Day Four was mostly free for us, with our first and only true engagement starting at 1, so Hanna, Malli, Mikey and I took a walk along the river after waking up at around 6 AM. It was meant to be a bike ride, but we were having many, many technical difficulties. It was a lovely walk anyhow, and we ended up talking to this one man who was walking 5500 kilometers over the course of a 1.5 years (5k a day) as part of a deal he made with his friend. See more on his Instagram page, which you can see below. Walk for love!
We walked for a while longer after that, as we were walking outside of the walls that protect the city from floods and there were not many doors to get back in. We ended up north of Dihua street, around Dadaocheng wharf. At this point we were all starving, as we had not had breakfast yet, but it was so early that only the traditional breakfast restaurants were open. None of the menus were in English, but we had no fear as Mikey was there to translate. In the end, he asked for whatever the lady running the store thought would be good for us to try, and we ended up with egg crepes with potatoes, radish cakes, xiao long bao, and scallion pancakes. 10/10, great food and the people were lovely. After, we met up with Jenn and shopped around a bit before heading back.
Pics from the morning
For lunch, I wandered off on my own and visited a café called Entry Time right next door to our hotel. Outside, there are postcards with artistic renditions of the menu on them that you use to order, and you can then keep or send the postcard to yourself in the future. I got a chicken parcel and a matcha panna cotta drink. I kept the first post card and sent the second so that it would arrive after graduation; hopefully it comes, it was the cuter one. I met a guy from Spain while picking a postcard: he was on his first solo trip and was backpacking through Asia, so we mostly discussed all the things we’ve learned so far about traveling and tourism.
As a class, we got to go to the Computex Taipei Expo, which is the world’s largest AI expo. We met Liam, a marketing agent from Gigabyte, who showed us the different servers and cooling methods that they are currently developing. He mentioned how the cooling technology used in their server racks and rack pods are the forefront of their stock growth. I don’t know a whole lot about the hardware aspect of AI, but I thought it was really interesting to see many household brands side-by-side with the large brands that support them, many of which I’ve never heard of. Liam also mentioned that some people in the Bay Area are trying develop cooling methods using immersion in ocean water, so I will have to look into that when I return home.
We had about an hour to explore the expo after visiting the Gigabyte booth. Again, although I am not the most well-versed in AI and technology, I tried my best to see as many booths as possible for the sake of the people I know who do who and could not attend. Many of the consumer products on the second floor were centered around gaming systems, such as the one by Gigabyte pictured below with Malli. I spent a lot of time searching for health care-centered technology, as I was interested to see what potential impacts AI might have on medicine in the (possibly) near future. One of the technologies I saw was a patient monitoring system that was designed to recognize and describe video data, most likely so less in-person check-ins are required per patient. Another AI program was used for training surgeons; I was unsure what exactly it was doing other than changing the speed of the video feedback. I included a video of someone else, but I also got to try my hand at it. The video was blurry and a little bit hard to look at it, but I swear I was the best as I managed to pick up the candy wrapper with one of the claws. I swear the other one was broken, so I never managed to actually open it.
For dinner, Prof. Chen took us all shrimp fishing! I was so glad I managed to catch some, I ended up getting three and Mikey caught the most at four (it was a one-sided competition on my part). I don’t really have the patience for fishing on my own, but it was a much grander time with all 14 of us fishing together. What I was not expecting, however, was to cook the shrimp myself afterward. Once our time was up, we brought our nets of shrimp to the sinks in the corner and were taught how to wash the shrimp, cut their legs off, skewer them from back to front, and then salt them so we could roast them in an oven. I know that this is the way that things are done out of sight in the kitchen anyhow but… they were still wriggling in the oven so I was glad that all three of my shrimp were used as demos :/ .
Once we returned from shrimp fishing, we were set loose in Ximending to get more dinner as we pleased. A handful of us went to Xing Fu Tang, a viral boba and bao place, where I split a boba and box of xiao long bao with Hanna. The boba was pretty good, it is freshly made and has burnt sugar on the surface, which creates a mixture of textures that I found pleasing. It was funny to me though that they didn’t put the boba in milk tea, but just milk. I suppose the drink was just a boba receptacle anyhow. We also stopped by a local bakery on our return back to the hotel, where we got more bao to complete our dinner.