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Taipei, Taiwan 4 Day Tour - 2006
23.11.06
Day 1
We decided to go to Taipei because Dan’s film got chosen in their Film Festival. He and his friend had to go there to do a presentation about their film to a panel of judges. If they win, they get $1,000,000 Taiwan Dollars to make the film. So we went to the travel agency to ask if there were any Taipei tours for those days. We found one in the last minute so our whole family could go. Mum asked my aunt to go as well. It was a 4 day tour, all within Taipei and we’ll be staying in the same hotel for the 3 nights.
We went to airport at 9am on the 23rd November. We met our tour guide lady, whose name was Gobby. (What the…?) We got checked in and got our tags and stuff then went to eat breakfast. The flight was at 11. It was China Airlines (which has had quite a few accidents in the past). I took a nap and ate plane food, listened to my Mp3. When we got there, we got our luggage right away and went to exchange Taiwanese money. Our Taipei tour guide was there to meet us. He is skinniest man I have ever seen. When everyone was ready we went to put our luggage onto the tour bus. There were about 20 people altogether on the tour. They were all Hong Kong people who live overseas, like me. When we got on the bus, we just wanted to sleep, but the tour guide talked for our whole trip to the hill. The dude wanted us to call him ‘Siu Fu’. He was telling us about his life in Taiwan. Snooooooze…
We got up to this hill, I forgot its name (it was all Chinese). There was this long street with very cool shops selling souvenirs and heaps of little restaurants. We went to the one that had the famous Taiwanese beef noodles. It was gooood. We shopped around a little. There were so many shops that had wooden shoes. They even had wooden shoes as key rings. I don’t know how people could walk in them. They don’t very comfortable! Every other shop sold candies and sweets, I was so tempted to try every single one of them. Dan and I each bought a caramel cake, this wrap with shaved caramel peanuts and ice-cream inside that melts in your mouth, a doughnut stick, and mum and dad bought a whole heap of other stuff. I bought one thing that wasn’t edible – recorder type instrument in the shape of a duck. The shop had all these different ones with different animals, objects and shapes. They looked so cool. The lady showed me how to play it. She played Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on it. She gave me a book with different songs in it to play. It’ll take me ages to learn the notes!
We went back on the bus around 5 and headed to the Taipei 101 building (101 storeys, apparently the tallest building in the world? Will have to check that…) We took some photos and went inside. They had all the big brands shops – Louis Vuitton, Cartier, Gucci, Dior, D & G… we didn’t buy anything. We couldn’t go up to the top though because they were all offices. It was a nice building to look at though. I couldn’t get a shot of the whole building from where we were though.
Our next stop was the hotel. When the driver drove into this dodgy street, we were thinking, this isn’t where it is, right? The street was so narrow, it was a one-way street and from the direction we where, we couldn’t actually get into the street, we had to stop across the street and walk there while carrying our own luggage. When we booked the tour it said that our hotel was 4 stars. But when we went into our ‘hotel’ it said 2.5 stars. WHAT??? It was called Hotel Liz and it was next to all these night clubs. There was one called ‘Feeling Club’, I wonder what they do there… It was such a shock when we got there. There was only 1 elevator, so we had to take turns to get up to our rooms. Luckily, ours were on the second floor, so we just walked up the stairs. The rooms were so tiny and the furniture looked so old. There were scratches on the mirror and TV. I thought I’d watch something so I picked up the remote. It had something sticky on it, it was disgusting. I took a shower and sat on my bed to read. Dan’s friend, Thomas had to come over to go over their presentation so I went to mum and dad’s room to sleep. They were up til 2am rehearsing the whole thing! They’re the first ones to present and it can’t go over 15 minutes. It’s the first time they’ve done this sort of thing, so they were a bit nervous.
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We got a morning call at 7am. Breakfast was at 7:45. We went down at 8. Dan’s presentation was in the afternoon, so we couldn’t follow the tour. Dad and mum decided not to follow either and did their own tour around. I went with Dan to the Taiwan TV & Film Festival for the Project Promotion Conference. It was in the World Trade Centre. There were different stalls set up on the ground floor with different TV and film stuff. It wasn’t very interesting. Dan registered at the front desk then we had a walk around before the Opening Ceremony. The presenters said a whole bunch of stuff in Mandarin, the chairman and other important people were introduced and they said some more stuff. Then they brought up the big cheque for $1,000,000 and called the directors of the 17 selected projects to come up. I filmed the whole thing. Dan was first. He shook the people’s hands and stood there, touching the cheque. It was pretty cool. Then they had to sign the wall. We met some of the organisers and we got tickets to the Golden Horse Awards. She was only going to give Dan two tickets, for him and Thomas, but she saw me and asked if I wanted to go, I was like YES! So she got another one. So awesome! After that, we walked through the stalls downstairs. There was a place that was restricted and we had to get a pass. We had to register with a business card and get a photo taken, then they print a card for you. I couldn’t get one because I didn’t have a proper business card. I got a boring piece of paper for the guards to rip. There was nothing to see in there though. I just picked up a whole bunch of booklets and pamphlets and other free stuff. Dan called Stella, this rich lady who is retired but is now like an investor who helps other people make movies. She was there for some conference thing. Thomas went to look around for places to eat while we waited for her at the World Trade Centre. He was so silly. He asked the security guard where the 101 building was. It was literally right in front of us. The guard thought he was joking. He looked at Thomas like he was crazy and said ‘Are you seriously asking me?’ and turned him around and pointed to it. We laughed for ages! Thomas is Taiwanese, how embarrassing for him. We met with her for lunch inside the 101 at a Japanese restaurant.
Thomas was thinking about whether it was ok to speak English during the presentation so he called the organiser there and asked if they had English interpreters there. Turns out there weren’t any and most of them speak Mandarin. Dan was freaking out a bit because his Mandarin isn’t very good, but there was no way he could change it to Mandarin anyway, so they just stuck with English. Even I felt nervous, and I didn’t have to go up to speak! We went back to the conference room so they could set up the PowerPoint and everything. I sat up at the front and was minding all their bags and equipment. We sat nervously for 10 minutes and then the MCs came up and introduced Dan and Thomas. Their proposed film is called “Battle of Hong Kong” which is a trilogy and Part 1 is called “Zero Metal”. They talked about their project, the story, the concepts, intended cast, animation and merchandise ideas. I filmed the whole thing. They rang the bell after 14 minutes but it was a bit early. They had to rush through the rest of their presentation, it was nerve racking. I thought they were awesome. And they were the only people I could understand because everyone else spoke in Mandarin. We stayed and listened to the other people present. They all proposed huge budgets. $1,000,000 is like nothing for them. Only 9 groups presented, the rest were on the next day, followed by the closing ceremony where the winner will be announced.
After we heard all the people present, we met up with one of Dad’s friends who used to be a lecturer at Polytechnic University who’s also a Film Critic. He watched Dan’s presentation and treated us to some drinks in 101. Then mum and dad came to meet us. We got a group photo outside the building and headed home. Dad suggested we take a nap and then go out for supper at 9pm. When we went out, most of the restaurants were closed or stopped serving dinner. We walked around for 20 minutes trying to find one that was opened til late. We finally found one that does hot pots and closes at 3am. We stuffed ourselves and took the long way home. When we were finding a restaurant, we walked a full circle around the streets and ended up across the street from our hotel, but we didn’t realise so we re-traced our steps and did another circle around the block. When we realised, we felt so stupid! When we got back to the hotel, we all had a shower. Dan brought the laptop and had some DVDs with him, so we watched Prison Break episode 12 and then went to sleep.
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It was a free activity day and everyone could do their own touring without following the tour guides. We went to this signature restaurant to have siu long bao. It was very nice. When we left, we saw a bunch of people from our tour line up outside. Dan had to go to the project promotion thing to see the rest of the presentations, so I followed mum, dad and my aunt. We went to the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial and took heaps of photos. There was a museum in there as well with different arts and crafts stuff. Then we took a taxi to the Museum. They had so much stuff there. We only looked at half of it. It was so crowded though. There were a few tour groups there. We had to take turns to look at stuff. The thing that amazed me the most were the ivory carvings. They were so delicate and fine and I cannot imagine someone actually carving things out of ivory. They would have to be strong but still be gentle enough not to break the whole piece of ivory. There was one piece that had about 23 concentric spheres that were wrapped around each other. Every one of them could be moved and turned inside the outer spheres in 360 degrees. I don’t understand how it could be done. It said that they took the man 30 years to complete it. We weren’t allowed to take photos in the museum though which was a shame. There’s probably one somewhere on the web or something.
We shopped in the souvenir shop and bought some magnetic coasters that had the 2 famous pieces of work there. One was a piece of glass carved into the shape of bak choi and the other one was a piece of rock that looked like a piece of fatty beef (‘fei ngao yuk’ in Cantonese).
We went to World Trade Centre at 4pm to see the closing ceremony and presentation of the cheque to the winner of the festival. Unfortunately it wasn’t Dan and Thomas. It went to this guy who is doing an animation about a dragon fruit. He’s almost finished movie and is in the process of post production and stuff. After that I met Dan’s friend, Joe, who is apparently associated with Taiwanese triad people and is in film making as well. We went with him up to this TV and Film production place to find Heman, who is Eric Tsang’s (Tsang Zi Wai) assistant. But she wasn’t there. We saw the manager there and he knew Joe so he was very nice to us and showed us trailers in the screening room. It was pretty cool.
We got back to WTC and had dinner at McDonald’s and met with Joe’s friend from work, who’s also going to the Golden Horse. Joe got special tickets and the seats were on the floor. We only general admission ones and didn’t have specified seats so we had to get in early to get good seats and they were up on the sides. Joe gave Dan his friend’s ticket and sat with him on the floor, but they were pretty far back from the stage. We sat closer to the stage up the top and we had better views of the celebrities. Lucky us! At first we weren’t allowed near the front because it was reserved or something. But when the show started, there was no one sitting there, so the whole crowd of people just stood up and walked to the front to sit. I didn’t know what was going on, and Thomas told me to move down. They said we weren’t allowed to take photos but people took out their cameras anyway. There were these usher people who kept coming over and telling people not to take photos but that didn’t stop them. I snuck quite a few shots too! It was so cool.
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