Tasty Taipei... R&D Friday

Most of the people I work with live in Taipei, which is a 25-mile drive from the HTC headquarters building in an industrial part of Taoyuan. The company offers a free shuttle bus from the Taipei R&D building which is across the street from the suites where I'm staying, but my co-workers still have to commute to take that bus. So, once a week, our manager allows the staff to work in the Taipei office, saving about 90 minutes of commuting. We work in the glassed-in conference rooms, two or three to a room. It's a good day for collaboration.

This is an awesome commute for me... I just walk across the street! But before I left for the office, I tried out the free breakfast bar offered in the suites. There's a selection of bread, white and wheat, for the toaster; a few small pastries, cut up; some miscellaneous healthy-looking flake-type cereal; pots of yogurt in an unidentifiable flavor (lychee? cherry?); and then in the hot food area, there's ham slices, little pieces of sausage (kielbasa, to my palate), some other kind of ham, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, and hash-brown patties. There are tea and coffee dispensers on another table. Regular condiments are offered, like butter, jelly, peanut butter, ketchup, mustard, and so on. This is definitely a reasonable breakfast offering and though it will get dead boring, honestly, how much excitement are you looking for at breakfast every day? I start out each day with a Champion Pure Whey Stack shake, so it's not like I'm starving when I hit the breakfast bar. :-)

The four Canadians I'd met earlier, including Erin and Juhani from PineLake Communications, were eating breakfast and we had a really friendly conversation. They were scheduled to travel home to Toronto today via Seoul, so I wished them happy travels after we chatted over our food.

Utensils: fork, knife, and a spoon... they don't seem to have teaspoons here and eating yogurt with a giant spoon is weird!

I walked over to HTC and shared my conference room with Hugo, who is one of the product managers, and we had a productive day. I learned a lot about the new phone I'm working on (an Android phone for Sprint) and learned how to do some of the critical technical-writer tasks that are specific to HTC, like how to update the software on a device and how to take screenshots from an Android device.

(An aside.... my fascination with restrooms has not yet worn out. The restrooms in the Gigabyte building are OK, but not the most posh I've used here. Here are two amusing photos...)

What does this sign mean? The little drawing is clearly to remind you to put your cell phone on top of the toilet tissue holder instead of dropping in the loo or from your pocket. No idea what the Chinese says, but I'm sure it's partly a reminder to not put anything um, extra, in the toilet, not even paper (there's a trash can for that)... don't know what the three rules are though. I just love her little smile and rosy cheeks. :-)

On the other hand, who the hell is this creepy but sincere fellow? Is he pledging allegiance to the pissoir? He's on a sticker on the toilet-tank lid. The toilet (and the sinks) in this restroom are made by HCG (which unfortunately, makes me think of pregnancy tests!) so is this dude trying to reassure us that this porcelain is the finest, most comfortable, most reliable? Or what? All I know is that I did not like to see his smiling face as I sat down. YICK.

Of course, we all go to lunch together. Lunch is at 12:30 (no sooner, even if you're starving, as I was!) We walked to the group's usual Friday-lunch restaurant, a Thai place about two blocks from the office. It turned out to be a lovely day... the remains of a typhoon blew through yesterday and have left the air clean and fresh and not quite so hot... it was 90 today... though there were a few sprinkles and the threat of rain all afternoon. There were 7 of us... Elen, Joe, Ben, Hugo, Tina, Mervin, and I. The restaurant is tiny, maybe 12 2- and 4-tops downstairs, but she sent us up the steep stairs to another smallish room with a 10-top and a few 6- to 8-tops. We took over the big 10 by the windows since there was only one other group upstairs.

Here, you can pour yourself water into interesting pressed-tin cups. Many restaurants do not serve anything to drink by default; you can always pay for tea or Coke or, often, beer, but water is not offered as a matter of course. I was glad to see the water because I am always thirsty these days, I think partly because I am hungry and partly because I am not used to the heat yet. Anyway, the menu is a tiny laminated listing in Chinese on the wall. I am at a loss. Elen is great though, VERY helpful. She and Joe and Ben all totally understand the peanut and soy allergy and have been so helpful. Elen has taken me under her wing... her Chinese is excellent... and she, like me, is not super-wild about spicy food. I ended up telling her, no soy, no peanuts, not too spicy, how about chicken? So she ordered for me. :-)

The meal was cut up crunchy chicken (I'm not sure what the coating was; some kind of really nice crumb, maybe toasted rice?), sticky white rice, and a few other little sides. The soup was miso, so off to Joe it went, and there were two different kinds of tofu on the plate; one was the sort of standard marinated chunky kind, and the other was a softer, stringy kind with carrots that looked like noodles. I just left those alone. There was also cooked cabbage on the plate, which I ate with the chicken and rice. It tasted good.

No chopsticks issue here; everyone's food was served with a fork and a spoon, and that's what we all used. Lunch was NT$100 each, a good deal for the food we got. Also, in Taiwan, there's no tipping which makes the total bill cheaper.

Utensils: fork and a spoon

Back to the office we went... I filled my brain several times and took my usual constitutional walks every couple of hours for five minutes. Elen showed me where the printer's located in this office, and I was really amused by the "secret" hallway you use to get there... in places, the ceiling is about 5'7" tall... I could only put part of my hand between my head and the padded beam. There are advantages to being short, but of course, there's NO WAY that hallway would be deemed safe or legal in the US in a commercial office building! You can also get to the printer via the lobby, but from our conference rooms, that is a much longer walk.

I was really tired by 5:30 (keep in mind, that's 2:30 am Seattle time, and my body clock is not completely in Taiwan yet) but Elen told me that officially, people start work at 9 and work until 6:45. I went for another restroom break and kept working until the bitter end. At 6:45, Elen showed me how to use the special meal-ticket printer in the lobby to get an NT$100 voucher that can be used at any of 15 restaurants nearby that are under contract to HTC to accept them. Elen left, but gave me her voucher as well, and Tina and I walked a few blocks to MOS Burger.

Americans, prepare to be disappointed a bit. If you're thinking beef hamburgers, well, yes and no. MOS Burgers (the MOS stands for Mountains Ocean Sky) is from Japan, and the food is different than you'd guess. The fries are excellent (thank goodness), better than McDonald's, actually, and cheap; a huge order is NT$35, just over a dollar, and it's more than I can reasonably eat; a small order is NT$25, and more my speed.

The burgers are a bit challenging for someone like me who doesn't like sauces. Of course, I don't (yet) know the Chinese for "no sauce" so I am at the mercy of however things are normally prepared.

I ordered the teriyaki chicken burger, foolishly believing that the teriyaki sauce would trump the desire to add MORE sauce... nope. There was a giant glob of mayo on it, a near deal-breaker. But I didn't discover it until we were back in the office, I was hungry, and I didn't want to make a scene in front of Tina. Relax! I didn't eat the mayo! I took off the top bun and the top layer of lettuce, which contained the vile goo. Then I ate the rest open-face. It was tasty. I washed the whole operation down with a Coke Zero, which is what most places have instead of Diet Coke. 

Utensils: none. Burgers and fries are finger food everywhere. :-)

I left Tina and went back to the suites, with a quick stop at Family Mart for a snack. I couldn't decide and ended up getting Chicken flavored potato crisps and a bag of Swiss Cheese Lay's potato chips.

I ate the Swiss Cheese chips first, and didn't like them all that much. The cheese flavor was good, but like so many Asian salty snacks, they had MSG, and I hate that weird metallic tang that MSG imparts. I won't buy those again; they were NT$25 for a big bag (62 grams, just over 2 ounces). 

The Lay's Stax Chicken flavor (essentially, chicken Pringles) came in a 95 gram box (3.5 ounces) at a cost of NT$35 (just over $1). They are DELICIOUS. They totally taste like nice roasted chicken, and Pringles are Pringles... you either like that sort of dry crunch, or you don't -- I do. I'm sure I will buy these again. Interestingly, the chips here seem to be fairly low fat. A 25-gram serving has only 1.3g of fat and 137 mg of sodium... both of those numbers seem lower than a typical 1-ounce serving of potato chips at home. I'm going to have to look that up to see if it's true.

Not covered so far here in the blog, but true... I'm almost out of the Trader Joe's chocolate bars I brought with me (I only had 4 in my bag). I guess one of the grocery store items for this weekend will be chocolate... it seems there are many imported brands to choose from, so I'm sure I'll find something I like.

I'm on my own for the weekend and I have the grocery store as my #1 priority. I woke up at 2 am and the sun is just coming up now, so it's time for me to go back to bed for a while.