Taipei, Taiwan - Part 2

Note:  This is the second post on my trip to Taipei, Taiwan.  You can see the previous post here.

The purpose of the visit, is to meet with companies that make PCs - using our computer chips.  This includes HP and Acer.  In addition, there are companies that actually build the PCs for companies like Dell, HP and Lenovo...when those companies don't want to do all the work.  The reason that they asked me to come here, is to talk about all the software that we're working on, to show how our chips have an advantage over similar chips from Intel.  I get to talk about all the amazing work that software developers are doing around the world, including making games.  I started by training all of the local employees of my company about the material that I would present all week:

The cool thing I found inside our office, were Christmas decorations.  They were cute...and you'd never find anything like this in the U.S., for fear of offending someone who didn't celebrate Christmas:

Like I said, Christmas is much more of a retail holiday here...not a big religious occasion, so people don't get too offended.

After the training, we traveled all over Taipei to visit with at least 3 companies each day.  One of my visits was with a company called Asus.  They make computers, but they are more popular in Asia and Europe.  Their lobby had a couple of interesting pieces of art:

While this bull was interesting, when you looked closely at the "hide", you discover that it's made up of computer chips and materials from inside a computer:

Across the lobby, they created a strange replica of the Mona Lisa, all made up of computer parts:

One of the big parts of life in Taipei is...scooters.  These are little motorcycles that literally clog the streets.  They've very popular for getting around, and it makes driving a real adventure when you have scooters all around your vehicle in motion.

Outside of almost every building is a row of parked scooters...in some major buildings, the line is quite long:

I would love to rent one, but in this town, it's a little too dangerous to compete with this many scooters on the road ; )  Here's a short video at a stoplight, where you can see all the scooters that take off when the light turns green:

One evening, I took the subway to a very popular location in downtown Taipei.  It's called Taipei 101 and is one of the tallest buildings in the world.  Since it was night-time, I borrowed these pictures to give you an idea of how massive this building is:

Inside, you'll find a huge high-end shopping mall, with a ton of restaurants to handle a multitude of culinary tastes.  It's a beautiful building to me...but many locals claim that it looks like the building that you place cremated remains into, at the local cemeteries.  I'm going to ignore that and still enjoy the architecture ; )

The last night in Taipei, the local sales team took me to dinner at a very nice Japanese restaurant. We had a multi-course meal that was simply delicious.  Here are a few of the highlights:

 Deep-Fried Oysters

King Crab Salad

 BBQ steak, on top of a Thai leaf and burner

Sushi - the fish in the middle is called "Fin fish" and it's the most delicate I've ever had

Dragon Fruit Ice Cream!

It was such a great experience - discovering each course.  Needless to say, I'm stuffed!  I leave tomorrow, so I'll just close out this post...unless something really fun happens tomorrow ; )  I'm headed back to the U.S. via Seoul, Korea and San Francisco.  I should be traveling for about 20 hours, experiencing two Fridays in a row.  Fun!!