Our $60 Hot Chocolate....

Well, there are always stories to tell that we are not proud of...and this is one of them. We had a great day today, we took the scooters out for a spin...ate lunch at our favorite Spanish restaurant (I know, Spanish food in Taiwan...what can I say...it's good!), and rode out to ChiChin Island for a little sight seeing adventure. We were planning on going home to make dinner, but we wanted to stay out a little longer, to keep Madison awake since she had already missed her nap...and we figured we could wrangle an early bedtime if we kept her up long enough.

This is where we made a fatal decision...we decided to go to Starbucks to have some hot chocolate and cake....they make pretty decent cake, considering this is Taiwan...where "sweet" things like cake rarely have any sugar in them. Traffic is pretty heavy any time of day, but this is Friday, and it was about 5 pm...so the traffic and parking situation was less than ideal, but we managed to find a spot to park. It was among hundreds of other scooters and bicycles, so we figured we were safe.

Now is a good time to explain that we never really know where it is legal and okay to park here. I think that even if we could speak and read Chinese, we would still probably struggle with the parking situation. People are always just parked everywhere...so it is hard to tell what is illegal, and what is just inconvenient.

But, back to our story....so we find a place to park that looks decent, and go inside to enjoy our snack. It cost us a little less than $10 US for two pieces of cake and three hot chocolates. We realize that this is steep...but we don't do it very often...and since we are on vacation, we decided that we were going for it. Had we but known.....Brian went out to get my wallet out of the scooter at one point, and everything seemed just fine. Then....we finished our cake and went outside to drive off when Brian pointed out that our scooters were no longer there. "Hmmmm..." we thought...."maybe we shouldn't have parked there."

When your scooter is illegally parked here, a big truck with a giant hook on it swoops in and quickly snatches your scooter up and puts it on a truck with all the rest of the unfortunate scooters. They then write your license plate number on the ground in chalk, along with the telephone number of the towing company where you can find your vehicle. We have a cell phone...so normally we would have just called the towing place (or rather, called the number and hand the phone to someone who can speak Chinese), but by another unfortunate coincidence...it was in the scooter with my purse and Madi's jacket. Soo...we went back to Starbucks and told them what happened, and they called the towing yard for us.

Now is where we almost had a disaster. You see, to get your scooter or car out of the pound...you must have your ARC (like the US green card) and your registration, and your international driver's license. Hehe....okay, so we are borrowing our friend Erika's scooter while she is in the US, and we never carry our international licenses with us...because they are HUGE! And we don't carry the scooter registration.....because we are lazy...and we don't have Erika's registration. So we took a taxi to the scooter impound yard and did what any good American citizen in our sitution would do...we played stupid. Fortunately for us, no one there spoke any English...so it wasn't too difficult to talk our way out of showing them anything other than our ARC. It also helped that Madison is cute...and I swear that without her we would have been walking home from the impound yard. She just looks at the impound clerk and flashes her smile and says, "Ni how!" And they start gushing....and the next thing you know we are handing over our cash and getting our scooters! I really don't know what would have happened if they had actually made us give them the rest of the stuff, because we have no way of getting Erika's registration....and since it is her scooter....it would probably be still sitting there in the impound yard right now.

But, to summarize....our hot chocolate ended up costing us about $60 US....so we're pretty sure that tops off our Starbucks spending quota for the year. I'm just really glad that we got the scooters back....even if we did have to give them all our money!! So, the moral of the story is....only park waaaaaaay up on the sidewalk. That way the nice man with the hook on his truck can't reach your scooter to drag it off......