Taiwan Day One
Thursday in Taiwan was fairly restful, or during the day anyway. The programme for the 2007 Freedom Forum didn’t start until the next day. We were all put up at the Grand Formosa Regent Hotel in Taipei, and it was an excellent hotel. Definitely would recommend it to anyone travelling there.
It actually used to be a temple, I am told, many years ago. It’s 20 stories high, and has the Regent Galleria shops all below in a massive shopping mall.
The trip in from the airport takes around 45 minutes and costs NT$1,200 which i around NZ$45. I’ve learnt the hard way to avoid the people who approach you offering a taxi as they always costs twice as much (were asking NT$2,500) and you always hunt for someone on an actual stand.
Went exploring around the neighbourhood. Like many Asian cities there is a mixture of modern high rises and ramshackle shops.
The motor scooter is the popular form of transport. Everywhere yu go there are scooters parked where ever there is space.
Crossing the road is an exciting sport. Even though they have these wonderful signs which tell you now only that you have right of way to cross, but also how much time you have left. You see the motorists try to turn left or right between pedestrians. Now this isn’t too bad when it is motor cyclists squirting between you as you cross, but the cars do it also. They move right up to the edge of the crossing, sometimes stopping just ten cms from you, ready to jump past the moment there is a space, The trick is to stare them in the eye so they at least wait until you have gone past before they accelerate.
There isn’t a lot of green space in Taipei, but this little park is next to our hotel, which you can see in the background.
Now back at the hotel in the evening we made an amazing discovery. The hotel has buffets for everything – a breakfast buffet, a lunch buffet, a dinner buffet and a liquid buffet.
Now hold on a second you say. What is a liquid buffet. Well we read the card. For NT$1,000 (NZ$40) one could drink from 8 pm to 1 am choosing from a choice of 52 liqueurs, spirits, beers and wine. We thought surely not, but the hotel confirmed it.
Well around 15 of us gathered together and paid our NT$1,000 and started ordering. Now after a while we started to see how they might make money. The waiter would come and take an order off each of us individually, then go and make 15 different drinks and then bring each of us a drink. Each circuit took around 30 minutes.
So I devised a logical speedup. I ordered 15 Baileys on the Rocks. The waiter queried whether I meant one, and I confirmed 15 – one for each of us. Well that took 20 seconds to order, and only five minutes until it came back. And then we ordered 15 strawberry liqueurs (which were awful incidentally) and they came in around ten minutes, and we ploughed on from that with Bombay Sapphires etc etc.
Almost all the guests at the hotel seemed to be Asian, so maybe they had never had a bunch of thirsty Finns, Kiwis, Aussies, Danes, Scots, English, Swiss and Norwegians before. We were all deliriously happy at being able to have five hours of spirits and liqueurs for what would normally be the costs of say four or five drinks.
We all agreed it was a very good start to the stay in Taiwan. We also agreed that if the hotel never offers a liquid buffet again, we would probably be to blame.