First Full Day in Taiwan: Taipei

I went to Taipei-101 and ate in the food court. I went to the one restaurant that didn’t have a long line of waiting customers. Probably not a great choice. I ordered pan-fried chicken. It wasn’t fantastic.

It costs 400 TWD to go to the top of Taipei-101 and peer out from the Observation Deck. I didn’t do it, but I talked to two Dutch guys who did. They were here in Taipei for AAMAS 2011, the Tenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. Professor Wilczynski would be interested. One of the guys was wearing an AAMAS 2011 t-shirt. One of the two guys is going to Bangkok, Thailand next — for vacation, I think.

I went to a shopping mall where there’s a North Face store, on the 4th floor I think. I bought a pair of convertible pants for 2200 TWD. The receipt is dated 2011-05-11 @ 14:38, and I paid for it by credit card. The processing bank is National Credit Card Center, Hankyu, in Taipei City.

I bought a SIM card for my iPhone 4. It’s pre-paid service from Taiwan Mobile. I also signed up for the 3G data plan. It’s 350 TWD for 5 days of unlimited usage. I activated it at about 5 PM on May 11, 2011. It lasts for 120 hours (5 days), so it should expire on May 16 at about 5 PM.

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At the time of this writing, it’s May 15, so my 3G service should expire tomorrow at 5 PM. When that happens, maybe I’ll continue using data just a little bit, to experiment and see what the per-kilobyte charge is. If it’s horrendous, I’ll top-up my SIM and sign up for 5 more days. I’ve been using 3G quite a bit, but not too much. Currently the totals read:

Cellular Network Data
Sent: 22.5 MB
Received: 136 MB

Tether Data
Sent: 40.1 MB
Received: 188 MB

Last Reset: 5/10/11 2:23 PM

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I went on the Maokong Gondola. On the ride, I met two ladies from the US, one of which lived in the Bay Area for 6 years.

In the evening, I met up with my CS host, Suresh. He showed me a drinking place where they also serve food. After dinner, we went to a small nearby Night Market. I bought a small towel for 75 TWD.

On the wall at my CS host’s apartment, he has a poster with lots of seemingly-random phrases on it. One of them goes like this:

– What really happened to Porcupine?
– I don’t know. I guess the Zone got to him. One day he returned from the Zone and suddenly got amazingly rich, amazingly rich. Then the next week he hanged himself.

Deep.

I may add more to this post when I’m not so tired.