Only three days after Dubai opened the Burj Khalifa and surpassed Taipei’s 101 Tower (台北101) as the tallest building in the world, vgag and I went back to 101 to pay our respects and buy stuff.

Taipei 101: inside and out.

The last time we’d been at the Tower was in 2008, and after a frustratingly long walk from the nearest metro station in bleak, drizzly weather we arrived at the base of the tower to find nothing had changed very much since then (the weather included). The shopping mall attached to 101 was still filled with big name fashion brands apparently devoid of customers, and the bookstore Page One was still as cavernous and arty as I remembered it, but now with the added advantage of several new bookshelves worth of Chinese-language manga (though seeing as I’d just bought no less than 26 manga at Kinokuniya the day before, I somehow managed to abstain).

Even the people movers need a break occasionally.

A slightly more noticeable difference was the Tower’s basement foodcourt, which was packed with business people, tourists and locals where it had been virtually empty the first time we’d eaten there. After a rapid circle of the court looking for anything vaguely vegetarian-looking we found a “Japanese-style” outlet with a separate section of the menu devoted to vegetables and whatnot. I’ve been overseas long enough to go through the “does it have meat or fish — yes, that includes shrimp — in it? Did it once have a face?” rigamarole, and once that was over with, it didn’t really matter what wound up on the plate. As ever, most Taiwanese eateries pertain to be Japanese, which easily reflects the large number of Japanese tourists in Taiwan and the two countries’ mutual affection for each other’s cultures — and particularly their popular cultures.

Hey, I'm no exception. After eating I sought out a Pokémon toy vending machine and got three Eevees in a row. Gosh darn.

Outside 101 tower are stone boulevards, linear parks and several other up-market malls, including a Shin Kong Mitsukoshi and a strangely hilarious complex called New York New York that I remembered from last time.

Liberty's paint job is definitely new, though.

All this wandering around and reminiscing was quite tiring though, so vgag and I went back to the area around our hotel and I acted as interpreter while she got an hour long foot massage. Massages have never done much for me and I’d had a foot massage only the week before in Shanghai, so I was content to sit back and scroll through the parlour’s TV channels (they have better MTV reception than us — no fair!) and flick through a Taiwanese gossip rag given to me by one of the ladies running the place until vgag’s feet had been rejuvenated or whatever.

The foot massage parlour itself was a hilarious mixture of interesting and kitsch, and the pudgy silver tabby cat that had the run of the place did a lot to endear me to the experience.

After her massage vgag suggested we go to one of the Italian restaurants reccommended on the Hungry in Taipei blog, so we metro-ed our way to Da’an and ate at a gently snooty Italian restaurant off Fu Xing South road. The food was good, the servings small, and again I fell into the very Shanghainese habit of not dressing my language up enough when talking to wait staff, at least judging by the waitress’ expression when I responded to her offer of a dessert menu with “不要, 买单” (“No, cheque”). Sometimes I actually feel as though I’m going through China-Taiwan culture shock, and not only because of the slight but surprisingly common linguistic differences in everything from “orange juice” to “metro”, but because I have to remember to be polite again and stop shoving people to get into elevators. You can imagine the stress.

By then vgag and I were well and truly figuratively knackered, and though I’d planned to go to sleep at a reasonable hour for once, I wound up reading a Chinese translation of Crimson Spell into the wee hours again, even if I didn’t understand half of the words and there was way too much demon sex.