Taiwan day 4

This was a busy day, so the blog will likely be long.

to start things off, we took a two and a half hour trip to Giant Bicycle inc. We toured the factory where they make all of the bikes. They showed us the materials it was made from, how they pieced it all together, the shifts that the workers worked, etc. We then went inside the corporate building where they showed us a promotional video about the company and the PR people answered questions for us. We learned that Giant Bike is the biggest manufacturer of bikes in the world, and that they are hoping to get people to integrate riding bikes in their daily lives. I think this would be a good thing due to the gas shortage and unhealthyness of most Americans. Another cool thing is that the president of the company is riding his bike across all of Taiwan and the man is in his 70s, which is really impressive.

After the Giant Bike tour, we had a traditional Chinese styled lunch, which was quite an experience. They kept on bringing out course after course of food, and they didn't stop until we stopped eating the food. Aparently, if you cleaned your plate it means that you are still hungry and so they keep brining food until you stop. The food was delicious, but for the first time I couldn't eat all of it.

After lunch, we stopped by a saxophone maker. They made saxophones that were priced in the tens of thousands of dollars, but in respect I think that it was NT money so it was probably not as much as the tag said when converting to US dollars. Either way, Megan got to play with the daughter of the owner of the shop, who along with her three other sisters are part of a saxophone quartet who are popular in Taiwan, and have even played for the president of Taiwan.

Our next stop was to a local winery. The owner of the winery showed us the equipment used to make the wine, and told us about how it was all made. Charlie did his best to translate from the Chinese, but there was alot of terminolgy used, but he was able to communicate the gyst of it. After about 10 minutes, the owner let us sample the wine that he made, and he gave us alot to sample, which was awsome.

Our last stop was to a love motel. And yes, this is the kind of love motel that people go to to have anonymous sex. It was actually a pretty cool set up, the rooms are kind of like apartments, and each of them have garage doors at the entrance so that you can close it behind you so that no one can see you as you drive in. You would never see something like this in America, but I guess that it is part of Asian culture which is why we went there.

Even though it was a love motel, there was no loving going on. But the room was perfectly suitable for a group of people hanging out. We rented out the most expensive suit, which was big enough to fit all of us comfortably. The room had a swimming pool, a jacuzzi, massage table, a huge bed, massage chair, karaoke station, and bathroom. We stayed there for a couple of hours and headed bad to our hotel in Taipei.