Freeloading, Shopping, and Eating Like There's No Tomorrow

So I'm back... after 24+ hours cramped into economy class, 5 airplane movies, 6 trays of stomach-churning airplane food, and 14 thousand security checks at 4 airports. And that was just the return trip.

Let's get right to the highlights.

Taipei - Brian and I had so many family friends who wanted to take us around and so many relatives to visit that we were double and triple booked everyday. We even extended our stay by a day just to make sure that we saw everyone for at least a second. Hospitality is like an extreme sport for Chinese people. The only time people weren't trying to feed us or buy us things was when we were riding in taxis. You think I'm kidding. There wasn't a single second where someone wasn't offering us candy or fruit or cake... or pulling us into restaurants and shopping centers. You have to be careful what you touch when you're around family friends too. If you hold something for more than 3 seconds, you're going to own it. I had to do some defensive buying to keep the level of spending from becoming absurd - my success rate was about 50% for beating these people to the cash register. It's not like our relatives and family friends are rich by any means either (I'll get to the rich people later on). Times are tough in Taiwan. Our family friend who just graduated with a Masters in Computer Engineering is making about $12K a year. Cost of living is pretty high in Taiwan too - food is slightly cheaper, but everything else is about the same price as it is in the states. Because of this, almost everyone lives at home. They end up sharing a 900 sq. ft. 2 bed/1 bath apartment with their parents, siblings, and grandparents. It really is amazing how generous, humble, and tightknit everyone is over there.

Notable events: Visited the new Taipei 101 building - the tallest building in the world, for the moment. The elevator to the observation level is the fastest in the world too (something like 38 mph - 89 floors in 38 seconds... it had to be pressurized or whatever so that our heads wouldn't explode riding it).

Hong Kong - Now we get to hanging with the upper class (a.k.a. what life is like if your salary in the millions). Brian and I stayed with our cousin, Nancy. Not that I place particular importance on material wealth, but I was just so overwhelmed by my first real taste of how the upper class live, that I have to describe it. It would be like visiting Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and not saying a word. In a city were the crappiest 500 sq. ft. efficiency apartment costs a good $2,500, our cousin and her family live in a ridiculous 4 story house on The Peak (a dizzying $10 cab ride up to the highest point in HK). They have 2 housekeepers/nannies and a driver. We only ate at the finest seafood restaurants when we were with them, and all of the activities they recommended were way out of our price range. For example, the first afternoon we were there, they took us shopping... and by shopping I mean we followed them around while they browsed through stores that I never step foot into - Escada, Ermenegildo Zegna... stores that actually offered you cappuccino while you shopped. We bought $30 macaroons to snack on while Nancy's husband decided whether or not to buy rather normal looking $800 shoes. The next day, they rented a yacht and took us around the bay so that we could get a different perspective of the city. They invited a bunch of their friends too, but somehow it became more of a babysitting service because a lot of their friends were busy, but their kids were not. We ended up with 9 adults and 16 kids - good thing the yacht was pretty big. We jumped off at one point and swam to a beach, and then ate a fantastic seafood lunch. The lobster's tail was seriously bigger than my head (with a heavy $250 price tag too). Good thing all of their friends are high-powered business people - they negotiated the seafood feast lunch down to a ridiculously low amount - fed 16 kids 4 different dishes for $14, got all you can drink soda and a free bottle of wine. The rest of the time, Brian and I wandered around Hong Kong on our own. We met up with a couple of his buddies too. Most of them were college friends now working in IB, but one of them was a girl named Dale (it's what her Chinese name sounds like in English). I didn't know this ahead of time, but Dale was one of the people my brother went on his 2 week Greece trip with. She also happens to be someone who was in my hiring class at Enron. She moved up to NY after the whole Enron debacle and met my brother randomly there, and she just relocated to HK a week ago. Small world. It was a little weird that someone I met first became better friends with my brother than me, but still cool.

Notable events: Went to Macau for an afternoon. It was hot and humid as #*@&#, and for some reason, most of the stores and museums were closed. The only things open were the huge Las Vegas style casinos filled with crazy chain-smoking Asians playing a dice game like roulette with $40 minimums. Brian and I only tested out the $0.15 slots for a few minutes to get out of the heat. I think the best part about that trip was getting to take the super fast TurboJet ferry. It seemed very futuristic to be riding in the cabin of a 250 passenger catamaran that flew across the water at like 40 knots.

Beijing - one word: POLLUTION. If you think Houston or LA is bad, it's nothing compared to Beijing. There was literally no visibility - it's like the whole city is in the clouds except those clouds are called smog. If you walked around outside for more than 15 minutes or if you rode in a taxi with its windows down, you felt like you had just smoked a pack of cigarettes. People I talked to said that it had been a little worse than usual lately, but that's like saying 110 degrees is a little hotter than 100 - it doesn't really matter at that level. Although we stayed with our cousin Norbert in his luxurious high rise apartment, Brian and I spent most of the time wandering around various shopping areas on our own since he was pretty familiar the city - having lived there for 2 months one summer. All of the former street markets have now been forced into organized buildings with standardized stalls and uniformed employees. Haggling is still the name of the game though. I don't think I have the personality for it. I just can't do ruthless that well. I'm sure I paid more than I had to, but it's just so hard to tell when you have no frame of reference. It's also like an escalating arms race - vendors know you're going to cut them by at least 50%... so they raise the starting price... so shoppers cut more... so vendors raise the asking price more... and so on. By the end they were starting at 80 rmb for something that I knew I could get for at least 20 rmb. At one place, I asked how much a purse was that I knew couldn't be more than 40 rmb max, and the lady started out at 280! You just can't help feeling like you somehow got screwed if the vendor is still smiling when you finish the transaction though... so I know I definitely overpaid. At the end of the day, it's still really cheap. You could say that the theme for all of our shopping trips in Beijing was... let's just call it "unsanctioned". DVD's were $1.20 each and you could get almost any TV series under the sun - everything from Medium to ANTM to random things like Sweet Valley High - they even had Wonderfalls! I got the obscure ones like Keen Eddie and Dead Like Me. We also went to a secret purse store that our cousin's wife knew about. Now every street market had the illegal copies of LV, Prada, Chanel purses etc, but this place had the top quality copies - by that I mean good stitching, real leather, and the exact logos. My cousin said the operation has even been raided by LV in the past. I had to call this phone number and speak in bad Chinese so that they didn't think I was a cop just to get the location. I got a Coach wallet and a supposed real Prada purse (one of those "fell of the truck" items). My brother got a Hermes tie, and we picked up a Prada wallet for our other cousin. Our last night in Beijing, we went to a birthday party for one of our cousin's high powered friends. I am always amazed at the caliber of people that my cousin Norbert is friends with. It's his charisma... but I think drinking and golf help too. He hangs out with execs for Symantec, Qualcomm, Disney - people who own vacation homes and drive $150k cars. They hail from France, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand... a plethora of accents for me to enjoy, but a constant reminder that I was way out of my league. Let's just say, when the Symantec exec asked me what I did and I said I worked for Continєntal Express, he said, "oh, what line do you fly?" Brian always fairs well with his talks about working in private equity in NY... and then there's me... the one people assume is a flight attendant apparently.

Notable events: Ate at one of the most famous peking duck restaurants in Beijing - a real hole in the wall, but these walls were plastered with photos of various ambassadors and rock stars who had eaten there. The place was the definition of hole in the wall though... it was in the old part of Beijing - dirt road, little shack probably built in the early 1900's. I wasn't even sure that they had running water. We tried not to look around or think about how sanitary things were, but it was hard not to notice that their "sink" was a tub full of water that they just dipped all of the used plates in (and ashtrays for that matter) before they set them out for new guest to use. Perhaps that was what made the food so delicious...

Overall Theme
All in all, I enjoyed the two weeks in Asia - it was a surprisingly interesting view into the way other people live. I can't help feeling a bit selfish for having done nothing but eat, spend money, and freeload off of relatives for 12 days though. And I have to say, our shopping malls are nothing compared to over there - the smallest one we went to was still 3x the size of the Galleria - on average they were all like 5 city blocks or 10 story buildings - they even have car showrooms in their malls (then again, when it's freakin' 3000 degrees outside with 100% humidity, the only thing you can stand to do is walk around a mall). I also feel bad for making my brother become my personal tour guide and shopping companion for the entire trip. He definitely got the short end of the stick on this vacation.

Anyways, it was a good break from the reality of life in Houston. But, there was one thing I couldn't escape. Throughout my trip, people kept asking me the same question in one form or another - when are you getting married? It usually started with "do you have a boyfriend?" My uncle even gave me some advice, which I think is pretty insightful. He said, there are a lot of different types of people out there, but to figure out if a guy is really good, watch how he treats you in two situations: when he's drunk and when he's losing money gambling. If he's still a nice guy in those situations, then he's a keeper (not to be confused with advising me to find a guy who drinks a lot and gambles a lot but is nice). I also had another revelation as it relates to the topic of dating. Everyone who took a guess at my age on this trip said 16. So, maybe the fact that I am still single has less to do with me being horribly unattractive and more to do with the fact that I look like jailbait? Hope my dream guy likes 'em young :)