Love Shack, Baby

When I took my Shane teacher training in Taipei, I stayed at a hotel near the Shane head office, known as the Love Hotel. I prefer to think of it as the Love Shack, as in the B-52s song. While I can't generalize too much from the Love Shack to the rest of the Taiwanese hotel industry, I do think the experience of staying there made me realize a couple of things about life in Taiwan I might not have realized otherwise.

The Love Shack, I gather, is not the absolute bottom of the barrel as hotels go in Taiwan, but it's pretty near there. Its rooms are done up in a gaudy style that strikes me as a bad satire of Western rococco decorating. The walls are covered in leather--yes, leather--despite the overall European look of the rooms. Rooms go for 800-1000 NT a night ($24-$30 American). This is remarkably cheap by the standards of America. Certainly in New York, that money would not get you a hotel room; at best, it would get you a bunk in a third-rate hostel. And even in small towns in the Midwest, I doubt there are any motels left going for $24 a night, even in the off season.

When I got into my room at the Love Shack the first night, I found I couldn't turn on the lights. Thinking something was wrong, I went back to the hotel desk and reported this fact. I was informed I had to insert a bar attached to my key into a slot by the door to turn the power on in the room. I went back to my room, did so, and voila! Let there be light!

I ended up at the Love Shack against last night, under unusual circumstances. My new friend Sherri, the manager at the Shane branch in the small town of Yangmei, put me in touch with one of the newer teachers at her school, a very personable Brit named Gary. It turned out Gary is a disc jockey and had a DJing gig at a Western bar on Roosevelt Road in Taipei, near the Shane Head Office and the Love Shack, and he invited me to join them. So about 4:00 yesterday afternoon, I boarded a south-bound train for Yangmei, met up with Gary, and headed off with him.

Now, I am not really the "bar" type. There's a line in It's a Wonderful Life that pretty much sums up my attitude toward drinking: "Boys and girls and music...why do they need gin?" I don't think I'm prudish about alcohol, and, unlike the Carrie Nations of this world, I don't think it's wrong for anyone to drink, under any circumstances. I myself have been known to have the occasional glass of merlot when out with friends. But I don't much care for social events or establishments where drinking is the main point.

In the States, I would probably not have come on this kind of outing. But in Taiwan, I figure that, when an opportunity presents itself to interact with other English speakers, beggars can't be choosers. And I will admit, I did have a reasonably good time, and even ran into a couple of teachers I had met and taken a liking to in the course of my teacher training and hoped to see again at some point.

It was a kickin' night at this bar. The music was good, and I did get up and dance a few times in the course of evening. By the time the clock struck two, however, I was royally bushed, and, as the MRT stops running at that hour and I had no means of getting back to Taoyuan, I decided my best bet was to get a room at the Love Shack. Fortunately they had a vacancy--albeit at the high price of 980 NT, which I attributed to its being a Saturday night or to an assessment of my desperation.

The next morning, before going back home, I decided to head over to Taipei 101, currently the largest building not just in Taipei, not just in Taiwan, but in the whole wide world. Gary had told me there was an excellent bookstore there called Page One, with a good selection of English titles, so I decided to check it out.

The bottom five floors of Taipei 101 are exactly what you would expect them to be, given that the building was constructed with the full knowledge that it would quickly become a tourist trap. Yep, that's right, they're an upscale mall. Aren't you glad to know that Taiwanese people have somewhere to go to buy their Brooks Brothers shirts and Piaget watches? I was so worried that Taiwan might not have caught on to the American obsession with upscale shopping venues.

But Page One turned out to be everything Gary said it was. I would say that about half the titles on display were in English, not counting books that were explicitly instructions in learning a foreign language. The literature section was particularly good and boasted a fair number of recent titles as well. I was warned before I came to Taiwan that it would be hard to find recent fiction and that I would have to settle for Penguin editions of the classics. Now, that would have been fine for me, as I do want to read more of the classics. But I was glad to know that at least I have some choice in the matter.