Day 3: High Above

25 October 2007, ????H

A dream... What? Who? What are you doing here? Why are we... Holy...!

0900H

Woke up. What a weird dream. We're changing rooms today, to a room with two single beds. My apparent tossing in bed was preventing Dad from having a good night's sleep the previous nights. Well, problem solved.

1000H

Met up with the Sis. Went out and stopped by a place for breakfast before continuing to the MRT station.

I tried looking for a good jacket I could wear back here, but since the seasons were changing all the brands were pulling out their summer lines for their autumn/winter ones.

Spotted a line of Reebok shoes for Voltron. They even had five different designs and colours for the five lions (red, green, blue, yellow and... white I think). I tried to get a photo of the display but the tender caught me and told me it wasn't allowed.

I found a Muji on one of the floors and went in to get a cool looking and simple black covered lined notebook and a nice looking pen for recording this (I wish my actual memory was this good, and yes, that means some of the things in the first two days might be a little inaccurate).

So then we went up the higher floors and there were a bookshop and a, if you will, tech section. Unfortunately, the bookshop was filled with Chinese books and the tech section was crawling with Apples so I didn't really bother and took the time to sit down and catch up on this record.

1415H

We went down to the basement for lunch at a restaurant called 鼎泰丰 (ding3 tai4 feng1). It was supposedly a really popular and famous restaurant for its 小笼包 (xiao3 long2 bao1). The food of course was great (especially the beef soup), but the irony was in the drunken chicken, which was the most expensive but the only one that pretty much sucked.

Noticed how tight the skirts on the waitresses were (what? ...what? .........what?). I got a bit freaked on the lift trip down before eating in here, because there were these... What do you call them? They're lift ladies but they don't do it all the time, only when they happen to be in it. They probably have other responsibilities as well but didn't really tried to find out. I'd seem like, you know, a stalker.

So what happened is when the lift door is closing, they'll wish you a... Was it a safe trip or a happy day? And they'll bow to about 75 degrees in front of the door, and they won't move until the door closes. That was the thing that kind of freaked me out, because it's something so obscure to a Singaporean. I mean, service like that? Never going to happen here, man.

After we were done we left the restaurant and we hung around a bit because Dad was buying some local foodstuff to bring back. We left the building after he was done, and went to (guess what) another Sogo down the street. Apparently, there are three Sogo buildings within 50 metres of each other, and I have no clue to why.

Sis was going in to get something for some coupon so we just left her to go in alone while we waited outside. I noticed a very interesting thing near the front door; there was a big sign telling you the amount of people in the building, and a supposedly maximum number of people the building can contain.

So I began to wonder: what if the capacity was reached? Does the whole building go into lockdown and people aren't allowed in and the whole place makes a big hoohah out of it? It kept me busy for like a minute before the Sis came out. Tough luck, they were out of that thing.

Just saw a girl who looks like Amanda. Big, freaky eyes. Brrrr.

Then I was reminded of how I was thinking about the variety of taxis here. They had almost every model you could think of converted into taxis; it was as if that if you wanted to be a taxi driver, you would just take any car, paint it yellow, install the meter and light, get a license, and voila! Mr. Taxi Driver.

I've seen Corolla, Altis, Camrys, Cefiros, Civics... I remember seeing a Lancer too. Of course they're not so hard to tell apart from other road cars, but it's pretty interesting. There was one with a big-ass spoiler on its back too.

1545H

Went back to the MRT and took a station down to 忠孝新生 (zhong1 xiao4 xin1 sheng1) station. We were going to a place via recommendation, a place called 光华商场 (guang1 hua2 shang1 chang3), or Guang Hua Marketplace, which is possibly the Taipei equivalent of Sim Lim Square.

They sold all kinds of tech stuff, and I saw an oh-so-familiar list of prices for parts. There wasn't much to see really, except when we walked into an alley and found a shop selling... "Special stuff".

We took a cab back to our hotel, with me still thinking about the shop. Took a short nap.

1900H

Met up with everyone and left for...



...currently the tallest building standing in the world.



We got tickets and went up on a freak-fast lift (5th to 89th in 32 seconds)...



...up to the viewing gallery on the 89th floor. We were given these ridiculous-looking phone things as our tour guides...



...but it didn't really matter much. I took loads of photos, of course.





Well, the real star of the show was really this little bugger:



It's called a damper. It reduces the shifting of weight in the building for protection during storms and especially for Taiwan, typhoons.



When you are there, you can buy another ticket to go up a further two floors so you can go outdoors and feel the wind in... Well, everywhere. It was so windy it got really cold and felt like a storm. We even saw some clouds up there. That's how high it was.



When we were done having our faces blown off our heads, we bought some souvenirs and headed back down. This time, I took a video of the display in the lift while going down. Notice the speeds on the display.



I guess you can't really go down as quickly as you go up.

We went down to the food court in the basement for dinner. We had steak, which was awesome. Haven't had really great steak in a very, very time. When we were done we had Tau Huey for dessert. The Taiwanese have a thing about peanuts it seems, it's everywhere! I'm having none of that, thanks. Plain tau huey for me, ok, thanks, bye.

We went to a nearby supermarket nearby to buy some snacks. When we were done with the shopping and gaping at the things they were selling, we saw something straight out of AltaVista Babel Fish.



It should really translate as "Green Tea Cake Roll", I think.

2200H

We went back, changed to something lighter and spent a long while at the terminal again. When I was done and went up, I decided I was quite sick of the bed hair I was carrying around the past couple of days, so I put off the shower to the morning.

They change the sheets everyday, no?