Less Traveled Path

I flew to Hong Kong on the Cathay Pacific flight I booked several months earlier on a 747-400 with new seats that were introduced last month, which included individual entertainment screens (no charge) that had plenty of options to keep you preoccupied including video games and seats that reclined in its own shell, plus a push out coat hanger.

According to Cathay’s site, the entertainment on-demand features:

9″ widescreen TV with StudioCX – featuring a rotating library of 100 movies, 350 TV shows, 888 music CDs, 22 radio channels, and entertainment programmes in nine languages.

Though I found the user interface for the entertainment awkward.

Though slightly more uncomfortable compared to the older seats, the new seat design was great because if the person in front of you reclined, the wouldn’t encroach upon your space because the seats slide forward and down. Unfortunately, the front pocket was practically nonexistent (see above), though my friend seems to think they’ve relocated it behind the calf area.  I’ll have to check on my long-haul flight back.

Anyhow, when I arrived at the airport in Hong Kong, there were only 7 days, 13 hours, 36 minutes, and 13 seconds left until the Beijing 2008 Olympics Games.  On the right, is the photo I took last December.  Quite a bit of time has passed.

We started a Taiwan Tour the day after arriving in Taipei. The van picked us up and two couples at other hotels before we were on our way. After our third stop, our tour guide tried to figure out which language he should use on our journey. One couple was from mainland China, so Mandarin was their vote. Then there was the couple from Brisbane, Australia who could speak both Cantonese and English, but couldn’t understand Mandarin very well. I was excited at the prospect of using Cantonese (since I can understand it so much more than Mandarin), but since our tour guide didn’t speak Cantonese, Mandarin with some English was the winner.

She was 52 and her husband, a software engineer, was 57 and they had one daughter, though she did not accompany them on the trip. Both had retired and were taking the time to travel. We traveled with them for two days on the tour and I would frequently see them snacking on something; they didn’t let the possibility of water-related sickness affect their gastronomical pursuits.

Time it took for our van to reach our first official stop on the tour: 3 hours and 30 minutes
Time it took for the Australian-Cantonese lady to suggest to my mom to find a son-in-law (husband for me): 3 hours and 50 minutes

Ah, how Chinese.

Taipei, a big city with bright lights as my good friend describes it, reminded me of Hong Kong, but not as busy. Her parents learned that we were going to be in Taipei and offered to show us around. Her father used to be a department chair at a state university in the United States, but now serves as the president of university in Taiwan (with an enrollment of about 16,000). As it turns out, we discovered that his family and my mom’s family are from the same village. (Family origin generally comes up within the first few Chinese conversations.)

They live about an hour away and drove in to Taipei and greeted us with various tropical fruits for our journey: bellfruit (crunchy, juicy, without a strong flavor), guava (lots of seeds and doesn’t taste as sweet as the boxed juice version), and Chinese oranges were among the welcome gifts. We were also treated to various dusk and night views of Taipei including the Presidential Office Building, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, Taipei 101 and its shopping complex, and The Grand Hotel.

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My friend Sandy and her family had raved about a Tomato Beef Knife Cut Noodle Place in Taipei. While wandering the streets of Taipei, a local had recommended this restaurant to them. It’s a hole-in-the-wall type of place and without an exact address, we only had walking directions from the metro station with a link to a map, plus a photo of her sister in front of the restaurant column like the one here.

On a quest, showing the photo to the hotel’s front desk staff (and I tried reading the Chinese in Mandarin to them first), a jewelry store lady on Zhongshan Rd. (who had only started working there in the last year), and a baby clothing store lady also on Zhongshan Rd. (who said it was in the other side of town on Boai Rd.), no one knew the exact location of this place. I felt like I was trying to solve a photo clue in the San Francisco Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt. I didn’t believe Baby Clothing Store Lady and walking down the stretch of Minsheng Rd. between Zhongshan Rd. and the Shuanglian MRT station, I spotted the sign!

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Five months ago, two of my good friends entered the lottery for Olympic tickets and they were informed last week that they were granted tickets to four (out of their requested six) events: basketball, diving, water polo, and volleyball. Which means… I am going to Beijing next summer!

I happened to be in San Francisco’s Chinatown this week and decided to stop by Classic Tours for information on tours in China; I was hoping to find an itinerary that would end in Beijing and allow the flexibility for an extension to stay for the Olympics. The travel agent had just returned from a meeting in Beijing about the Olympics and imparted some advice to me:

1. Don’t go to the opening or closing ceremonies - transportation will only be allowed 1-2 miles from the venue which means a mass exodus of people will cause huge human traffic jams
2. No tour company will go anywhere near Beijing during that time - best bet is to tour around China, then catch a plane to Beijing from there, but that plane ticket will not be cheap
3. Accommodations will be expensive - estimate is around $400-$500 a night

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