Travel Blog

I just got back from a 2 week business trip to Germany. During the many hours of transit time dispersed throughout my near 24 hour trip, I walked through the duty free shops of Berlin Tegel, London Heathrow, Bangkok International and Taipei CKS, only to discover one basic truth: we love packaging. Good packaging is exciting. Good packaging sells, sometimes more than the content itself.

I have here a few examples to ponder. At Bangkok International, I purchased a really nice tea candle set as a present for my friend Lynn Gately in London. The nice Thai lady spent 5 minutes meticulously knotting a perfect ribbon on the already nicely packaged box. This made me feel good. I had optimized the value of my Thai Bhat.

On the same trip, I had bought a box of cookies to bring home to the parents. I picked the box with the best packaging. Who cares if the cookies were actually good! But man, the box looked good in raw silk. Each individual cookie neatly wrapped in pastel colored paper. The packaging must have cost more than the cookies.

We all like nice things….pretty things. But some things get you so excited that you have to wonder when the brainwashing took place. Tiffany & Co. has made a fortune selling the baby blue box. Women get climactic at the mere sight of the color. Hermes has a nice deep orange ribbon that looks so good I want to buy a roll of it and then have them put it in the same orange box and tie it with the same orange ribbon.

There was an interesting story in a local magazine here in Taiwan that reported of a family that was shocked when their new baby didn’t turn out as pretty as the father and mother. Turned out the mother had done extensive plastic surgery, including rhino, cheek lifts, boob job, the works but forgot to tell the husband (except the boob job, of course). There was a before and after picture of the woman. Wow. There was a picture of the baby. It wasn’t pretty. The bottom line is: the husband was cheated in his genetic choice of a mate, purely based on packaging. Ladies…it may soon be time for you to start wondering if your guy’s six pack abs are real, because anything is possible these days. Honestly, I think we all willingly want to be cheated. 

Mere content isn’t good enough anymore. We want it all: packaging AND content. And if we can’t have it all, then the packaging will do. This is what feels good in the short term. And then we wonder why divorce rates are so high. There is no lecture or moral lesson in this blog post. But the next time you’re confronted by the simple cost benefit analysis between packaging and content: make a mental note of the difference between your logic and your emotional urge.

This past weekend, DJ Tasc from Toronto came into Kaohsiung and we threw a raging party. I’ve never really watched a live scratching session and I have to admit it was fun. Tasc was stellar. The party was a success. Kaohsiung is becoming a better place with every event. I should call city hall to have a discussion about how to package the city better, and show up in a Tiffany baby blue shirt.

Summers here in Kaohsiung are just like Summers in Washington, DC, New York, or to an extreme, Miami … hUmid, with a capital "U" for Unf*ckingbelievably humid.  Unlike many of these other nice cities I mentioned, the Summers here are lonG with a capital G for "God-d*mn, chill out already!".  So humid that it makes you feel like you have perpetually wet your pants. 

But then … just 2 weeks ago half way through October…. BAM!  I woke up one find morning and the humidity disappeared like an out of favor mobster.  AHHHHHHHH.  Now, Fall is the stuff of dreams.  The really nice coats and sweaters start coming out.  Body parts not meant for public showing are covered once again.  Daydreams of eating sticky rice wrapped in bananaleaves and slow roasted pork knuckles with sweet potatoes* creates unnecessary drool over my keyboard.

What’s all this got to do with Gun Slinging with Jack Daniels?  Nothing.

Halloween just went by and my new Kaohsiung instigators and I threw and amazingly fun party at a club called Dreams.  Yes.  I was a cowboy with hat, guns (2 Guns!), and a shiny silver badge.  My horse was named Richardo - Latin for Richard.  Appropriate only because Ricardo came as a pair of shorts and, when worn, his head jut out of my groin.  Ricardo is an eager beast.  I had his tail coming out of my behind.  The line "Pet my Horse!" did not go completely well with the locals, but they appreciated the humor.  We had 851 people show up (not bad for a newbie in town, eh?) at our first party. 

The next one is going to be November 26th, with DJ Tasc flying in all the way from Toronto, Canada to throw down some hip hop tunes and show the local Kaohsiungnese what scratching is all about.  For those of you who know me from back in the days who are now thinking: What the F*UC&!  Hip Hop?  Yeah.  It’s the only kind of music you can play here without getting shut down by the cops. 

So Hip Hop will have to do until I meet up with Dusty and Laura, and the DC crew at the Winter Music Conference next March.

If you’re wondering what role Jack Daniels played in all of this: I traded a pistol in for it and fired it with just as much frequency.  Yee Hah!

*We don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas here in Taiwan, so it’s the closest thing we have to seasonally made holiday food.