premshree

Daniel Shih has an *amazing* collection of pictures of Taipei 101, the world's tallest building, and the Taipei skyline in general. There are loads of other interesting Taipei 101 pictures in the Taipei 101 Tower group that he started.

The picture seen here is a stitch of three pictures taken during the countdown to 2006. What a sight it must’ve been!

Thursday, after work, we went for dinner at Taipei’s most popular restaurant—Ding Tai Fong. It was featured among the world’s best restaurants in the New York Times and things like that. They’ve now got branches in LA, Tokyo, etc. Lotsa foreigners are bound to be here. And don’t expect to just get in—you’ll need to wait for your turn patiently. Food was really good, btw.

After dinner, we headed to Ice Monster, another very popular joint. Then bought some random alcohol from 7-eleven—a chain of convenient stores all over Taiwan; originally American, but bought over by the Japanese branch. (One of the alcohol bottles—some deer antlers stuff—broke, and that too after I reached office in Bangalore.)

My flight was at 8:30, which meant I’d have to leave the hotel by around 6:00, which meant I’d have to wake up really early. And, since it was the last day, meeting eddd was necessary. We hit Luxy. And it was ladies’ night (every Wednesday at all clubs in Taipei). Bloody awesome place! I generally wouldn’t choose to go to a hip-hop place, but this place—totally effing good. Luxy had lots of notices displayed outside—one of them being “please refrain from leaving the club before midnight” :-).

After that we hit Carnegie’s, drank nothing there, and then headed to our respective hotels.

Image © Cloud, 2005

Yesterday, after work, Cloud, Irene, three of Irene’s friends, and myself went atop Elephant Mountain. The view from top is amazing! (Well, we didn’t actually go to the highest point; had we gone, I wouldn’t be able to talk about the amazing view and all.) I had wanted to go to one of the top floors of the 101, but then you’d see everything but the 101.

The climb is tiring—very tiring, given the humidity. But it’s absolutely worth it. (Cloud’s father walks up the mountain everyday, btw!) Once we were up, we admired the view, resting ourselves, and then Cloud took a buncha pictures with her D70.

We later had dinner at a restaurant close to the mountain. Dumplings and stuff.

Today’s my last day here. Dunno what I’m doing in the night. Oh yeah, need to buy some Taiwan rock CDs. Maybe I’ll get drunk or something. Have a six-hour stopover at Bangkok; I think I’ll go out and explore... unless I get tired and fall asleep or something.

Oh yeah, I haven’t been updating my journal, but I’ve been uploading pictures here. Also, Cloud said she’ll send me high-res pictures later.

And you thought this was crazy?! This is Charles’ desk. It’s crazy! You have to see the larger version of the image. Apparently, a lot of magazines have carried pictures of his cube. Most of the things he has there are bought from Yahoo! Auctions. Couple more pictures: here and here.

In other stuff, while going for dinner yesterday, I rode around Taipei in a scooter — that’s the best way to travel: no bumps means awesome fun!

The Taiwan office is like a toy shop or something! All cubes are loaded with stuff. I mean look at that! It’s nice!

No cafeteria here, so we have to go out to lunch. We went to a traditional place today. I don’t remember the names of any of the things we had.

Weird and interesting thing: most, if not all, developer boxes run Windows, not FreeBSD. Right.

After work, we headed to Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building. Part of the building has shops and restaurants, while most of it is office space. Had dinner there at Hwa Young. Food was good, as in really good, and unlike the stuff I have been having here otherwise. Heh, Abhinav, my colleague, was really happy to have some “normal” food. The only normal food we’ve been having is the breakfast at the hotel. The hotel also serves some traditional stuff; maybe I’ll try it tomorrow.

Oh yeah, it’s extremely humid here. Like Bombay.

A few minutes after we checked in to our hotel in Taipei, we headed to Danshuei. We basically wanted to go see the coast, so we took a cab and headed there. We then took a ferry to fisherman’s wharf, and then spent some time there drinking beer at a pub. On our way back, we used the MRT—really convenient. Bug free.

Observations: there’s more women then men wherever you see; there’s a restaurant every five meters or so; there’s a salon every seven meters or so.

There’s all sorts of weird food around—in the night, I had solidified duck blood, and a buncha stuff that I have no idea about. There’s also solidified pig blood, duck legs, chicken legs, and I’m sure a buncha other things that I need to try. I kinda liked the food, btw, though I’m not sure my stomach’d agree.

Later in the night, Steven (TW), Cecily (HK) and I headed to a pub where local bands play—good stuff. Steven says that the place used to be more popular earlier, but that nowadays people prefer going to “American” pubs.

I don’t know if I’ll get time to post regularly. Anyway, pictures will be here.

So looks like I’ll be flying to Taipei, Saturday night.