"And they all want to love the cause,

'Cause they all need to be the cause,

They all want to fuck the cause"

- Broken Social Scene

Yeah, I know, it's just a dog.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Obama healthcare plan for ex-pats

2010-04-05T22:19:00.001+08:00

Once the Taiwan situation became a reality I started making some political jokes with people at work pertaining to how many things no longer apply to me. Higher taxes? Doesn't matter. Employment rate? Not worried. Falling dollar? Don't get paid in dollars. Healthcare reform? Ha! I'll have REAL national healthcare as nearly zero cost to me.

I AM supportive of the idea that in a country like the U.S., there should be some degree of coverage for all with the cost shared among many. Call it "socialism" if you must, but then call the interstate highway system "socialized", too. A friend astutely called the Obama plan a national insurance plan and NOT a national health care plan. Point taken. I thought the elimination of preexisting condition discrimination made sense but didn't feel like it particularly applied to me. While this blog at the NY Times points out that the Obama health care plan does not affect Americans living overseas since the ex-pat tax was removed from the bill, many commenters pointed out that, in fact, it does affect them.

By eliminating the preexisting condition, it will allow many ex-pats who want to return to the U.S. to do so. If I go to Taiwan and suffer a major illness, I might be unable to receive insurance coverage upon returning to the States. There are many Americans "trapped" overseas because of this reason. I wonder if the American voters will really lash out at the polls over healthcare.

Getting by with a little help from my friends

2010-04-05T10:16:00.000+08:00

As if the flat tire wasn't enough bad luck for the time being, I came home Wed night to find a humongous oak tree lying across my driveway! The first thought that went through my head was, "Too bad it didn't fall onto the house." Luckily, it did NOT fall on the house because it certainly would not have "totaled" the house which was my initial thought, but we'd be battling with insurance and contractors just to get it sell-able, and we wanted to put in on the market this weekend.

We had a rainstorm Mon-Wed and got somewhere near a half foot of rain. The root ball had eroded and the tree came toppling over. Shirley's car was in the garage at the time so she was now stuck on the other side unable to get down the driveway. Luckily I had come home late from work that day and ended up downstream of the tree and therefore, able to still get off the property. I first thought I'd call a "tree guy" but then decided it might be something I could handle on my own, or with a little help from my friends.

It always pays to have a buddy with chainsaw. I went and borrowed it right away and decided to tackle the job the next day after work. He came by to help out but we ultimately hit a wall with a dull chain and ended our night's work with the driveway still blocked. Next day, new chain, the thing cut like butter. It's still a complicated situation: depending on how the segment you are cutting is supported, it will either tend to pinch the saw on the top or on the bottom. And then you have to watch out when branches are loaded; they can spring back in your face and then you may sever your head. We ended the night by rolling the main pieces into the woods and freeing up the driveway. Success!

Now I had to figure out a way to get the wood off the property and make it look to potential buyers that there isn't a significant chance of a 10,000 pound tree crushing them. This guy at work, Jim, had mentioned that if I ever have a tree go down in the woods, to give him a call. He's looking for firewood. I emailed him the photos and he was ready to come get the wood. He showed up on Saturday and was a bit awestruck at the sheer size of this tree. Before coming up, he suggested that he might just come up with his SUV and fill that, and, if required, make another run up with the trailer. I hinted that we'd fill that SUV up in 10 minutes; fortunately he heeded my word and brought a 5000 lbs. capacity trailer.

It was a hard day's work but we were able to roll all of the big logs out of the woods and onto the trailer. They weighed about 400 pounds each and that trailer was dragging when he finally hauled it away. There's still a pile of smaller pieces left and he's going to come by tomorrow and haul the rest away. I carried all of the brush out into the woods and the yard is looking decent now. I think we are going to list the house next weekend.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

"In a perfect world, every dog would have a home and every home would have a dog."

2010-04-02T05:00:00.001+08:00

This past weekend we set out to tackle one of the remaining milestones: getting Kramer into his new home with my Mom in Niagara Falls, Canada. We still have to find a home for Ozzie so Kramer is the first of two pets to make a departure. We packed up the Mini with Kramer's crate and set out after work. When we travel with Kramer in the car, he is usually just loose in the hatchback which typically results in a lot of restlessness, whining and him stuffing his snout in your face as best he can from the back seat. This time we actually had the crate set up back there and put him in it. He was much more comfortable and rested the best he could considering the Mini + Pennsylvania highways is not the smoothest ride in the world.

We made a pit stop every couple hours at a rest area to let Kramer out, and arrived at the border in Niagara Falls around 11PM. I had read on the internets that you just need a rabies certificate to get your dog into Canada. We had that along with Kramer's entire vet record, just in case my Mom would come to need it, but I was still wary of customs. Going through the border always results in some sort of dumb question that I must trick myself into NOT answering literally.

I think the way she phrased it was, "Are you bringing anything in?"

"Well, this here car, for starters!"

Sometimes I get, "Are you bringing in any gifts?" "Is there anything NOT coming back with you?" "Do you have anything to declare?"

So I answered, "A pound of cheese and 2 boxes of cortizone cream, apparently difficult to find in Canada (probably not as tough as tires, though). I made no mention of the 50# dog in the back but had his rabies cert in hand. She let us pass asking nothing of the dog. Not sure she noticed. Not sure "this dog" was what she was looking for in her questioning.

We got to my Mom's place around midnight. She recently got a German Shepherd puppy, "Barkley", who is a year old and probably just under a hundred pounds. I had Kramer on a leash as we went through the door and Barkley lit up when we came in. He came charging over to Kramer a bit aggressively, upon which Kramer latched on to Barkley's ear until I yanked him back.

I think this set the stage perfectly. Kramer proved that he could hold is own and he and Barkley got along very well afterwards. It was funny to see Barkley follow Kramer around with an inquisitive look. Whenever Kramer did something new, Barkley would come charging over to see what was going on. As soon as Kramer would go outside, Barkley would go charging out the door after him. Kramer got along with Dan pretty well, too, as you can see them practicing their napping skills together.

In the morning Shirley and I went down to the local YMCA which is amazing. They have a nice pool, actually two pools: one kiddie pool and one 4 lane 25m pool with a water slide. Above that there is a huge weight room, loads of cardio equipment, yoga room, spin room, basketball court and some classrooms. They let you in for free the first time and thereafter it's 10 bucks a day as a drop fee. There is also a coffee shop and library on site so I come here often when visiting my Mom. I don't think this is the type of YMCA the Village People had in mind, but you can, in fact, get yourself clean and have a good meal.

After working out my Mom joined us for a trip down to the falls since Shirley has never been. We lucked out and had great weather, albeit a little chilly. I swear it rains constantly in Niagara Falls; my Mom swears it's only when I'm visiting. I hear the same thing from people in Seattle-never rains there, either. If you've never been to Niagara Falls, I think the Canadian side is the tackiest place on Earth. Shirley thinks Vegas holds that title but at least Vegas has an authentic Madame Tussauds Wax Museum whereas Niagara Falls has the "Louis TussaudsWax Museum". Cheezy.

On the way home the check tire light illuminated in the Mini and we stopped to get air but found the air leaked out as fast as it would go in. The Mini has no spare and uses runflats, tires that you can drive on even when flat. We made it back to Mom's and I crawled under the car to find that the tread and the sidewall had become separated at the seam. This tire had seen it's share of mileage and needed to be replaced (probably 10k miles ago) along with its rear conterpart on the passenger's side. It was 6PM on Saturday and we couldn't get a hold of a tire shop. I made some calls on Sunday and could not locate a tire in that size anywhere in the vicinity. I was quoted a lead time of 10 days. There was a Mini dealer a few miles away in St. Catharines and we would have to use that as a last resort on Monday.

On Monday morning we called some real tire shops (as opposed to Candian Tire and Wal-Mart) hoping that might be a better option. Found a guy who could get us a tire in 5 days. The Mini dealer had them in stock and we bit the bullet and headed up. We wanted to avoid the highway as with the damage to the tire, it got a bit wobbly above 40MPH so we needed to take backroads which were under construction. With Dan leading the way we limped in to the dealer and were directed to the lounge area to wait for them to look at the car. Here is Shirley waiting with her blue Mini through the window in the background. An hour later they assesed the situation and gave us a quote. 2 tires, mounted...guess how much? Over $800, Canadian! So with today's exchange rate, $787. It was actually around $820CN so we broke the $400 per tire barrier. Insane! But we had no choice to get us home that day. So we waited another 2 hours for them to mount the tires and were on our way. They even washed the car, for free!

We already had to skip a day of work, keep Ozzie in the kennel another day, and have someone come up to our house to take care of the cat. The price of the same tire in the U.S. on Tirerack=$144. So we can look at it as a $500 car wash, or ammoritize the cost across the few cups of "free" coffee we drank in the dealer lounge. Warning: if you ever go to Canada, bring tires. I will forever have 195/55R16 burned into my brain. Oh, and these are STOCK tires. We don't have any wacky low profile or huge spinner rims or anything like that. Next time I buy a car, I'm checking the tire size and making sure it is readily available in places other than a car dealer.

We at least were able to leave knowing that Kramer was comfortable in his new home and had made a new friend in Barkley. I think it's more like, Barkley made a new friend in Kramer. Here is my last moment with Kramer. Not sure why he's licking his lips. The food must taste better in Canada. Either that or he secretly ate that tire to get revenge on us for deporting him.

We hit the road for home and were planning on stopping in Buffalo for chicken wings since we've never had a "real" Buffalo wing and it might be something that we can't quite get in Taiwan. My buddy Brett is from Buffalo so we asked him where to go. It seemed to be a tough choice between Duff's and Anchor Bar but when pressed he suggested Duff's. There are two places that we go to for decent wings: TK's in Danbury,CT and Frankie's in Melbourne,FL.

We each ordered a lunch special which is 10 wings in your choice of hotness and 2 sides. The menu indicates they have a scale factor in their hotness, like a "chicken wing exchange rate". They tout "Medium Hot is VERY Hot" so I ordered Medium Hot and Shirley chose Mild Medium. We asked for chili and fries as our sides and they had run out of chili and gave Shirley the last scoop. Bummer. Our wings and fries arrived. Fries were shoestring which I like and you could smell the vinagar in the air from the wings.

In a nutshell: the meat of the wings is superior to anywhere else, but the flavor of the sauce is very basic, Frank's Red Hot in butter with some white pepper and probably not much more. I thought the assesment of the hotness was pretty accurate. Duff's Medium Hot is comparable to a TK's "suicide" and Frankie's 4 or 5, depending on which cook made the sauce that day. Frankie's sauce is rated on a scale from 1-9 with each level having a moniker, e.g., level 9 is called "Dial 9-1-1". The thing with Frankies is not just the hotness of the sauce but with the flavoring; it's not just a jar of Red Hot or Tabasco but I think it has tomoto paste in it and other secret ingredients, probably stuff with a very short half-life.

I easily put down 10 Duff's Medium Hot but even one 7 at Frankie's can disable your digestive tract for days. I've witnessed someone vomit on the table at Frankie's when trying to ingest just one level 9. Folklore says they make a level 10 but you have to be "in-the-know" to get them as they are worried about the side effects and potential lawsuits. All said and done, Duff's was good, but Frankie's has the best hot wings I have ever had. I think Frankie was from NY so maybe he was originally from the Buffalo area which might add to his wing cred. Frankie died about 5 years ago. I wonder if it was in the act of researching a #11. They should name it, "Call the coroner".

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

St. Baldrick's Day

2010-03-24T02:38:00.000+08:00

For several years Shirley has told me about some work colleagues of hers that participate in a fundraiser known as St. Baldrick's Day. The premise is you pledge to shave your head if your friends pledge donations for children's cancer research. I always thought it was a cool idea but never felt THAT connected to the cause. Even though my grandmother died from cancer, the St. Baldrick's Foundation is specific to children's cancer. I realize it's all part of the same disease, but the connection wasn't really there until I attended an alumni reuinion in Florida in 2009 and found out that my college roomate's 9 year old son had Leukemia.

So I did the fundraiser last year and shaved my head for the first time ever, raising $1300 in the process. I once had a "crew cut" when I was 8 years old or so. It was a great experience to see how connected people felt to the cause and even hear stories about their battles with cancer. I'm fortunate that I've been a relative bystander in this disease.

I signed up again for the event in 2010 and will be shaving my head at lunch time tomorrow at Shirley's school. The event was started by one teacher there and has caught on to several faculty members and some students. There is currently no St. Baldrick's event in Taiwan but there is in Hong Kong. I was talking to Shirley about trying to start up an event at her new school in Taiwan. It would be awesome to start the first event in Taiwan. I wonder if it will catch on. If not, it might be a good excuse for a trip to Hong Kong.

You can see my profile and join me in donating at:

https://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/pilam99

The beard alone should be worth something!

I will post photos/video after the shearing...

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Dog eat dog world

2010-03-23T10:18:00.000+08:00

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is, "What are you going to do with your dogs?" There were two tough pills to swallow with this opportunity, one being the house and the second being the dogs. There was actually a point in time where I envisioned bringing one of them to Taiwan with us but I fortunately came to the conclusion that this would be self-serving and the right thing to do would be to find them both suitable homes. Living in an apartment in Taipei is not suitable for these guys.

Kramer is 14 and I've had him since a pup. I actually solicited my sister to enter as a silent partner into his purchase from a mall pet store. They had two Bassets at the time, Kramer and his brother. I got to play with them and Kramer mauled his brother so I chose Kramer. Also, his brother had only one testicle.

I recently read that Bassets rarely live past 12 years of age. Kramer is still going pretty strong at 14.5. Luckily, my Mother has agreed to take Kramer and we'll be hauling him up to Canada this weekend. I'm sure we'll have more to say about that later in the week.

We got Ozzie from a coworker of mine who had an uncle who had a kid that worked at a pet store who brought home this dog and their condo association allegedly told them they couldn't keep the dog. Ozzie is a handful. I think they were just looking for an exit strategy. We took him in when he was eight months old and he is now 10 years.

We've been working through a Basset Hound rescue organization to find him a home. Anyone who runs a Basset Hound rescue has to be insane, for multiple reasons. I called the rescue lady tonight and she didn't disappoint. There's just something not right, in that crazy cat lady sort of way. But I'm really hoping that she can find Ozzie a good home before I leave in May. Go crazy Basset Hound Lady!

We'll be sad to part ways with our dogs. I think the void left by bringing Kramer to Canada this weekend will propel the imminence of this move into a new league. I wonder if he'll like life as an ex-pat.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Paradigm shift funk

2010-03-20T08:25:00.001+08:00

I'm sort of in the calm before the storm as I'm down to 45 days before departure and in limbo on a few things:

waiting for some paperwork to go through
sprucing up the house before putting it on the market
getting all of the cat import documents filed
etc, etc, etc

I was at a coffee shop once (the American kind where there is no pot smoking going on) and a band of three teenagers took to the stage. The lead singer started with, "Our name is Paradigm Shift Funk and we are a funky, funky band." He played lead guitar quite well, had a mediocre bassist and a terrible drummer. I was impressed that they opened with a Steely Dan song, forget which, but impressive for someone that age to be into Steely. But, I guess if you are a funky, funky band, that might not be so odd.

Anyhow, paradigms... It's amazing to me how our daily thoughts are confined by certain perceptions and visions of the future. You know how, at the end of a cold harsh winter in the northeast, you just can't wrap your head around the notion that in July it will be 90 degrees? Just a year ago, I would have never thought that we would be moving to Taiwan. Never thought we'd be living in another home. Never thought we'd be speaking a foreign language. It all seemed so alien at that time. Now, it's the opposite:, can't envision sitting down to watch football on Sunday, driving a pickup truck, ice skating on a pond. It's all practically been erased, like when looking at the light in Men In Black. Gone.

I was working on mulching some of the planting beds the other day and uncovered, for the first time, an engraved stone that the previous owners had laid in the ground. It said, "The Mills, est. 1993". They got divorced in 2004, forcing the sale of the house to us. I wonder how soon before 2004 they realized how different their lives were about to come.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto

2010-03-10T11:23:00.001+08:00

If you notice at the top of my blog I have a series of random "I wonder..." questions, one of which is, "I wonder if my wife will be able to find a job?"

I'm glad to say that said quote will be coming out of rotation as Shirley accepted a job teaching math (in English) and, get this, "robotics". Myself and several of my work colleagues are very jealous at the whole robotics thing, especially since my company has a core competency in mechatronics.

Her interview process ended up similar to mine in that before making an offer, they asked to hold a video chat interview. She thinks one of the interview factors was her enthusiasm about the possibility of starting up a surfing club at the school. Surfing and robotics... Is this really "work"?!?! Can we switch jobs?

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Always thought that I'd see you again

2010-03-08T11:45:00.001+08:00

Putting another check mark on the Connecticut bucket list involved a stop at Tucker's in Fairfield where Neil, a friend of Shirley's from her first job tends bar on Friday nights. We were fortunate enough to be joined by 3 other colleagues of Shirley's and their significant others who also worked with Neil at the same school. It quickly turned into a combination of reunion and going-away as we received our first "going away gift", which caught me a bit off guard and served as a reminder of the imminence of this move.

I made a slip when we were leaving and said, "We wanted to see you one last time..." to which Neil retorted, "Hey, I'm only 55!" My comment came from 2 issues:

1) I often get asked, "How long are you going for?" When I first thought about exploring this idea I had envisioned going on an ex-pat contract with a finite time of say, 2 years, upon completion of which, it would be unlikely for me to be offered the opportunity to stay. Long story short, that did not pan out that way. I am taking a permanent job on a localized package, for many reasons, some of which will likely surface in future posts. In my interviews with my new boss, he warned me, "Mike, in 1994 I took a job in Taiwan thinking much like you, to stay a couple years and return to the U.S. I haven't been able to convince myself to leave." So Shirley and I being open minded about the time frame. I think it comes down to doing what will make you happy and eliminating obstacles that stand in the way.

2) The other issue is, you never know when you are seeing someone for the last time; don't take it for granted. What would things be like if we treated every encounter as though it was the last time we would ever see that person? Not easy to do. I wonder what I would have said differently if I had known that I was seeing my father for the last time ~6 years ago.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

And we're worried about texting while driving...

2010-03-04T05:51:00.000+08:00

I've been wondering what we'll do about a car. We want to live near the MRT and my company is outside the network of subway stations so I will need a car to get back and forth to work. Shirley will assumedly be within the grid of public transportation so we'll at least be able to get by on one car. My plan is to purchase a car used, which should be the most economical solution, rather than lease or buy new. I'd like something small to navigate the city (park), fuel efficient, yet big enough to transport bikes to races, either inside or on a rack.

We currently have a Mini Cooper which fits the bill but the import tax on cars is crazy so it will not come with us and, anyway, is probably not the easiest or cheapest to maintain in Taiwan. I started doing some research into Japanese Mini-substitues if you will, cars like the Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris, Mazda 3, Suzuki Swift and Nissan Versa, which is apparently the "Tilda" in Taiwan.

I'm fascinated by cars that have different names in different countries. I mean, the names are generally meaningless to begin with. What's a Corolla? a Prius? Impreza? Hummer? well, forget that one! How is the "Tilda" more marketable in Asia than the U.S.? Maybe they need to make it less likely for the factory to accidently ship a Tilda to the U.S. because it has a feature that would bar it from the road in the States. What would that be?

Oh, just an LCD TV screen with a DVD player built into the dash; this is stock! Driving in Taipei is insane enough. Now we need people watching movies while driving? And with subtitles?!?!

When I was working in Korea there were three of us travelling to a factory in Icheon, a couple hours east of Seoul . We made the trip out in a small taxi, with all our luggage, most of which I ended up sitting on. During the week out in Icheon, we saw a cab parked at the curb which was a nice looking roomy minivan. We asked the driver for his card and called him to come pick us up at the end of the week for the journey back.

We hadn't seen the inside and were pleasantly surprised to find that it had multiple flat screen TVs and a crazy surround sound system with fiber optic lighting. I made a comment to my coworker that involved "Pimp my ride..." and when I said that, the driver's ears perked up and he gave me the thumbs up sign in the rear view mirror. I guess they get MTV over there. I also noticed that the driver had a screen for himself up front, much like this Nissan.

I wonder if it is interlocked such that when the car is in drive the DVD turns off. Anyone know? Apparently another feature in cars in Taiwan is wall-to-wall carpeting, on the dash! I think the carpeting is aftermarket, though. Maybe they watch MTV in Taiwan, too.

Signed, sealed, delivered

2010-03-04T01:36:00.000+08:00

I am often asked, "So is this a done deal?" and my typical response notes the way things work with my company, it's not a done deal until I'm actually there. But I'm about as close as I will ever get to a done deal as I have finally received an acceptable contract. The first contract goofed up my original hire date based on a "glitch in the matrix" so we had another go around. Next up is gathering the documents for a Taiwan Work Permit. I need to get one before I arrive in Taiwan, then I need to apply for an ARC.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Impossible!

2010-03-02T11:18:00.000+08:00

I started on Pimsleur lesson #9 on my way home from work today. I discussed the ever important lesson 8 which addresses how to order beer and it was only appropriate that lesson 9 focus on trying to score with Asian chicks, which is apparently what most Pimsleur customers are looking for.

The whole situation kinda snuck up on me as the previous lessons have delved into food and drink and little bit with time and location such as now/later, here/there. Then lesson 9 starts to get into exact times, 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock. Then out of nowhere it reveals the word for "impossible" which leads to the final conversation of the lesson between a guy and girl:

Guy: Would you like to have a drink with me at 1 o'clock?
Girl: Impossible!
Guy: Would you like to have a drink with me at 2 o'clock?
Girl: Impossible!
Guy: Would you like to have a drink with me at 8 o'clock?
Girl: Impossible!
Guy: Would you like to have a drink with me at 9 o'clock?
Girl: Impossible!
Guy: Would you like to have lunch with me?
Girl: You do not understand what I am saying.

Much of what I read about the ex-pat social scene involves a bunch of desperate white computer geeks trolling Taipei for an Asian girlfriend that would be a solid two notches out of their league in the Western world. I wondered if that was really true but since it only took until lesson 9 to enforce that behavior, I think I can count on it.

CT farewell tour stop #2: Merritt Canteen

2010-03-01T11:08:00.000+08:00

The CT farewell tour continued this weekend with a trip to the Merritt Canteen. Almost as controversial as pizza in CT is the hot dog. Travelling along any major artery in the state will yield roadside hot dog stands one after the other, and once you choose sides, loyalty is expected. Don't get me wrong, I have dined at other decent hot dog joints, Swanky Franks, Super Duper Weenie, the Greeks, but my heart lies in the Canteen.

I grew up not far from here and worked across the street at Pathmark Supermarket and probably ate here 5 nights a week for the good part of two years of my life. They say, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and in retrospect, I am surprised that I survived my "regular" order:

2 cheese dogs with bacon
Mozzarella sticks
Grilled cheese sandwich with bacon

All 2500 calories (?) of which I was able to put down in a 15 minute break. Oh, to be 16 again...

In some ways the Canteen has stayed true to its heritage and in other changes leave me yearning for the good old days.

The good:

The hot dogs taste the same as they did 30 years ago. The dogs are natural casing mix of beef/pork. I think they are deep fried in lard and then grilled to order. The chili is the same recipe and is crazy hot
Whole belly clams are still served in season
They make a cheese dog by frying a piece of cheese on the grill and then putting it on the dog. I've tried this myself an there is a narrow window of opportunity where the cheese is cooked just enough but not too much.
There's something good about the breading in the mozzarella sticks. It's a little bit thicker than normal and they served them before the trend caught on.
There's a method to the ordering system that exposes the locals vs. the out-of-towners.
No credit cards accepted.
They've always had a cheesy arcade game in the corner. It's now a crane game. It may have been a crane game for quite some time.
The bathroom looks like a great place to commit a murder. I'm not saying that murder is great, but it's great that the food is so good that the risk of being murdered in the bathroom is worth it.
It is kinda dingy inside with terribly uncomfortable tables and because it's small and the door is always opening and closing, it can be pretty cold in the winter

The bad:

They have an ATM machine on site. This removes one barrier to entry at the Canteen, you used to have to go find a bank, or perhaps rob the place
They have a website. In the old days, much of the good stuff wasn't even on the menu
They changed French fries. They used to serve a thicker, longer crinkle cut and now are a bit on the skinny side, still crinkle cut though.
They have a more diverse menu with items that are actually healthy, like salads.
They painted the place
There aren't as many shady characters roaming around the parking lot as there used to be

This was planned as our last visit to the Canteen. I wonder if the sausages at the Shilin Night Market will serve as a worthy substitute. I think so.

My brother ate at the Merritt Canteen almost every day until he turned vegetarian around age 15. I've been trying to think of a clever message in that fact. While I haven't come up with anything, I don't think such a message would be used in a commercial for the Merritt Canteen.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Now that I know all the Chinese I need to know..

2010-02-26T11:46:00.000+08:00

I started studying Mandarin with Rosetta Stone about a month ago and after getting in a decent amount of studying while on a ski trip in Utah, I found it difficult to free up time to continue. Several years ago I got Shirley the Pimsleur Chinese series on CD as a gift so that she could re-learn Chinese, having nothing to do with a move to Taiwan. I found it on the bookshelf, dusted it off, and ripped it to MP3 so I could fit the 26 disc series onto 2 CDs. Luckily my car stereo can play MP3s as my strategy was to use it on my hour (each way) commute to work. Finding something productive to do while commuting as like magically making the day 26 hours long.

Rosetta Stone is very visual, you associate sounds and writing with a photo and it runs on a computer. From my limited use with it, it at least starts out being very vocabulary based. Pimsleur is strictly audio, and immediately focuses on actual conversations. It's also clearly geared toward touristy situations. Where things are, what to eat, how to tell someone, "Sorry, my Chinese sucks". While I can't necessarily say that the Pimsleur method is better than Rosetta Stone, for me, it is the better choice for now. I suspect the best solution long term is to use them both.

The lessons are about a half hour long. Most lessons I repeat once before moving on to the next and that seems to result in a pretty good mastery of the material. There is a lot of repetition built in so I suspect you could do each lesson once and not lose out as the following lesson will start with a review and then expand the material. I wonder if I look like and idiot driving down the road with my lips flapping away, speaking Chinese.

I just started the 8th lesson today and finally learned how to say, "I would like to drink some beer." The number 8 is regarded as very lucky in Chinese culture. Therefore, I think it's no coincidence that the 8th lesson involves asking for a beer.

taiwanderyears.blogspot.com

Holy Grail of Pizza

2010-02-24T03:12:00.002+08:00

"When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your mind's eye." -Julia Child, My Life in France

I've started thinking about what things I should do or see before leaving Connecticut, like a one last time "bucket list" of experiences that will not be available in Taiwan. Much of this revolves around food. In CT, pizza is like a religous experience.

Perhaps the most famous of the New Haven pizza joints is Pepe's. There's also Sally's and Modern and you have to choose sides. I am a Pepe's guy and this was high on my list of must dos before leaving. There are two buildings @ Pepe's, the newer building known as "Pepe's" and the original building known as "The Spot". Both serve the same pizza. The line @ Pepe's was easily two hours as we waited over an hour to get into The Spot. For pizza.

I'm starting to get that feeling regarding leaving for Taiwan. Eating food, going places, seeing people. What used to be routine now has a sense of finality about it. There's a bit of surrealness to it. While it has potential to be depressing, the upside is that there will be substitues for all of this activity and the opportunity to fill these voids with completely new experiences is very exciting.

I wonder if I will ever eat a more memorable pizza.

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