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My room at the hostel was tiny but the bed comfortable and I slept well considering I'd had 5 hours sleep the previous night, then lots of crappy dozing on the 12 hour flight over. I asked the lady at the hostel to recommend some local breakfast and she gave me directions to the Huashan Market, cnr of Zhongxiao E Rd and Shaoxing S Rd. The ground floor are typical fresh food markets and on the 2nd floor is a brekkie place that serves soybean milk & bread/omelette/fried dough sticks. IIRC she said it was called "hao pi".
Lunch was near the hotel, another recommendation from the hotel staff since I have no interest in eating at any of the thousands of chains present here. I suggested beef noodles and they sent me up the street to a little noodle house. The guy there spoke English thankfully and helped me order some spicy beef noodles. As an appetiser he recommended a small dish of compressed beancurd skin. As I was eating the guy went outside to fiddle with his bike which appeared to be a Krex carbon fibre model. I guess the noodle business is doing well. :)
My impression of the Taiwanese so far is that people are very friendly. Anyone I've asked directions from has tried to draw me a map and I notice people tend to randomly talk to each other (though I have no idea what they're saying) and people even say thanks and bye to the bus driver. I have a feeling the table next to me at lunch today might have even asked about me (as I was dining alone) as I heard the noodle guy saying to them that I only speak English. I guess I do understand enough Mandarin to know when people are talking about me.
So I'm generally amazed by the shitty customer service I experience in various walks but today I had a really good experience with Westpac. I closed my Altitide credit card after 6 years with Westpac. This has been my primary card and I've spent over $100k on it over those years, racking up quite a few reward points. When I first joined the reward points converted 1:1 to Qantas Frequent Flyer points, but quite a few years ago this was reduced to 2 reward points = 1 QFF point. A few months ago I switched to Citibank's gold card since it offers 1:1 conversion.
What impressed me about my experience with Westpac today was that it was so prompt, and genuinely helpful. After asking for various details to identify me (tick for security), I was transferred to Tania in the department that closes accounts. Tania asked why I was closing the account and I explained the better deal at Citibank. I was expecting at this point that she might pitch another Westpac product at me but she didn't (understandably, because Westpac has no comparable product). My $75 annual card fee was due this in September, and I am technically overdue, and she waived that fee. She also inquired as to whether there were any direct debits setup against the account (which would obviously fail once the account was closed) and if I had used up my reward points (which would otherwise vanish). Even though I've no longer any banking relationship with Westpac because of this no fuss service I will consider them again in future.
Cheers to good customer service.
Just yesterday I bought US$100 worths of books from Amazon which cost me an additional $50 shipping to Australia. I'm never quite sure whether I'm still getting a great deal after the shipping charges are included but I really can't be bothered manually checking umpteen different stores local and overseas to find out where I can find the cheapest price for each of the 7 books I ordered, taking into account the combined postage if dealing with multiple book stores.
Enter AddAll. I just discovered this site and as a book nerd its bloody awesome. The key features that make this site rock are 1. it takes into account your destination country which is important to take into account postage costs, and 2. it'll search for multiple books and return you the best overall package. Holy crap, its like someone finally made computers do what they're good at - crunch lots of combinations - to save us poor human beans time and money (literally! :).
There were no ads that I could see and according to the FAQ AddAll makes its money through affiliate commissions - that's perfectly fine by me.
I'm doubly glad that someone's already done this because if they hadn't I was about to spend months of my life hacking something up. Big thumbs up.
Mark, Phil, and I dined at the Gaucho Grill on Thursday night. Its an Argentine restaurant formerly in Stanmore, but now in Kirribilli, serving what Argentinians eat most of - meat and cheese. :)
We had a mixed entree consisting of an empanada (like a beef pastie), morcillo (blood sausage) and some weird cheese omelette thing which was extremely salty. But tasty. And of course, some bread on the side ... in classic Argentine style - it was at least 8 days old, very hard, and very dry. I'm not dissing the food btw - this is exactly how it would be in Argentina!
Mains - well there's only one option. The parillada all around. Its a mixed grill so you get a bit of chorizo, grilled chicken, grilled pork, steak, asado (ribs). The only thing wrong with the picture was that it came with a dressing of vegetable! In Argentina meat never comes with vegies. ;)
We shared 2 flans for dessert ... but to be perfectly honest the flan was just an excuse to have some