MiSadVenTURes oF rAtuGYm iN TaiWAn PaRT tHrEe

The Night Life

We were invited to a dinner party one night with a vice-minister (no Zan, not a minister of vice! ) at the penthouse of the Taiwan World Trade Center which had a spectacular view of the city. They even had binoculars on standby in case we wanted to play voyeur and take a peek at the building across ours. Dinner was superb and our host, the vice-minister drinks like a fish. She took out a bottle of a particularly potent Taiwanese local moonshine called ‘Kaoliang” which had, get this, 58% alcohol content! And she was going ‘Kampei’ i.e. bottoms up, with some of the delegates! All this after toasting each of us with red wine, except with me it’s mineral water!

After all that merry-making, the Koreans and I went to a night market called Shinlin with Tony a local chap who’s been living in Hong Kong for the past 6 years, He just got back about a month ago and was almost completely lost driving around Taipei but unlike most guys I know, he actually stopped to ask for directions! J Anyway, the night market was amazing! There were loads to see and buy, especially if you’re a certified fashion victim! I was absolutely dying to get a pair of knee high boots that was everywhere! But good sense got hold of me - Yeah, u dun need knee-high boots in tropical KL!

In any case, going around the markets in a group made it difficult to stop or even browse properly and the Koreans didn’t seem to be very interested. Except the Korean boss who was probably slightly drunk, was particularly insistent about buying all of us HATS! Haha…he kept urging us to pick one but we managed to resist. The selections they had will probably make us look like complete idiots, not that we needed help in that department! We were walking around in our formal dinner-party outfits, yeah, for me it was sequins and all! We were quite a spectacle!

Taipei is so alive at night. Everyone was outdoors, either eating, shopping or just hanging about. When we left the market area a little after midnight, everything was still in full swing. In fact, it was probably still only warming up.

Didn't really have the opportunity to check out the night spots. If the awards show is any indication of how people 'dress up' here, the mind boggles at the potential fashion disasters there!