I visited the model shop today to get my phone model ironed out. As ever (and this only seems to happen to me) it turned into an episode that of course everyone in the office found hilarious. It brought back delightful memories of my previous visit to Sun Li – which you can see here.

So I rock up to meet Adam at Che John Models (who is alarmingly non – Taiwanese in immediately expressing his views without holding back) and we cruise out to a really rather nice wee Italian restaurant where I have the very best Lasagne I have eaten in Taiwan so far (ie: bad). We shoot the breeze for a while and go back to discuss business. Before we got into it he showed me around and introduced me to the team of model shop workers, who immediately took an intense interest in me and fed me a pile of betel nuts. These things are common place on the streets of Taiwan – the “betel nut girls” post is a post for another time, though.

Anyway, they fed me a couple of these things. You bite the end off, chuck it in your mouth and chew away. You spit out the horrific blood-red expectorant and continue chewing, and after a while you get a pretty strong hit of nicotine and this coincided with beginning to discuss the details of my proposal. A spinning world does not help in this and I think I approved all the short cuts they suggested – very smart of them, eh. They then presented me with a large pile of porn and suggested I take it before also giving me a book of fake blank Taxi receipts that I could make some nice money from. I managed to escape at this point with only sporadic feelings of weightlessness and gentle involuntary acrobatics.

Perhaps I will make the following week my ‘Betel Nut Special’ – Markus is planning a Betel nut party for his birthday – it promises to be… blinky.