(no subject)
today it was finally chilly enough to umm, wear a hoodie on my scooter at night. didn't really need it for the day at all, which i can't complain about. the weather seems like the only reason i'm loving taiwan these days.
due to the state of our apartment, i decided to go to b&q (like lowe's) and carrefour (say "car-uh-foo" -- and it's like, kroger's or stop and shop, i guess) to buy a shoe rack and cleaning supplies. however, due to all of taiwan's engineers apparently being busy building computers and electronics, no one has bothered to pay any attention to engineering roads, traffic lights, or stores to be convenient.
so instead of what should have been a half hour trip to the store, i spent about 2.5 hours. b&q, hola (fancy home furnishings), and carrefour share a building, so it seemed convenient to comparison shop. but i was wrong. i waited for an elevator for like 10 minutes before giving up and using the slowest moving inclined-plane-vators (like escalators except slower and more impossible to pass people on). not all of them were set up so once you reached one floor you could just switch and go up the other. sometimes you needed to walk to the other end and continue there. and you could only enter each of the 3 stores on certain levels, even though they each take up two levels. and due to hola wanting to steal high class customers away from ikea (which is a madhouse on the weekends) they've decided to set up their floor plan in a similar, inefficient, combogled way where in order to see one thing you've got to go through a maze. in carrefour the mops and floor cleaner was no where near each other.
when i finally left the building, in a rotten and hungry mood, i couldn't find my scooter. i'd parked it in a parking lot and managed to snag an elevator as i left, but the elevator only told me which floor to get off on if i drove a car. so with no signage i finally found an exit leading to the scooter parking, at which point i couldn't find my scooter.
the whole trip would have left me in a supremely pissed mood, except some dear guy who worked there noticed my consternation and asked me to write down my license plate so he could find it for me. turns out there are two floors of scooter parking, neither which is marked from exiting the building. so anyhow, he found my scooter for me.
and it's stuff like that which makes me love taiwan. a few weeks ago i dropped my tea as i turned to leave the tea shop and they gave me a new one free of charge.
that and the fact that i can match any taiwanese person in ability to jam crap onto my scooter and ride home with it (i carried three bottles of cleaning supplies, a mop, a shoe rack, a six pack of paper towels, and a bucket on my scooter).
due to the state of our apartment, i decided to go to b&q (like lowe's) and carrefour (say "car-uh-foo" -- and it's like, kroger's or stop and shop, i guess) to buy a shoe rack and cleaning supplies. however, due to all of taiwan's engineers apparently being busy building computers and electronics, no one has bothered to pay any attention to engineering roads, traffic lights, or stores to be convenient.
so instead of what should have been a half hour trip to the store, i spent about 2.5 hours. b&q, hola (fancy home furnishings), and carrefour share a building, so it seemed convenient to comparison shop. but i was wrong. i waited for an elevator for like 10 minutes before giving up and using the slowest moving inclined-plane-vators (like escalators except slower and more impossible to pass people on). not all of them were set up so once you reached one floor you could just switch and go up the other. sometimes you needed to walk to the other end and continue there. and you could only enter each of the 3 stores on certain levels, even though they each take up two levels. and due to hola wanting to steal high class customers away from ikea (which is a madhouse on the weekends) they've decided to set up their floor plan in a similar, inefficient, combogled way where in order to see one thing you've got to go through a maze. in carrefour the mops and floor cleaner was no where near each other.
when i finally left the building, in a rotten and hungry mood, i couldn't find my scooter. i'd parked it in a parking lot and managed to snag an elevator as i left, but the elevator only told me which floor to get off on if i drove a car. so with no signage i finally found an exit leading to the scooter parking, at which point i couldn't find my scooter.
the whole trip would have left me in a supremely pissed mood, except some dear guy who worked there noticed my consternation and asked me to write down my license plate so he could find it for me. turns out there are two floors of scooter parking, neither which is marked from exiting the building. so anyhow, he found my scooter for me.
and it's stuff like that which makes me love taiwan. a few weeks ago i dropped my tea as i turned to leave the tea shop and they gave me a new one free of charge.
that and the fact that i can match any taiwanese person in ability to jam crap onto my scooter and ride home with it (i carried three bottles of cleaning supplies, a mop, a shoe rack, a six pack of paper towels, and a bucket on my scooter).