The core of 101 is a high-end shopping mall, but the giant complex includes some un-mall-like entities. Tucked away at the edge is the martini bar Mint, one of the most hyped icons of the new Taipei decadence. Named after the cool candy, you have to pay a cool fortune to enjoy its cool atmosphere: glowing pastel dance floor, violet lights, furniture designed within an inch of its life. (Michael Jordan put this place on the map when he showed up to smoke a cigar.) I even spend a few guilty hours in the mall itself, pressing my nose against the windows of Chanel, Celine, Prada, Gucci and the world of the mysterious rich.

I don’t spend all of my time chilling in the capital; I want to see more of Taiwan. If cool equals calm in this country, then there can be few cooler places than the Lalu, a famed resort about four hours south of Taipei. It’s on the shore of Sun Moon Lake, which is said to be an ancestral place of worship formerly occupied by the Shao aboriginal tribe.

When I step into the lobby, a girl is meditating, in full lotus position, on a chair facing the lake. (Is she part of the decor, like the scantily clad models that lounge in a glass display box in the lobby of the LA Standard?) This place makes me want to assume the lotus position, but my legs won’t bend that way, not without surgery.

The Lalu has calm down to a science. Much of this has to do with the quality of natural light, which is carefully permitted to drench every square inch of the public spaces but nicely excluded from the denlike rooms. Vast screens and roofs, held up by tall, thin quasi-industrial columns, hover over the exterior spaces.

I figure it would take me a few hours to fully investigate the various ways of getting clean in my hotel room. I have a central bathtub set into a block of stone, and stone sinks; the shower has one of those monsoon shower heads, the kind that could easily cause a drought in less wet countries. I subject myself to a culturally appropriate bathing ritual at the spa: an acupressure massage. It is, in fact, one of the finest massages I’ve ever had: firm, uncompromising… borderline painful. But unlike the fey oil and hot stone stuff common in North America, this feels as if it’s really accomplishing something.

When I return to Taipei, clare and Jovi are amused by (and envious of) my monastic glow of calm. They try to disturb it by taking me to Bistro O, which turns out to be a lesbian bar. Here I encounter a more radical strand of Taipei cool: a unique mix of Japanese pop culture and Shanghai retro. In the bar, Day-Glo baubles from Tokyo alternate with risqué pictures from Shanghai’s era of international sin. The Bistro O girls have developed their own brand of opium-den chic, a look that I later see echoed in numerous clubs and clothing stores around the city.