The Leofoo was a pretty hotel with small, but clean rooms. Each morning, guests were given a “Western-style” all-you-can-eat buffet breakfast. The meal consisted of sausage, bacon, eggs, rolls, toast, corn flakes and a curious, soggy, gloppy, watery rice dish.
The prospect of all-you-can-eat bacon for breakfast was tantalizing; however, the reality was somewhat less than satisfying. The Taiwanese eat lots of pork and, reportedly, there is no incidence of the disease Trichinosis on the island. Consequently, the bacon was rare – pink, in fact. A lifetime learning that pork should never be eaten unless fully cooked was impossible to overcome and the bacon remained safe from my food marauding expeditions.
One nice thing about the buffet dining room at the Leofoo was that we sat next to a second story picture-window looking down on a busy intersection. From the safety of the second floor I could watch the chaotic turmoil that is Taipei traffic and prepare myself psychologically for dealing with it before each day began. On our first morning at the Leofoo, I watched an ambulance, siren blaring, attempt to make a left turn at the intersection. The maneuver took fully 5 minutes as the rush hour traffic simple refused to yield to the ambulance. Even the scooters and pedestrians continued on their way, oblivious to its errand of mercy.
The best part about the ambulance diversion was that it temporarily drowned out the selection of awful Christmas muzac playing incessantly in the lobby.
We set out for Chu-Wan’s parents’ house. The weather was perfect. We had been expecting continuous rain, but the weather couldn’t have been much better. Her parents had only returned to Taipei a day before us, as they have been in the States for our wedding, so all we did was drop off some things we had brought for them in our luggage, checked my Internet mail and headed off for a walk in Ta’an park. I spent a good half hour attempting to get my dad’s GPS unit to function, but to no avail. It later turned out that I needed to turn off battery-saver mode after travelling any distance over 400 miles, but I didn’t learn that until I returned home.
After failing to get the GPS working, we set out to the South-East corner of the park to locate the web-cam operated by the city Taipei. Normally the camera looks over the elevated freeway, but sometimes it points towards the surface streets and the park can be seen. If the camera had been pointing towards the park we were going to attempt to set a time for our friends back in the States to see us on the camera. During our whole trip, the camera stayed stubbornly pointed at the freeway.
On my previous trip to Taiwan, there were times when I had been sorely desperate for American food, this time, my in-laws went to great pains to find me places to eat. After our walk in the park, they took us to the Basil Mint restaurant. An oddly-named place specializing in American food and Australian seafood. It was all-you-can-eat, and I ate a lot – gorging myself on steak, fried chicken, grilled chicken, lamb and spaghetti. We ate lunch with friends of Chu-Wan’s father, one of whom was a businessman working in Indonesia. He told us several stories of the violence going on there targeted at ethnic Chinese.
Afterwards, we started our great Wedding Photography Adventure. Phase one was to go to a place called “Catherine’s” – one of the many places that specializes in wedding photography albums. The wedding albums are apparently unique to Asia (so far) and consist of a rather elaborate glamour photo shoot, which ultimately results in a handsome album and portrait of the couple. The photos involve multiple clothing changes for the groom, and many more for the bride, including complete make-up and hair changes too. The process ends up taking several days to complete. Today we just went for Chu-Wan to select the dresses she’d be wearing. Meanwhile, my father-in-law took me to a men’s ware store to buy shirts and ties.
Before leaving the States, Chu-Wan had reminded me to bring a suit. She failed to remind me to bring shirts, socks and ties to go with the suit. I’m a proponent of travelling light and was making every effort to keep the baggage to a minimum; however, forgetting the clothes was just a stupid oversight.
We walked back to the hotel, finally confirming my suspicion that, despite having 2.6 million people, Taipei actually covers a relatively small geographic area. On our trek, I made note of the various exotic western restaurants that we might eat at: Subway, Tony Roma’s. Hooters (Never made it there, but really have to see that one for myself! I suspect they have to import foreign waitresses to “fill out” their staff.) Hard Rock Café, Ruby Tuesday, TGI Fridays, Ruth Chris Steakhouse and Trader Vic’s – just to name a few. Ultimately, we decided on RoundTable Pizza, and I was once again pleasantly surprised at how similar their pizza tastes compared to the American “original”.
Before we go on, I can tell you I spent most of the rest of this part of the trip in bed. Sounds perfect for a honeymoon, doesn’t it? Well, read on…
Notes from the 21st Century
My original post didn’t have that cool embedded image from the web cam. When I was dragging the text, which included a link to the webcam, into my blogging software, somehow it turned it into an image from the webcam.