This morning we got up at 0800. Mom showered, then I showered. I couldn’t get the temperature to go down for some reason, so the shower was just a little too warm the whole time. When we got out, Mom asked me to call the tour place and ask them if we could change from the National Park tour to the Taipei city tour. So I did, and they girl who answered remembered me and said that’d be just fine. Anyway, then I dressed and we went down to breakfast. I had another stellar omelet and some fruit. I went up to the girl who looked like she was in charge.
"Excuse me. Are you the manager here?"
"Assistant manager only."
"The omelet I was just served," I said, pointing at the omelet-making place in the coffee shop, sort of frowning "was absolutely delicious." Then I smiled. She smiled. It was funny. We had a moment-thing.
"Thank you. I’ll be sure to tell the cook." Then she gave me her card. Flora Chen. Nice girl. I told her she had a weird email address. howard@howard-hotels.com. She said it was the hotel’s mail. Then she gave me her personal one. 8)~ After that I went downstairs and checked my mail and came up to the room.
Mom and I have been holding off buying tea this whole trip in anticipation of finding a nice tea shop here in Taipei. Therefore, we decided to go find somewhere this morning. I went back downstairs and sort of flirted with the girls in the business office and found out a good place to buy tea: in the basement of the expensive Japanese department store SOGO is a little tea shop where you can ‘try it before you buy it.’ This sounded good, so mom and I walked up the street. A long time. Finally we saw a shopping center. "Breeze Center."
??? We went inside. We went downstairs. We found a girl selling tea, but it definitely wasn’t what we had in mind. I told her what we were looking for and she drew us a little map showing how to get there. Unfortunately the map wasn’t very good, but we had a better idea of where the place was. We wandered in that direction and asked a cop who was standing in the road, who said something really fast that I didn’t understand, but he also pointed, so we went that way. Eventually we stumbled across SOGO after roaming through a few small streets full of people selling fruits & stuff. We went inside. We went downstairs. We saw a *lovely* little shop selling all kinds of tea. Unfortunately they were only sampling one kind. I asked (in Chinese, of course) if we could try a few other kinds. The girl behind the counter was very accommodating and we wound up trying 5-6 kinds of tea and buying 4 kinds of good tea and an assorted pak of teabags. Then we headed back to the hotel to meet our afternoon tour guide.
While standing in the business center flirting with the girls, mom came in, followed shortly thereafter by a man asking if we were the Morfords. He then led us out to a waiting van, which was occupied by a driver and another tourist – a man who currently lives in Australia, but moved there from Guangzhou when he was 20. First we drove into the center of town to the Chiang Kai Shek memorial; this building was really quite beautiful. While on the second floor we noted a changing of the guard. Our guide was like "Now they won’t move for a whole hour." Well they spent a good 5 minutes going into parade rest. I dunno, swinging their guns around & stuff. Weird. Then we drove to the Martyrs Museum or something, where I learned more about the history of Taiwanese & Chinese government in 15 minutes of reading panels on the wall than I had known previously. Very interesting. If my digital camera had worked I would’ve taken pictures of the panels. Then we went to the Palace Museum, where they were storing something like 700,000 treasures that Chiang Kai Shek took out of China with him. Mom said it was a good thing because otherwise they would’ve been smashed in the Cultural Revolution. After that we went to a shop where they were selling local handiworks. Nice stuff, but we were sort of souveniered out by that time. Mom bought a dress for herself, however, as well as a few little pendants & stuff for Melissa & her friends. Then we were taken back to our hotel.
Mom and I were both tired and very hungry, so we went to the restaurant in the hotel. I had a tasty burger. Mom had some Curry Chicken which she did not like. Then we went back to the room where I called Robert. He was still at work. The time was about 7:30PM. I didn’t necessarily feel like going out, but Robert reminded me that it was Ladies’ Night at Carnegie’s, a local bar. I agreed that it sounded good, since Taiwan is full of hot chicks and girls can only get better looking when they’re dressed up and going out. At 9:30 I met Robert in the lobby, where we walked to the train station, took the subway for just 2 stops, then walked another 10-15 minutes to the bar. We had to wait in line. The line was full of girls, including one who was very skinny, and yet somehow very pretty. Really, really skinny though. It was actually kind of gross. Her tummy was extremely flat. Not even the usual bumps from muscle. Sort of like when you see pictures of Jews in concentration camps… like that kind of skinny. Her face was really quite pretty and not grossly skinny like her tummy. AAAAAnyway, I talked to her for a few minutes because her English was quite good, although I stopped when her BF showed up. The bar was really packed, with lots of attractive girls. Unfortunately, there was a 2:1 ratio of white guys to girls. I don’t get it. I didn’t see more than 2-3 white guys the whole time we were in Taipei, but they must’ve come out of the woodwork for Ladies’ Night. Every white guy in the city must have been there. Robert & I left after an hour or so (and one beer) and went back to the train station; he needed to change trains at the stop where I needed to get off, so I told him thanks for taking us around and that we’d be sure to return the favor when he comes to AZ later this year. Then I walked the few hundred yards back to the hotel; went up to the room, showered off the night’s accumulated sweat (really humid out!) and went to bed.