Monday, November 23, 2015

The Return to Taipei: Fooooooood

I was long overdue for seeing my girlfriend in VN, so we agreed to meet for a 3-day weekend in Taipei, roughly halfway between Ho Chi Minh City and Seoul. I had greatly enjoyed my first visit to Taipei for a wedding in 2013 and I was eager to return.

Xiao Long Bao time
Much like my return to Hong Kong, Taipei’s charm and allure faded a little for me on the 2nd visit, but I still consider it a highly appealing and overlooked travel destination — a “diamond in the rough”. Some facts about Taipei that became more apparent on Trip #2: there isn’t a lot to do besides eating delicious food all the time; it is very Chinese, though certainly far more civil and refined than the mainland; there aren’t many tourists besides those from mainland China.

To coordinate flight schedules my girlfriend and I both scheduled strange overnight itineraries: I landed at about 3:30am on Saturday morning from a flight eventually bound for Singapore, and my girlfriend landed at about 5:15am. At about sunrise we were heading on a bus into the city.

We put our bags down at our boutique hotel in the Ximending district and took a walk around to look for breakfast. Fortunately there was a “Breakfast Street” nearby … perfect! At 7:30am people were starting to queue for sticky buns and street dumplings and other foods. We found a food counter with a little bit of seating. I grabbed a wrap of pork surrounded by sticky rice … almost like a breakfast burrito. It filled me up. By the time we were finished a long queue of locals had appeared at the food counter, which certainly justified our decision to eat there.

I touched the top of Taipei 101!  (well, not exactly...)
After coffee, which was actually rather difficult to find, we jumped onto the Metro for early brunch at the original Din Tai Fung restaurant on Xinyi Road near Dongmen Station. At 10am the restaurant was already starting to fill up, it seemed largely with tourists judging my the number of cameras taking pictures of food! We ordered several sets of xiao long bao still steaming in bamboo pots when they arrive at your table. Our favorite was the shrimp with fish roe xiao long bao — the shrimp was so fresh! By the time we finished at 11:30 there was another long queue outside the Din Tai Fung … maybe an hour’s wait for a table … I am glad that we arrived early!

We next checked off the Taipei 101 box by staring up at the tower and taking photos. We didn’t feel the need to ascend … it’s a beautiful building and the only thing you won’t be able to see from the observatory at the top is the tower itself! Plus the entrance fee, about US$15, we deemed too high. The mall below feels quite luxurious and is worth walking around.

Next the Sun Yat Sen Memorial, a big building dedicated to what seems like an important guy, but most of the exhibits were written in Chinese only so its pretty indecipherable. There is an entrance with a big statue of the man guarded by armed soldiers, and the hourly changing of the guard ceremony drew a big crowd. By this point, lack of sleep caught up with us and my girlfriend could barely walk in her high-heels, so we napped at the hotel before going out for a delicious all-you-can-eat hot pot buffet at Mala Hotpot by Zhongshan Station. Though right on top of the station it was a little difficult to find, but quite filling and enjoyable — the certified Angus beef here was superb!

Falling in love with conveyor belt sushi!
When we returned to Ximending in the evening my girlfriend was surprised to see how the pedestrian area had come alive with shops and street vendors and crowds of young people. She thought it was similar to Myeongdong in Seoul, but I agree with the prevailing sentiment that it is more like Harajuku in Tokyo. The area definitely has a Japanese vibe with anime characters plastered on billboards and punk teens walking the streets.

On Sunday morning we got a much-needed late start with lunch at a Sushi Express restaurant near our hotel. Conveyor belt sushi! Fresh and wonderful and a great value! We found some milk bubble tea from one of the many stands and wandering Ximending in search of swimwear for my girlfriend … not the easiest thing to find! We finally found a bright orange bikini and my girlfriend was able to use fingers to negotiate the merchant down a little on the price. Then, we were on the Metro north to the hot spring district of Xin Beitou.

I chose for us to visit the Millennium Hot Spring, a public facility which opens for 2-hour shifts and attracts many Taiwanese senior citizens on a Sunday afternoon. It was crowded and had makeshift changing facilities, but eventually we found our way into one of the cauldrons of hot water. Ow ow ow ow ow! I think I saw a sign that said the water temperature was 43C. It was an endurance challenge to submerge one’s body from the neck down for more than a couple minutes. But once you get out of the water… ohhhhh, it’s so relaxing! We dipped ourselves in the water a couple times before the shift ended and the elderly masters of the facilities shooed us out before the beginning of the next shift.

On our walk back to the Metro station we searched in vain for some bubble tea — it is not as ubiquitous in Taipei as I would have expected — and then took a Metro ride to the Shilin Night Market, which seemed to have opened a little earlier (around 6pm) on a Sunday. This was dinner time… we tried street dumplings and street fried squid and street sausage. So many other foods we could have tried but skipped. The whole place was mobbed with people shopping, eating, or just out for a walk.

Monday morning was another sleeping-in day before a big lunch at Chao Pin Ji Cantonese dim sum restaurant in the San Want hotel by the Zhongxiao Dunhua station. Also some really delicious shrimp dumplings here as well. The atmosphere was more formal than Din Tai Fung but isn’t mobbed with tourists, and certainly the food was of similar quality. The time flew by on Monday, as it always does on days when my girlfriend and I are separating yet again. Before we knew it, we were at the airport eating pork at the cafeteria food court and saying our goodbyes…

Saturday, November 21, 2015

India Business Trip

I work in South Korea for Samsung, but I have seen very little of South Korea this fall. After a 3-week business trip to Brazil and a 5-day trip to see my girlfriend in Vietnam, my boss soon had us packing our suitcases for another 3-week business trip to New Delhi, India for a project with Samsung India.

Welcome to India ... NOT!

I had been to India once before during my business school days, and let's just say that I did not enjoy it. Most people who have visited India tell me, and I agree with them, that India is a polarizing place — you either love it or you hate it. I had recollections of bad pollution, intense heat, burning trash, chaotic roads, strange smells, and food poisoning.

At least I had remembered Delhi Airport to be a decent place. ENHHH! Wrong! It's crap. Just witness the chaos at the immigration line when I landed at 2am from Seoul. Why on earth do a ton of flights land in Delhi in the middle of the night, and why does Asiana Airlines (an otherwise decent airline) operate the only direct flight from Seoul to Delhi from 8:10pm to 1:00am?  (our flight was delayed) Anyway, the Indians have not figured out that they should staff enough immigration officers to meet the demand in the middle of the night, or maybe immigration officers there like everywhere else in the world don't want to work the graveyard shift. Anyway, the immigration line at DEL moved at a crawl ... it took an hour to get through and I was not in my hotel room until 3:30am. Ugh ... terrible.

This Punjabi restaurant in a Gurgaon shopping mall was excellent (and one of the few Indian meals I was granted)

Thankfully I had a day to sleep in on Sunday before the long work week began. We were staying at the Westin Gurgaon, a nice hotel but with nothing around ... it's a fortress. Not that India is a walkable country anyway. I looked outside my window, noticing the cloud of smog and a dusty grassless field where dozens of Indian men were playing cricket. I will admit that I am a man that greatly prefers comfort in business travel, and when faced with the choice of staying in the hotel and getting a massage and taking a nap on the Westin Heavenly Bed, or going out on a rickshaw into the polluted chaos outside ... I chose to stay at the hotel all day.

Humayun's Tomb
It was to be one of only 3 free days that I had on my whole 3-week business trip to India. Korean-style business trips are stressful and unpleasant ... "You're not there to shop," as they say ... and we worked long hours of 6-day weeks in a conference room at the crowded Samsung India subsidiary. After 6 days of hectic work in a week in the chaos of a Korean-Indian task-force environment, the last thing I wanted was to hang out with my teammates on Sunday and go around to explore things, sadly.

However the Indian-Korean office environment was certainly a fascinating experience. For one thing ... Koreans do not eat Indian food! Samsung India has 2 cafeterias — a hidden bunker that serves pretty terrible Korean food (and felt like a prison to me) and a chaotic loud crowded cafeteria serving Indian cuisine. 99% segregated lunch hours ... I once saw an Indian in the Korean cafeteria. Then for dinner, to "take care of us" the Korean dispatcher walked us to the nearby Korean restaurant just outside in a pathetic half-abandoned shopping mall next to the subsidiary. I was so sick of eating Korean food in India that I needed to go on Korean food strike upon returning to Seoul. The one saving grace is that somehow the Korean restaurants were able to serve beef, which I thought was outlawed in most parts of India.
(Actually, we did not eat Korean every night for dinner. One night the dispatcher took us to an Italian restaurant, and once a Japanese restaurant, and once a Chinese restaurant. But absolutely no Indian food!)

The big meetings were chaos. A ton of people would fill the room. So much commotion. At one point in one of my meetings I counted 6 simultaneous conversations going on in the room between Hindi, Korean, and English. You have the authoritative Korean boss and the constant Indian chaotic debating. So much commotion and head nodding and "Tikka" this "Tikka" that. I also had one of my meetings interrupted by an earthquake...and the rather disorderly evacuation of the Samsung building (thankfully there was no damage and no one was injured).

Fortunately I discovered that Uber still operates in Delhi/Gurgaon and we used them all the time to get to/from the office. So thankfully we could avoid being trapped in the 15-passenger rickshaws. The big advantage of Uber is that the drivers were honest and didn't try to cheat us, unlike a couple of the terrible normal taxi drivers. Also Ubers are cheap — the 5km daily commute only cost about $1.60. Unfortunately, Uber drivers in India have almost no idea where they are going. I thought a 5-star hotel (the Westin) would be a major landmark and every Uber driver would know how to get there, but probably half of the drivers relied on GPS or needed direction on how to get to the hotel. And most of the drivers only speak Hindi ... not all Indians speak English, apparently.

Indian emergency room experience
The operative word to describe my first trip to India was "Unclear" ... why were things happening the way the were around me and what would happen next? Nobody knew. It applied on this trip as well. Why don't Uber drivers in Gurgaon know how to navigate? Unclear. Why does GPS give you bad directions? Unclear. Why are there no signs to mark the roads? Unclear. Getting around was stressful. The traffic was terrible in Gurgaon, the whole road outside the subsidiary office was torn up and there were cars and rickshaws and buses and diesel-spewing trucks and farm tractors honking everywhere. There are cows and pigs in the road and cars sometimes drive the wrong direction on one-way streets. Gurgaon has a lot of offices for overseas IT companies, and could be a little like California's Silicon Valley if you added a toxic dust cloud in the air and tore up all the roads and added cows and pigs and rickshaws.

I did manage one day on sightseeing on a 21-day trip. I went into Delhi and saw Humayun's Tomb, the National Museum, and ate dinner (Indian food!) in Connaught Place. Humayun's Tomb looks like a mini Taj Mahal made of sandstone. It has quiet grounds around it with green grass that actually felt pretty peaceful. My colleague got caught up speaking with some teenagers masquerading as "English students" who wanted to take us somewhere and scam us, but we thankfully shook them off easily. National Museum is old and has too many items .... my colleague liked it but I am not much of a museum person. Connaught Place was a chaotic mess but at least we ate well there.

Honestly, I felt I was beginning to adjust to the rhythm after 2 weeks on the ground in India ... but then in my 3rd week I fell ill and I remember why I hated India in the first place. Remember how I said I was "sick of Korean food" before? I let down my guard and tried the bibimbap in the restaurant. Two hours later I was racing too and from the toilet and three hours later I was in a Westin hotel car on the way to the emergency room. I was not seeking an Indian hospital experience on my trip! Thankfully I ended up at a decent facility in Gurgaon, surprisingly to me, and I laid there for 4 hours as I took an IV in my arm filled with antibiotics. The hospital doctor wanted me to stay the night but I didn't feel comfortable and just wanted to sleep in my Heavenly Bed in the hotel room. Thank goodness I had a helpful Westin hotel employee there the whole time who helped negotiate my release. I spent the whole next day in bed, eating nothing but bananas and plain boiled mashed potatoes. I lost 2.5 kilograms. THE IRONY! Korean food, which I was so mentally tired of had made me physically sick. I forgot the cardinal rule in India -- avoid uncooked foods when you eat outside of a 5-star hotel. I forgot that even at a Korean restaurant which my teammates and I had safely eaten at almost our entire trip your bibimbap vegetables are rinsed in the local feces water.

I was glad to see these elephant statues at Delhi Airport ... and get out of town!

Our trip ended just before Diwali ... all the lights were set up on the buildings in the the city ... and I cannot remember ever feeling so happy to return to South Korea as when I got off the Asiana Airlines flight on Sunday afternoon at Incheon Airport. Clean air! (relatively speaking)  I can brush my teeth with tap water! No more honking or crazy drivers! (again ... relatively speaking. Korea is not the US or Western Europe.) I imagine at some point in my career ahead that I will need to return to India, but I am certainly not looking forward to that day.

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Sapa: The Alps of Vietnam

To say I was a little discombobulated is an understatement ... after an enervating and stressful 3 week business trip to Brazil, then 25 hours of flying back to Seoul, 1 night rest in my house while fighting jet lag (a 12-hour time jump), then a 5-hour morning flight to Hanoi, I was rather out of sorts. However my crazy business trip had been scheduled just before a major Korean public holiday (Chuseok: the harvest moon festival) and I hadn't seen my girlfriend in 5 weeks so I wasn't about to change my plans. Fortunately my final destination was perhaps the most beautiful place in Vietnam, Sapa.


Flights full of restless Korean tourists, much more so than the experienced business crowd, are always a chore. I thought by booking a window seat of Vietnam Air that I had bought myself the chance for a long nap, but I was sorely mistaken. I was in a loud section full of tour group trailers and my seat neighbor was a Korean man from the countryside who may never have been on a plane before. He was talking to me in Korean, and I think was explaining that he was visiting his newly-married Vietnamese wife in Haiphong. It is common now in Korea for low-status farmers living in the countryside, devoid of domestic options, to marry Vietnamese women. Though I appreciated this man's story, I did not appreciate that he was reaching over my lap every 30 minutes to open the window shade. Dude, let me rest!

Room with a view
On little sleep, walking around central Hanoi was even more overwhelming than when wide awake. Motorbikes everywhere, noise, few sidewalks, street vendors and little plastic chairs to dodge... I just wanted a little place to sit down and relax. My girlfriend and I finally found that at the Cafe Runam coffee shop, which had an elegant, quiet and supremely comfortable set of sofas in the upstairs section. I fell into a deep nap as my girlfriend snapped photos of her sleepy boyfriend.

We took the 10pm overnight train to Lao Cai, the nearest station to Sapa. Unfortunately on the rickety Vietnamese train, perhaps not upgraded since colonial times, I was not going to get any beauty sleep. The train was loud and rode roughly over the tracks. When we arrived at 6:10am at Lao Cai, I was even more of a zombie than when we departed Hanoi. After another 75 minutes by van up winding mountain roads, we arrived at our hotel. Thankfully our hotel, the H'Mong Sapa Hotel, offered us a room for a nap while our room was being cleaned, and when we finally arrived at our room... I was blown away by the views. Wow! The mountain valley outside was majestic and so green. I loved the clean air and wispy clouds grazing the mountain tops and the little bits of morning fog still in the air. This is truly the most beautiful place in Vietnam.


After a little more rest my girlfriend and I were ready for an afternoon exploratory hike of the area. By late September we had just missed the peak of the real attraction, the rice harvest, yet we still saw many yellow rice terraces stacked up on the mountainsides. In full bloom, perhaps late August, these would have been truly spectacular. In the grassy fields nearby you see buffaloes grazing and young children running around while their parents pull the rice plants from the ground and beat the stalks against the edge of a big wooden bin, separating the rice grain from the plant. Unfortunately the harvested fields are brown and barren, so do time your Sapa trip appropriately!


On our first day we hiked downhill from our hotel to Sapa town, then further down to Cat Cat Village, a tourist attraction where ethnic minorities try to sell the clothes they have knitted. There is a nice waterfall and the walk is great for seeing the slower pace of mountain life. We watched a traditional dance performance where bored-looking teenagers went through the motions of courtship dances and the like. Fortunately a motorbike taxi spared us the grueling trek back uphill to the town. My girlfriend found a massage parlor for us, and I fell into another nap as the local woman relaxed my shoulders and neck.

Rice terraces
For our second day in Sapa we took motorbike taxis out of town to see the countryside and pass through the mountain villages. I would recommend taking the motorbike taxis rather than renting a bike yourself ... some of the roads are in treacherous shape and best handled by a professional. The drivers only spoke Vietnamese (and probably also their local language) but they were able to explain some of the attractions to my Vietnamese girlfriend. Again the landscape was beautiful, and we were only nagged by a couple children looking to sell us knick knacks. Back in Sapa town, mostly a tourist village with little ethnic feel, my girlfriend and I were able to enjoy a date night with a steak dinner.

Beating the rice grain from the stalk
For our third and final day, nature gave us a sunny day with clean air and beautiful views yet again. We took another motorbike trip to a different set of villages ... you could spend a week exploring and trekking through all of them ... and had a hike through a large cave. Unfortunately the clean air goes away later in the day as afternoon fires and set to burn the expired rice stalks, so I advise to plan your sightseeing for earlier in the day if you can wake up. Also I advise you to be careful with the "medicinal oils" in the villages ... my girlfriend dumped one on my hand and it inflamed my skin.

It's a beautiful day!
The van ride back down to the Lao Cai train station was a little frightening... the reckless driver careening at high speed down the windy road made my girlfriend feel ill ... but thankfully I sleep better on the overnight train ride back to Hanoi. Definitely pack a pair of ear plugs if you are a light sleeper! An early morning walk around Hoan Kiem Lake and a couple strong cups of ca phe sua da were just the thing to wake me up! There are more attractions to see in Hanoi, of course, but my previous trip there ticked most of those boxes. With my long-distance relationship now firmly established, and only limited time to spend together before my overnight return flight to Seoul, those attractions could wait for another day...