Friday October 13, 2000

We got up early in the morning to make to the free breakfast.  Oh, my goodness, it was the biggest, best and most complicated breakfast I've every had!  There were Chinese-style breakfast such as dumpling-like buns and thousand-year-old egg, Japanese-style breakfast like seaweed salad, Western-style breakfast such as scrambled eggs and fruits.  I tried to stuff myself as much as possible so to taste all of the food.  Yum.....

I still drool when looking at this picture
Taken at: 7:42 AM, Friday 13 October 2000

After breakfast we still had a few hours before checkout time and before the van scheduled to take us to Kaoshiung arrives.  It was a nice sunny day with reasonable humidity, so we decided to rent bikes and ride down the road along the beach.  We ended up renting battery-charged bikes instead of regular bikes because 1. neither of us had tried battery-charged bikes 2. there will be some ups and downs on the road and this will just make it easier/faster 3. we were lazy.  These bikes were very heavy and so were the batteries; god-forbid one of us run out of power and have to drag the thing back!  It was really fun riding these bikes especially uphill.  We discussed the possibility of importing them to the US and use them to commute short-distance.  I wonder why electric-charged bikes have not caught on in the US.

The pleasant breakfast and morning ride were a contrast to the previous two days.  If only that had continued on for the rest of the day.  I hate having to write the following paragraph but it so affected our trip that it can not be left unsaid.

After we got back to the hotel, we took a quick shower and checked out of the hotel.  We got on a van that ran between YoHo and Kaoshiung and started our trip back North.  The ride was very pleasant and much quicker than the way down.  Once we got to Kaoshiung, we were thrown back into chaotic streets.  Kaoshiung, like most of Taiwan's major cities, was very polluted.  However, eventhough Taipei was polluted, I didn't feel that the city was filthy.   Kaoshiung was not only filthy but also had a very unpleasant smell.  The people on the streets were more rural-like in the sense that they dressed and acted very uncivilized.  People seemed to always feel the need to either yell or spit, sometimes both at the same time.  After we left the safety and comfort of the van, we walked across a few blocks, careful not to get run over by crazy drivers, looking for a bus line that would take us back to Taichung.  I spoke to this man at a store running a bus line and he told me that they did go to Taichung.  He also said that the bus goes "straight" to Taichung and stops at the Taichung train station.  Since one of their buses had just arrived, he hassled us to pay the tickets and get on.  During the trip we discovered the following: 1. the bus did not go "straight" to Taichung; as a matter of fact it stopped at every single exit on the highway which meant the travel time was extended by at least an hour 2. the bus was filthy - the toilet did not flush, had an unbearable stench and the door wouldn't close; I tried to hold in as long as I could till I felt my bladder was about to burst; imagine I had to pee half-standing up while using my right leg to keep the door shut in a 3x3 space, all this while the bus was in motion 3. the bus was picking up more people than there were seats available; the aisle was packed, people were standing together like sardines without anything to hold on to but the seats' backs, this can't be legal! 4. the bus did NOT stop at Taichung's train station! I repeat: it did NOT stop at Taichung's train station! The SOB at the store LIED to me!  Imagine this happening at your local Greyhound station.....

During the trip I was practically in tears and just about ready to commit a massacre of the bus line employees.   I must've apologized to Russ half a dozen times during the ride.  He trusted me to make the right choice and I fucked it up.  He was very supportive and did not blame me for the miserable experience.

Finally we arrived at Taichung.  I was completely exhausted and couldn't wait to get back to our hotel.   We bought tickets for the final leg back to Taipei and had a nice dinner at a small restaurant.  It turned out that there were alot of travellers that day and we had to wait about 2 hours to get on a bus.  It was another long ride back.   When we finally got back to my parents', I explained what happened to them and my father said that he thought we might get taken advantage of because we were unfamiliar with the "Taiwan way" of doing business. We called the hotel that we've been staying at in Taipei and we got the last remaining room (thank goodness!).  The whole day (excluding morning) was like a fucking nightmare.

I learnt something that day: Taiwanese have a very different philosophy when it comes to doing business; and I'm referring mostly to people in small or self-owned businesses.  Lying and cheating is a common and acceptable practice - if the customer is too dumb to know better, that's his/her own damn fault.  There's absolutely no shame in cutting corners and absolutely no regard for customer satisfaction or keeping one's moral dignity.  It's all about making more money, at all cost.  This philosophy would bury their business if they're in the US, but I guess it works in Taiwan.  My advice to anyone who's visiting Taiwan for the first time: don't be shy about ignoring or pushing off people who are pressuring you to use their services.  I had to learn it the hard way.