Lame in Taipei
Taiwan Travelog #7
At the Sheraton Taipei hotel - Sat 2 Oct 2010 - 11:30am
I arrived in Taipei yesterday afternoon. Riding the train in from Hsinchu was easy. It was practically empty and the stations were like ghost towns. Once in Taipei it was still about 0.8 miles to my hotel. I decided to walk it to see more of the city. Not the greatest idea as dragging a suitcase around-- even a rollaboard sized suitcase-- is, well, a drag.
I arrived in my hotel room and promptly turned into a sloth. I frittered away the whole afternoon surfing music on YouTube and Amazon. For dinner I couldn't summon up the energy to go anywhere other than the buffet in the lobby of the hotel. But at least it was a visually stunning lobby, with a huge atrium:
Now it's almost noon on Saturday and I'm still feeling pretty lame. I say lame because here I am in Taipei, one of the great cities of Asia, which I've never been to before, and which I booked an extra day in this trip to visit, and in my first 16 hours here I've only left my hotel room to eat dinner in the hotel lobby. Boo-hiss.
In a bit I'm going to check out of this hotel and travel across town to the Grand Hyatt. Why leave one perfectly good hotel and go to another for just one night? A few reasons:
1) It's the Grand Hyatt and I got a good rate.
2) I'm hopping hotels to earn points & status faster via promotions they're offering. [Ed: I've subsequently discussed this sort of thing as a "Mattress Run" in this post.]
3) The Grand Hyatt is next to Taipei 101, a landmark skyscraper that had been the world's tallest since it was finished in 2004 until earlier this year when the Burj Kalifa in Dubai overtook it. Ever since I was a kid I've been fascinated by the architecture of tall buildings. Long before I knew there was such as thing as a career path in computers, I wanted to be an architect and design huge bridges and skyscrapers. So Taipei 101 is something of a shrine for me. I just gotta motivate myself to get out there later today. I didn't expect it was going to be so hard.
At the Sheraton Taipei hotel - Sat 2 Oct 2010 - 11:30am
I arrived in Taipei yesterday afternoon. Riding the train in from Hsinchu was easy. It was practically empty and the stations were like ghost towns. Once in Taipei it was still about 0.8 miles to my hotel. I decided to walk it to see more of the city. Not the greatest idea as dragging a suitcase around-- even a rollaboard sized suitcase-- is, well, a drag.
I arrived in my hotel room and promptly turned into a sloth. I frittered away the whole afternoon surfing music on YouTube and Amazon. For dinner I couldn't summon up the energy to go anywhere other than the buffet in the lobby of the hotel. But at least it was a visually stunning lobby, with a huge atrium:
Now it's almost noon on Saturday and I'm still feeling pretty lame. I say lame because here I am in Taipei, one of the great cities of Asia, which I've never been to before, and which I booked an extra day in this trip to visit, and in my first 16 hours here I've only left my hotel room to eat dinner in the hotel lobby. Boo-hiss.
In a bit I'm going to check out of this hotel and travel across town to the Grand Hyatt. Why leave one perfectly good hotel and go to another for just one night? A few reasons:
1) It's the Grand Hyatt and I got a good rate.
2) I'm hopping hotels to earn points & status faster via promotions they're offering. [Ed: I've subsequently discussed this sort of thing as a "Mattress Run" in this post.]
3) The Grand Hyatt is next to Taipei 101, a landmark skyscraper that had been the world's tallest since it was finished in 2004 until earlier this year when the Burj Kalifa in Dubai overtook it. Ever since I was a kid I've been fascinated by the architecture of tall buildings. Long before I knew there was such as thing as a career path in computers, I wanted to be an architect and design huge bridges and skyscrapers. So Taipei 101 is something of a shrine for me. I just gotta motivate myself to get out there later today. I didn't expect it was going to be so hard.