On Saturday night, after spending the afternoon organizing lessons, games, books and everything for all my crazy new classes our schools' "international" staff went to the randomly named Indian restaurant in Taipei. Indian serves absolutely no Indian food and has a wild dinosaur theme going on. One look at the building and it wasn't hard to figure out that you were in the right place.
As you can see the menu offered a lot of variety. We pussed out and ordered some more recognizable foods which we all shared: fried rice, pineapple chicken, stir fried boar, "3 cups" chicken and a mutton dish. The restaurant was really cheap but the food was all really good. None of the dishes were more than $4 a piece and guess what they were selling for a little under $3?
A liter of beer!!
We were sat in what looked to be the foreigners section, but was probably just the section where the waitress who spoke the best English was working. There was a big pterodactyl skeleton hanging over our table, and as you can see the restaurant was not short on decorations. Next time I want to sit inside the dinosaur!!
There was some god awful live music and every 10 minutes the woman performing sang "Happy Birthday" to another table and everyone clapped along to the song.
Calling Wilma Flinstone to let her know I'd be home late.
Even the bathroom was themed. The water for the sinks came out of the t-rex's mouths! By the time we left it was after 11:00pm, which meant that the other teachers who live on-campus had missed their 10pm curfew (so ridiculous!) and were locked out for the night, so they decided to stay over at our place on our comfortable floor covered in pillows. We took the subway and then took a taxi the rest of the way. Before we got in the taxi I bought a chocolate bar at the convenience store by the subway station and then we hopped in the cab. The cabby started waving his hands and asking us to leave the cab, so we got out and got in the next taxi instead. Who knows why he didn't want to drive us, maybe he was on a break or something, but this happens sometimes. When the taxi dropped us off at home I reached for my wallet to pay and it was gone!! I searched the cab and it was not in there, so we headed back to the station to try and find it but it was nowhere to be seen. I know I had it when I bought the chocolate bar, so the only place it could have fallen out was when I was in that first taxi that kicked us out. All the cabs here look the same and all the drivers have a similar profile (Asian) so I have no idea what cab company it was, who the driver was or anything. Really fun night, pretty crappy ending.
So today I asked my neighbor to write a note that says "I lost my wallet in a taxi last night, have you seen it? Thank you" which I took back to the convenience store area to show any cab drivers that were around.
One of the drivers called his dispatcher on the radio and it seemed like he had found out where the wallet was. He wrote something on our note, which we happily thought would be a huge clue... but when I showed it to my neighbor she said it's just the name of a radio station that you can call to report missing things. Sooooooo I'm not really holding out much hope of finding my wallet. There wasn't too much money in it, but ALL of my ID (drivers license, birth certificate, SIN card) are all gone now which totally sucks. Luckily, none of those IDs matter at all in Taiwan, but it's still going to be annoying to replace them all when I get home.
So.. um.. have you seen my wallet laying around anywhere in the Xinpu area? It's got a big Domo reporting the news on the front- can't miss it!
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