Today: AmCham and pizza

It is Thursday afternoon here (very early Thursday morning at home), and it's been a good day already. I started off the day by making a presentation to some folks at the American Chamber of Commerce of Taiwan. It was a breakfast meeting, and got publicized rather late (I was only asked to do the talk a little over a week ago), so the attendance was not huge, but it seemed to go well. I mostly talked about some of the cross-cultural issues in business ethics research that I've worked on with Christian Resick from Drexel, and Mary Keating and Gillian Martin from Trinity College Dublin. I am always a little unsure about what will be useful to people in a talk like this, but the people who were there today were primarily not HR people, and they were genuinely interested in the topic. We had lots of good discussion, and I was glad for the chance to do the talk.

I was back at the hotel by 10:30am or so, and for lunch I decided to go wandering in a different direction than usual. In Taipei, there are streets, and off of streets are lanes, and off of lanes are alleys, so I headed back in the alleys around the hotel. About 10 minutes walk away, I found a little pizza parlor -- Mary Jane's. It was not an Italian joint at all -- it was very airy and brightly colored, and was run by young Taiwanese people. The menu was typical pizza (more California Pizza Kitchen type dishes, I'd say), including a 4-cheese pizza for which the description read "This pizza is seriously cheesy. How cheesy? Think David Hasselhoff singing Air Supply backed up by Menudo -- seriously cheesy."

Tonight is class again, from 7-10pm. We're covering cross-cultural issues in leadership, and starting to address some specific issues the students have raised. Tomorrow I will spend part of the day with a Taiwanese former student from Wayne State who is now a professor in Taichung. She's going to show me around a few spots I haven't been to here, and I am looking forward to it.

Oh, and here's a picture that shows a scooter, piled not quite as high as the one I saw and mentioned the other day. This one is from Tuesday night, at the Shida Night Market.