Triscribe

Category: En route

  • All Olympics, All the Time

    Ok, it’s bad enough that I’m a major insomniac and that I blog at strange hours.  But, it’s almost funny – I just let the tv on NBC and let the Olympics go.  On and on and on.  Imagine if I had cable – it’d be seriously non-stop Olympics with the networks of NBC (although, arguably, I’d then have some live coverage of something if I had cable).

    I still wish NBC would show Olympics in a a straightforward fashion, rather than this “hold your suspense, let’s show this other event…” piecemeal fashion.  But, you have to admit, watching this Olympics … man.  Plenty of thrills and spills.  Arielists are crazy – that is dangerous – a cross between gymnastics and skiing – you have to land – or break a limb (literally).  Ugh.  Painful to watch!

    I was never particularly fond of ice dancing (at one point, it seemed more like faux sex on ice, with those extremely arty Russian skaters, or it seemed just not very athletic), but this time – all these falls.  I came out of it feeling a bit more respect for this sport.  And, of course, watching Belbin and Agosto – the pair for whom Congress had to change Immigration law to let Belbin skate as an American.  And, they got a silver for their efforts, the first time in a long time that Americans medaled in ice dancing.  Kudos.

    U.S.’ Sasha Cohen’s coming out of the short program of the women’s figure skating as  No. 1.  The Japanese skaters Arakawa and Suguri were quite good.  Emily Hughes and Kimmie Meissner were also very good.  Hmm.  And, of course, the perennial hopeful Irina Slutskaya, was very good.  So, this is going to be tough.

  • I’m almost living on a plane

    So I flew to Hong Kong Sunday night, which was the same day I flew back to Taipei, having arrived Sunday morning, Feb 5th :o.  Stayed in HK for business trip 2 days, THe Excelsior Hotel, Causeway Bay (http://www.excelsiorhongkong.com/) was good and relatively cheap.  I found a nearby Holiday Inn Express that was a couple hundred HK $ more…. Food was great 🙂

    I liked the flight back last night from HK – TPE, it was a 777-400.  Plenty of space width-wise and length-wise, I lucked out to be in front of the bulkhead, seat 55H.  No bumping of the shoulders or elbows in the aisle seat!

    Unfortunately, when we arrived, one of the passengers behind me, an elderly woman seemed to have fainted/passed out.  Not sure for how long but wasn’t responding.  Once the doors opened, the doctor crew came in but by then I had high-tailed it out ’cause it was almost 10pm.  It looked like she had died ….

    I also signed up for the AA Gold/Plat Challenge but left quite a few miles on the table :-(.  I even missed the Steelers beating the ‘Hawks but go team.  I like Pittsburgh, a nice city and people.

     

    ps- can someone fix the link option in the posting? 🙂

  • Yearbook Photos

    Today, the office is supposed to take the annual group Yearbook Photo. I’ve designed yearbooks in high school, and the thing that annoys me the most is when the yearbook is a prefunctury scrapbook of photos, where the people don’t care how good the photo is. My greatest pet peeve is when there are no captions accompanying the picture – I want some background and some identification of the people in the book. Maybe someone 20 years from now wants to know who these people are, and they will have no way of finding out. Maybe I’ll be senile and will need the prompting.

    I really hated my college yearbook – they misspelt my name, there were no captions, and the cover accidently spelt the initials of another nearby school. These things at campuses across the country are mostly caused by some yearbook company agent that doesn’t know how to excite the yearbook staff in recording their best years. We regret it.

  • Profiles in Courage

    This is one where I’m proud to acknowledge that I was a lawyer. These are the finest examples of what attorneys, believers and protectors of the rule of law, must do.

    Palace Revolt

  • Back in Taipei

    I just landed and back in Taipei.

    Much thanks to FC for everything.  Friday before I left, he showed my mom and B- My Little Pizzeria on Court St for some classic traditional NYC style pizza.  Everyone loved it.  We were gluttons, eating a whole 12″ half pepperoni and half mushroom pie along with a spinach rolle, sausage roll and a regular calzone!!! Awesome because I loaded up and hope that memory will keep me until I come back to NYC again 😀

    Made it to JFK with 3 pieces of luggage and my computer bag.  I was afraid that I’d be dinged for being overweight but surprisingly they let me through.  But I won’t do that again anytime soon I hope.  Being a “mule” just aint fun even though is obligatory.  Just need to find a limit 😮

    Trip was fine, but i’m thinking that I should avoid the 747-400s which China Airlines flies because my shoulders are bigger than their seats.  Being in the aisle seat, I kept having the flight attendants knock into my shoulder going up and down the aisle.  Hurts them more than me but annoying that I can’t avoid it as if I shift to the side, I’m into the middle seat.

    We stopped by Anchorage again and this time I had more time to check out their duty-free shop.  All the store clerks were Korean!  Some great stuff there but pricey.  They sold lots of fur (PETA beware) for 2-4K depending on size and type of fur.  Beautiful stuff but I wonder who would buy fur coats in a duty free shop?  My flight filled up when we got to Anchorage, it wsa pretty empty leaving JFK.  I wonder, what were people doing staying in Anchorage?  I’d be kinda peeved to have to wait for a 2:30am flight to go to Taipei if I’m there.  Very curious.

    Caught up on some reading on outsourcing and prepping for my HK trip this evening.  Starting my first day at BAT.  I wonder what I’ll say.

    I’ll probably be flying a lot to HK and Macau now so maybe we can get a category for these places as well ;).

    And a belated Happy Year of the Dog to everyone!!!

    =YC

    ps-interesting new WP 2.0.1   This really an improvement?

  • Belated Happy New Year Greetings

    Thanks FC for the always enjoyable year end recap. One of the things I look forward to now that I can’t do it in person.

    I’ve been traveling a lot, actually almost constantly for the past 6 months now. Currently back in the hometown, Ipoh Malaysia . B- and I have been running errands and took a couple of days off to visit Damai Laut (see previous postings) at the Swiss Garden Hotel Damai Laut. The trip started out very nice, our stay was extremely relaxing and we bummed around a lot in bed watching TV, eating and sleeping. But the experience leaving the resort was very disappointing and leaves much to be desired. In terms of the overall experience, I think it was bit better than the Mutiara Burau Bay Resorts Langkawi except for the poor spa service and travel arrangements from the resort to Lumut bus station.

    Next stop to KL for some meetings and a B-‘s cousin’s wedding to attend. Tonight is a family dinner for my cousin who’s getting married tomorrow in Ipoh. Non stop eating of course but getting slower in my old age. Can’t pack it down like I used to :-(. I suppose that’s a good thing. It’s sobering when you’re insurance shopping :-|.

    Limited email and internet (by design) to enjoy myself here. Let’s see how it works out.

    Cheers all,
    =YC

  • Nice Sunday outing – Baishawan (白沙灣)

    B- and I headed out for a whole day of R&R. She found this place within the North Coast and Guanyinshan National Park area.

    We visited my favorite Yonghe Dou Jiang (永和豆漿) for some traditional Chinese breakfast stuff like soybean milk (dou jiang 豆漿), breaded stick etc. Then headed out to Danshui (淡水), the last stop on the redline MRT. From there we took the bus to Baishawan, about a 40 min bus ride. Nice slightly overcast and breezy day. But that’s the best kind fo weather to be traveling and moving about. Feet tired but a nice good day for us. Headed back to Danshui around 5-6pm and ate some HK style food which was great. Good call by B- again on this one. Walked around the Danshui boardwalk and then headed home.

    Tomorrow, back to work.

  • Beijing 北京 back to Taipei 臺北 (台北)

    hey FC, wanted to mention I like what you’ve done with the little tweaks here and there.

    Arrived back in Taipei yesterday. My traveling seems to be always rush rush these days. I forgot my laptop battery pack at my friend’s home in Beijing. The trip out to Beijing airport early morning was pretty busy for 6 am. Most of the highway roads are at least 6 lane highways, 3 each way and plenty of road traffic hmmm. Got to Beijing airport by 6:30am ish and wham, road jam as everyone just stopped at the international airport. I have to say, they got to do a better design and quickly speed up the build up of Terminal 3. There’s no way that they can support Beijing 2008 with two terminals which are about the size of CKS Airport Taiwan.

    At the Beijing airport with the mad rush of international flights early morning, there was a remarkable 5 immigration agents on hand to check your passports …. so everyone was feeling the squeeze. But before then they had a system I’ve never seen before in any other international airport.

    So, you arrive at the terminal and you need to check-in. But before you check in, you need to pass the Customs gatekeepers with your “Goods to Declare” or “No Goods to Declare” card. The problem is that there were only 3 lines but then in the middle of it, they closed down one of them! So all the folks in that line had to go back to the end of the line in the other two custom lines. Ouch. The reason? They were only for the airline crews. Huh? But can’t they also service the other people? By that time, we’re talking about a few hundred people queued up. So everyone’s trying to cut into line and moving forward (just like on the highway, roads of Beijing). Once you’re through, then you go to the airline counter to check in. My Cathay Pacific agent was very nice. He put a priority check-in tag on my luggage so that it would arrive first when I got to Taipei. (It did, I didn’t have to wait long and it came out fast, instead of last). I’ve travelled so many places before and never knew that you could get this nice customer service feature. Great because I hate waiting at the luggage claim carousels.

    So then after the speedy efficient Cathay Pacific check-in (Cathay is starting to get my vote for top airline award here in Asia-Pacific), I hit the immigration check-in wall. When I get there, they saw my English written declaration/exit card but with my Taiwanese Tai Bao Zin “passport” and he said I had to fill it out in Chinese. WTF! Apparently, someone who was Taiwanese had to know how to write in Chinese, not English. So anyways, I did that quickly as best I could (thank God for my drawing abilities learnt as a kid), and then on my way. Had about 10 minutes to spare before boarding time.

    Flight into HK, I had 10 minutes to spare before my transfer onto CX406 to Taipei. One of the downsides of the hub system is that they really cut the transfer times close. By the time I got there, they were already boarding. Luckily there were other planes feeding that flight so I was able to settle in and deposit my bags in the plane’s luggage compartments. Managed to catch the latest Batman movie. Liked it a lot. Wasn’t sure but was that Gary Oldman as the good cop? I was surprised because he seems to always play the bad guys.

    Taipei is very warm and the weekend is good. Catching up with B- with some QT time this weekend. It’s been nice to decompress from the work and enjoy.

  • Cloudy Arrival

    The clouds were ominious when we arrived. Dark, swift clouds contrasted deeply with a bright sunset. We arrived at Honolulu to be greeted by an American Airlines staffer with lei. We had no idea that our super discount package included it. We were totally dazed – the 12 hour flight made those butt-in-seat miles really do a number to the tail bones, and there was a Hawaiian couple with 2 young kids that were bobbing around the whole trip. It was a good thing that we swapped seats with them. The movie was “Must Love Dogs”, which wasn’t that hot either.

    The compact car that we got was a full sized Impala, which was more than enough car for what we wanted. We checked in and got upgraded to an ocean view room on the 23rd floor – which was nice and quiet, but I knew this going in that an ocean-view room doesn’t really mean much in the dark.

    We were starving when we arrived, so we went to the sushi buffet known as Todai. The air conditioning wasn’t working, but it just meant that they got the fish out there much faster (their chilling tables were working). Really really good – we were stuffed.

    Hit the mandatory ABC store to get supplies, and then passed out.

  • LAX

    We make it to Los Angeles in a relatively good shape. We made back the 20 minutes that we lost leaving late from JFK, and the landing was pretty soft. However, my tail bone is just killing me. We’re hungry, but the only two food choices at the terminal are Burger King and Chili’s. P- decides that the answer is to ask the See’s Candies lady, who recommends the Chili’s hands down.

    The wait for tables was really too much – we were able to squeeze in at the bar. P- got a chicken breast dish that she thought was going to be a wrap, but was actually on a roll. I got the Phily Cheese Steak, which was actually quite good, except the guy sitting to my left, who was obviously inebriated, coughed into my dish. At least I had finished the sandwich ahead of time.

    Onward to Honolulu….