Taipei 3: conference...

Here's the hotel our conference was held at,
the Gr@nd H0tel, which was M@d@m Chiang herself commissioned back in the day. Much money was spent:

And since our conference is pretty big (~900 people), and the Taiwan govt. has a lot of sponsorship money for hosting international conferences... so they went all out, including a line of flags along the drive way, banners, signs inside, etc.

 We even beat out the only state visitor for the 10-10 celebration... 

President of Honduras (or at least his limo)... he was staying at the hotel too. But apparently we got the bigger banquet hall for that night's conference dinner... which was pretty fancy.

Characterized by over the top presentation... including this weird thing w/ these fake torches leading a procession of platter laiden waitresses.

 Hey look who's here! its my favorite former lab mate, N@ka0ka!

(who you may remember from such fashionable outfits as this...)

 They also had a bunch of performers.... in this case Taiwanese drumming (sounds just like Japanese taiko...)

Video (1.2mb -DIVX)

 Some very nice peacock dancers too

As you may have been able to see in that video, this hotel is also into fancy ceilings, this is the ceiling of the lobby. pretty snazzy.