--I got charged for a plastic bag at a convenience store. I desperately needed it. But plastic bags are going to cost you out here, the Taiwanese are very earth-conscious.

--Someone blatantly cut in front of me in line at Starbucks. I forgot my brother Roger's cardinal rule. "This is Asia. There is no concept of a line."

--So this hospital is all kinds of purgatory-type places in one big building. There's the whole hospital-as-purgatory idea in the most obvious sense, since some people here are actually waiting to die, but there's more.



a.) The food court. I've always felt like food courts kind of sucked, but I don't really know why. While the food selections have been wonderful, being in the basement of the hospital to eat every meal is strange.



b.) There's this scary mega-waiting room where every family member whose loved one is in surgery waits together in rows of uncomfortable looking chairs. We're talking at least a hundred family members sitting idly in perfect rows, under a marquee with updates on the status of the patients --"in surgery", "surgery completed" -- and the time they first went under the knife. It is seriously like a more-depressing version of the DMV. Here's the HIPPA-breaking marquee:



-- We're having a lot of fun out here despite the strangeness of the hospital surroundings. Spending a lot of quality family time together before the surgery, which happens tomorrow morning.