Gettin' High in Taiwan

Today was a fun day. I actually slept pretty well last night and had a long work day. Lunch in a Taiwan office? Well, for us it was KFC and Pizza Hut. Actually pretty good. I think usually they eat pretty traditional Chinese, though.

After work we went to a traditional, informal familty Chinese restaurant. It was like an 8-10 course meal with lots of vegetables, meats, etc. Actually very little noodles and rice. But, they DID have Sweet and Sour Pork!! (I even ate some of the other stuff, though).

More importantly, they had beer! Just so you know, "Distinctive Flavor Lager" means it tastes a whole lot like Budweiser.


Here's a shot of the restaurant- They had a bunch of tanks full of fish and other fresh seafood goodies. I declined to select anything from here...

After dinner, we went to "Taipei 101", which is currently the tallest building in the world at 101 stories. We went to the 89th floor observation deck, which is inside. The 91st floor outside deck was closed.

Here's a shot of the display in the elevator. The elevators are really neat! They move at 1000 meters per minute (almost 50 miles per hour) and have aerodynamics built in to move through the shafts smoothly.

Here's a picture of a photo of the building.


Here's the 660 metric ton "Damper Baby"... A steel ball hanging from cables near the top of the tower that can move like a pendulum to dampen the building when it waives around in the wind. It had huge hydraulic pistons to slow its movement.



Besides that, we rode around in some taxis in the daylight. Very neat place. Scooters everywhere.

One other neat thing we did was find a geocache near Taipei 101. One of the guys we were with had the location of one and his GPS. It was buried under a bush in a park.