Sunday morning after church sitting in my new favorite place away from home. Bean Works, formerly Cafe de Caffeine. Get to try some pretty interesting but very expensive (US$4.30) cup of joe (they have very cool teas too which is a better value as you get free water refills as opposed to coffee which is a one shot deal). A drink here gives me wireless connectivity which I need as I currently am without DSL at home. Not sure when it’ll be back as I don’t have time to call. The downside of course is that I’m out of touch with my usual net places and emails with F&F. But the good side of things is that I actually can get to sleep at a reasonable time like… before midnight! Or I read books instead of surf the internet until like 2 or 3am.
It’s been a little over a month now at the new gig and it just gets busier and busier. This week it was bad enough that I finally realized why it was that I wanted to get out of corporate world and be independent. But I’m here so no use crying about it… just knuckle down and just get it done. While doing so enjoy the perks of working here. That includes staying at 5-star hotels and business class flights. The following weekend I’ll be on a hell travel schedule TPE -> HKG -> TPE -> SIN -> KUL -> TPE. I’ll be living out of a suitcase for literally two weeks, back April 1st. All of this obviously is going to pay for me and B-‘s tickets and holiday hotel upgrades later this year. Got to make the system work for me (but am still trying to figure out the system, heh).
The music at Bean Works is wonderfully calming, nice classical music, evenings with Windham Hill / Narada music and very light jazz on occassion. Quite a civilized oasis from the every day hustle and bustle of Taipei.
Yesterday, Saturday, was a full day out. The previous evening, out with AJS and another BLS alum who was in from HK. We hooked up at Romano’s Mac & Grill then proceeded to go down the block to a new lounge place called Barcode. It’s a retail outlet for my company’s products but unfortunately they were out of the cigars and that wasn’t so happy. Need to raise that issue to our distributor. I headed home knowing for the Saturday picnic day with my English class and their colleagues in Sanxia Township, Taipei County. We went up the hills to find a place near the river where we could do BBQ Taiwan style. They went to Carrefour and Costco and went to town on the food. Disposable grills, charcoal, lots of meats, fish, seafood, veggies and drinks. They showed me how it’s like to picnic and eat southern Taiwan style. One thing is that with grilled meats you’re supposed to eat it with a small head of peeled garlic. It’s awfully spicey but great. Especially if you just only lightly salt the grilled meat and eat with the garlic. I saw them play games with paper, rock, scissor. The loser gets water dumped on them. So they were out there on a wooden plank with a bucket doing this and taking turns getting soaked. It was so funny and I hadn’t laughed so hard in a long while. It was cold too so it was a double whammy. We had ten of us just eating, BBQing and playing these games. One of the guys had a Kodak DX-6490 model and caught some of it on video. Lots of fun.
After this, we headed back into Taipei and then went to PartyWorld, a big KTV chain, and then preceded to sing for 4 hours. Luckily they had quite a bit of English songs to select from and went with some old standbys like Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Village People (YMCA). All getting in some English singing in there and they were good too! I wish I could sing though, so hopelessly out of tune.
It’s all good though…. classic music, in a warm cozy cafe with a little drizzle outside doing Internet surfing. I like.
