The World Needs More Ninjas

This is better late than never….

When I left off my trip last week I was getting ready to head to Taiwan. On Friday morning I slept in and then got ready to go to the airport. It was about an hour taxi ride from my hotel in Shanghai to the airport. My flights went fine and I made it safely to Taipei that evening. One annoying thing is that there isn’t a direct flight between Shanghai and Taipei, so I had to have a layover in Hong Kong which made the trip much longer than was necessary. Because of political factors, the quick one or two hour hop over to Taipei actually ends up being a seven or eight hour journey. I think that Dragon Air (Hong Kong’s airline) probably loves it because they have a ton of full flights everyday to connect China and Taiwan. It was another hour taxi ride from the airport to my hotel (the same hotel I stayed in last year), and by the time I got there I was exhausted and went right to bed.

On Saturday morning I slept in and spent a little time in the morning checking my email in the business center. It was a nice surprise to find Matt online and we got to chat for a bit (thanks gmail chat!). After that I walked down the street to a Ruby Tuesdays that I remembered from last year and had a salad bar and loaded baked potato for lunch. I even treated myself to a blondie ala mode for dessert. Yum!

The MBA fair was Saturday afternoon, and, like usual, it was our most busy city. We had hundreds of people stopping by our table. Fortunately I had a lot of alumni (nine) there to help me. After the fair seven of the alumni took me out to dinner at a traditional Japanese style bbq where you cook your own food at the table. It was fun and the food was good (even the weird things I ate like intestines and tongue!!). It was all you can eat so they kept bringing out trays full of uncooked, sliced meat, seafood, and veggies and we cooked them on little grills at our table. We topped it off with a popsicle. Everyone laughed at me because they chose the purple or blue popsicles, but I chose the chocolate popsicle. They said chocolate was the American thing. After a couple of hours, and when we couldn’t stand the smoke filled restaurant any longer we decided to leave.

On a side note, sometime during dinner I went out and walked down the street with one of the alumni to a 7 Eleven. There is a 7 Eleven on just about every corner in Taipei. She needed to pick up a fax from her dad at the store, so I went along to get some fresh air. While she was waiting for her fax I browsed around at the food and drinks. I think the most unusual thing I saw was “Seafood Platter” flavored Doritos – yuck!

I spent the rest of the evening helping our alumni, Jason and Jackie, prepare for their upcoming wedding (September 30). We started by going to visit the store where they had their wedding photos made. Wedding photos in Taiwan are SO much different than in the US. It’s actually quite amazing and I wish I could start one of these businesses here. They told me all of their Taiwanese friends that live in the US fly home to Taiwan to get all of their wedding pictures made. Basically the bride and groom go out for a whole day with a photographer, a make-up artist, and hairstylist. They take pictures at several locations and throughout the day they change clothes multiple times – formal wedding attire, fancy dresses, casual, etc. In the end they have this beautiful album that seems like a cross between engagement photos and a wedding album, and in every single picture they look like models in a magazine. I know there are a lot of wedding photographers in the US (props Van Sullivan) that do beautiful photos, but something about these are just different. Maybe I just like them because they are different than what I’m used to. But seriously I think if you combined this style, with the Korean style (a story for later), and the American style you could have a great product © – hey, don’t steal my idea!

After looking at the wedding photos, we went over to Jackie and Jason’s friend’s house. There we spent the rest of the night listening to CDs and picking out music for the wedding. A lot of songs were in Chinese so I couldn’t tell if it was good or not, but for the songs that were in English they always wanted my opinion on if it would be a good song for a wedding (with a good message). It was fun to feel valuable during the process. Around 1:00am we finished up and they took me back to my hotel for a good night’s sleep.

It was much cheaper to fly back on Monday than on Sunday, so I got to stay an extra day and Sunday was completely free. Four of the alumni from the day before picked me up at my hotel around 10:30am and we went to brunch where we met up with a few more alumni (in case you haven’t figured it out, we have a huge alumni network in Taiwan!). We stayed at brunch for a while just chatting. We all had omelets and I learned that they all put ketchup on their eggs! I’ve always thought putting ketchup on eggs was weird – Matt and his dad both do this, but I guess they’d fit right in if they lived in Asia.

After brunch five of us drove about an hour to the “country.” I forget the Chinese name, but it was called Fisherman’s Wharf. There was basically a big pier with a lot of snack bars and things like that. Many people where there with their dogs or their kids (or both) just walking around. One hilarious thing were these toys…it reminded me of those ride on toys you used to see in front of grocery stores when you were growing up – the ones like airplanes or mini carousels or horses – where you put in a quarter and sort of bounced up and down for a few minutes. Except these toys actually walked! Yep, you put in your money and these toys (shaped like bears, monkeys, etc.) would carry a child and parent walking around the pier complete with a mini steering wheel. You can watch a short video of the walking action here.

There was also a fish market and arcade there. The guy at the fish market enjoyed reaching his bare hands into the tanks and pulling out random animals so that I could take pictures. We also played a few games of basketball at the arcade. It was shabby though because it didn’t give you tickets to get cheap prizes behind the counter. What good is an arcade without cheap prizes? And there was no ski ball – which makes me wonder if they even have ski ball at all in Taiwan – it would be a shame if they didn’t, it’s my favorite arcade game.

After leaving Fisherman’s Wharf we headed back to Taipei to visit a night market. We walked around the market for a while, but no one found anything good to buy other than some snacks. After that the alumni said goodbye and dropped me off at my hotel. Jason and Jackie came back to see me that evening and brought me wedding cookies. Another Taiwanese tradition is that the groom sends beautiful boxes full of cookies to all of the guests coming to the wedding a few weeks before the wedding. I don’t even want to imagine how much that probably costs. (I ended up taking the wedding cookies to work when I got back and I think they were all eaten within a couple of days.) After Jason and Jackie left I walked down the street to a McDonalds to get a bite to eat. I learned that I do not like Diet Coke in Taiwan…it’s much sweeter than I’m used to. It’s actually surprising because anyone outside of the US will complain that things in the US are too sweet. Other than that the dinner was tasty, and then I packed up and went to bed to get some sleep before my 4:30am alarm.

My flights back home went fine, and thus concluded this year’s trip to Asia. By the way, if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this blog you should definitely give yourself a pat on the back. And if you’re still wanting to know more, you can check out my pictures here.