Double 10

I will never be able to do justice to the fantastic day I just finished living, and I won't even pretend to be able to do so when I begin writing at 11pm and have to work tomorrow morning. I just returned from the swankiest, largest gathering of highly influential people that I have ever attended, or am likely ever to attend.

Let's just take a second here to break it down.

The reception was held at the Taipei Guest House, an official building which looks to be on par for niceness with the White House, though on a much smaller scale. To get there, Karina, Rachel and I (and Tom, who hung out with us for the morning) took the MRT, but we left a full hour early for the 10 minute journey (you never know what holiday traffic could bring! Tom was an hour early to the 6:30am flag raising ceremony and still couldn't get close enough to see), and so got to join the swelling group of fancy-dressed foreigners drawing stares and unasked-for photos every thirty seconds or so. I haven't had that much attention since China!

The entrance is a massive arch guarded by security personnel and set off from another archway covering a road, which they had closed for the event, and decorated like so:

Inside, we walked a red carpet with other dignitaries as black cars guarded by police escorts and adorned with dual flags (one Taiwanese, one from whichever native country the inhabitants were) zoomed past to another entrance. The building itself was gorgeous,

and, once inside the actual door, we shook hands with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and his wife--our hosts for the evening. We crossed through the house and into the park behind (between two lines of waiters holding trays of drinks for you to choose from) to the sound of drums, and found the whole place to be swarming with people and filled with food, drinks, and waitstaff every few feet to take your empty dishes and/or glasses. On the pond, native drummers/dancers were performing; everywhere, people in absurdly high positions mingled, mixed, and sampled a plethora of food dishes, ranging from typical Taiwanese fare like bubble tea to Western food like a Haagen-Dazs ice cream station and foreign foods like a Thai station.

We spent most of the time just wandering, but once we realized the President had entered the building, we dropped our food (pretty much literally) and sprinted to join the throng. Karina and Ari (one of the Yilan ETAs) were by far the most successful of the group, jostling to the front and both shaking the President's hand (three times, in Ari's case) and getting photographic proof that they did; Rachel managed to be in front and shake his hand, too, and I was literally right behind her wondering if there was any way I could leverage my arm over her shoulder to shake his hand without it being obscenely awkward. Well, at least I got photos.

We actually lost Karina and Ari in the press to meet President Ma, and later found out that they'd made the very smart decision to ask Dr. Vocke who we should be on the lookout for in the crowd--and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus were both there; Ari got to meet Rumsfeld, apparently. But we did get to meet some cool people; Brittany got an invitation from a Fijian lady to come visit her in her country (yes please!), we talked for a while to the wife of the diplomat from Swaziland (who also invited Brittany to stay with her in Taipei), and I had a great conversation with a Taiwanese-American guy who works in immigration in California (at first I thought he said he worked at Universal, but must have been San Francisco or something...) and had a friend who was a professor at Oregon State. Small world!


In a very small nutshell, that was my evening. It was fantastic. However, it is now almost 2am, and I teach tomorrow, so I can't do much more on here. I'll be adding more pictures to the album I made for the weekend, though; here's the public link if you're interested.

Happy 100th anniversary, ROC/Taiwan!