Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 4 Part 1)

After making it to Taipei, Taiwan, the day before and sleeping in our hilariously round but not entirely uncomfortable hotel bed we woke up to the first of our two full days in Taiwan.

Here's a nice picture of the highway right next to the hotel.

The hotel offered complimentary breakfast so we sallied forth to test the quality of their offerings. We peered with some trepidation into the buffet trays and mostly didn't understand what was going on, or if we did, didn't much care for the look of it. Ana pretty much had toast, and I had a lot of the good fresh cherry tomatoes and sampled a few other items. The best part of breakfast was definitely the table on the roof of the hotel - the wall was a bit too high to see a whole lot of Taipei but the sun was shining, there was a little garden, and the temperature was entirely temperate.

I still don't know what the orange stuff was.

The view from our breakfast table

Food urges muted, we headed out to the first of our three big goals for the day, the Taipei 101 building. On the way to the subway station, a man on a bike singing opera rode by. He was actually pretty good.

I didn't put a picture of the nifty RFID plastic subway coin in before, so I'm putting it here.

Recently overtaken by the Burj Khalifa, the Taipei 101 is now the second tallest building in the world, and remains a significant piece of structural engineering while allowing for amazingly expansive views of Taipei despite the fact that it is hideously ugly. The Taipei 101 does not have any buildings of remotely comparable size anywhere near it, so when it stands above you it's hard to appreciate just how big it really is, which is nearly 1,700 feet tall to the point of the spire. The base of it is an enormous mall, above which are dozens of floors of office space, topped by the observation decks, on top of which there are some more offices, which I believe are occupied principally by building management and the like.

Taipei 101 from only a block or two away

The mall at the base is positively cavernous and not for the faint-of-credit-limit. For example, they weren't advertising Mercedes Benz, they were advertising specifically the AMG performance arm of Mercedes Benz. It looked like a great place to spend a lot of money for specific designer names on the tags of your clothes or wristwatch, but was pretty lacking in anything else. We zig-zagged across the mall, going up one floor at a time, just to see what they had. The food court on the top floor of the mall area was pretty fancy, but we kept moving up to the lobby for the observation decks.

Inside the shopping cathedral

More shopping cathedral

The lobby area was crowded and a bit of a madhouse, but we paid them about $30US for two tickets to the observation deck and got in line for the elevators. They make a big deal about the elevators because they're apparently still the fastest ones in the world. I'm pretty sure the school elevators take about the same amount of time to do five floors that these ones spend to hit the 89th floor observation lounge.

That's about 38 miles an hour, inside a building.

At the time we were in Taiwan, dust storms over the Gobi desert were putting a real haze in the air in all Asian parts east of the Gobi. We'd first thought that it was pollution, but later discussions with people who were elsewhere at the time and were seeing the same effects put us on the right track. Anyhow, for all the extraordinary height of the building, visibility was significantly limited by the dust in the air to, say, miles instead of light-years. I do wish we could have seen it on a really clear day but it was impressive nevertheless. Hold your hand at full arm's length; your forefinger nail is how big a city bus looked from up there.

The observation lounge is the whole 89th floor, and the city looks a lot like this in every direction.

The observation lounge also featured several souvenir areas hawking various things, including postcards with special postmarks that Ana decreed must be sent to several people, though not having addresses limited the potential audience sharply.

They also had ink stamps with pictures of the tower and the inexplicable "damper babies"

This is the 101's tuned mass damper. It keeps the building's swaying to a minimum, though my inner ear sent down a few notices saying that things here were perhaps not quite right.

And this is one of the four mascots for the 101 based on the damper, called "damper babies". I'm not sure these things were necessary or made any sense at all. The other colors are black, gold, and silver. Each one has a backstory and catchprase....

There were a lot of signs and info about the building posted in the observation deck. The engineers in us noticed that one of the signs rated the concrete used in the 101 to "10,000PSI" and immediately wondered which failure criterion the 10,000 psi applied to. We're guessing compressive failure but without indication the number means not a whole lot.

The floor above the windowed observation deck is an open-air observation deck. The was pretty much the same, except with a really big fence. From here it was clear that the floors above the observation decks are also office space.

After descending from the heights, Ana's attention was caught by signs advertising something calling itself New York New York, so we followed them to find out what it was. I'm still not exactly sure what that store sold, but it turned out to have a Coldstone right in front of it so we promptly had ice cream for lunch. I'm going to break Day 4 into two parts here. Next up is the National Palace Museum and then we eat Tex-Mex in Taipei for dinner.

New York New York's Statue of Liberty

I wasn't nearly as excited as her, but it was probably 90˚F out there so the ice cream was welcome.