Greetings from Taipei

Well, here I am in CKS International Airport, Taipei with nothing to do. I decided to leave plenty of time to get to the airport and check in, with extra time because it would be rush hour when I was trying to get here and of coursen I didn't need any of it. The meeting I was at was outside Taipei on a Technology Park which meant that despite the fact that it was the opposite side from the airport the journey was quick because we never came off the freeway. No baggage for the hold meant checkin took 5 minutes, I've looked in vain for any English language reading material (Telegraph Weekly or USA Today is all I found), and I've still got 90 minutes before I need to be at the gate. So why not tell you all (three of you) about it I thought.

Quick summary so far. We left at 8:20 on Monday night, travelled to Hong Kong on Virgin Atlantic (watched Saved! and Mean Girls - look then up on IMDB yourself - and half of the latest Harry Potter - hope it's still showing tonight) then changed to Cathay Pacific for the last leg to Taipei. So we reached the hotel at around 10pm Tuesday I think. Just in time for a quick briefing/strategy meeting and to bed.

Slept poorly - of course - but at least a little and went for breakfast in the hotel. The breakfast room is quite the most amazing room. It has just gigantically high ceilings (several floors high) and serves food on 3 sides of the room. There were, I'd guess, around 50 different things to eat. The price was high for Taiwan, around GBP10, but normal for a hotel breakfast - and it's expenses so who cares, right?

The day was taken up by a couple of meetings, the first was fine, but in the taxi ride to the second the jet lag started to catch up with me and I really didn't feel well. I was mostly hoping I didn't have food poisoning as I'd somewhat foolishly drunk tap water the night before to counteract the effects of the beer. It was then made worse by the fact that we'd gone to the wrong address - Francis had the business card the wrong way up and we'd gone to the right street in the wrong town - and so had about a 45 minute trip round a busy town where the driving is a little on the aggressive side. Also, there are an awful lot of scooters around. Possibly even more than in Rome.

That evening we went out for a real Chinese meal, which was actually very much like a Chinese meal in Cambridge except half the price and then did a little sight seeing. We visited a night market, which is a street market that is open at night (strangely). You can buy much anything there, the latest Hollywood releases on VCD for GBP1.50 next to a large amount of soft porn, huge amounts of food of many different types, a wide variety of pets (lots of rabbits, various birds, what I think were iguanas, and a pig. Yes, a pig. It was small so I assumed it was a piglet and wondering what they did with it when it grew up my colleague informed me that they ate it. Apparently however it would have been a dwarf pig so it wouldn't have grown further anyway) and the usual clothes and tourist junk you find in street markets the world over.

There were some video arcades there as well and it seems the latest craze, after the dancing game, is the drumming game. 1 or 2 of you have to bang a big drum with a large stick in time with music. I think there's a bit more to it than that but that's the basics. Good way of letting off a bit of steam I expect.

At the end of the street is a very nice old style temple. There's been a temple there for 250 years, it's not clear how much of the current one was there before though, certainly much of it is obviously very new, the design is old, but the craftmanship is new. Inside it has different rooms for different gods and they are all in continuous use. You can pick up incense sticks to burn or wave and even wads of fake money that you chuck in a furnace to bring luck for yourself and your family.

Lastly we took a taxi back to the hotel stopping for some photo opportunities outside Taipei 101 (also here - currently the world's tallest building. And so, skipping today's meeting as that's confidential (and dull) that brings us up to date. I'm really not sure whether I'm coming or going and have got 17 hours of travelling to go still to go. And no book.

I really hope the flight is not full so there's room to stretch out.