Last week, my dad’s friend, Dr. Lin, took me, Melissa, and my mom to an upscale lounge in Taichung’s Hotel One. The place offered bottle service, so Dr. Lin ordered up a liter bottle of scotch… for a party of five… one of whom is my mom… who doesn’t drink scotch. Basically, we had four people and a liter of scotch.

When the server brought the bottle over, my first thought was, Holy crap, how are we ever going to finish this?!?

My second thought was, I’m on it! And I made it my mission to make sure we didn’t waste any of that bottle.

At one point, maybe an hour — and seven or eight (small) glasses — later, Dr. Lin’s girlfriend joked, “Wow, you have a pretty high tolerance.”

To which I replied, “Remember whose son I am.”

Everyone nodded in understanding.

Unfortunately, as we neared closing time, we weren’t even close to finishing the bottle. I made a feeble attempt to determine just how much scotch was left, but my eyes were both unable and unwilling to focus on any physical objects at that point. I concluded that, regardless of how much was left in the bottle, there was no way we were going to finish it. And so, I lamented to Dr. Lin that all that scotch was going to go to waste.

Aaaaaand… that’s when I learned that bars in Taiwan allow you to take home the unfinished bottle. Or even better, you can check the bottle at the bar, and they’ll tag it with your contact information and hold onto it for up to three months. That way, you can keep drinking from it any time you come back in the next three months.

Pretty awesome, right?

I had no idea this was how bottle service was done in Taiwan, of course, which is why Dr. Lin and his girlfriend probably thought I was a raging alcoholic as I manically plowed through those seven or eight (small) glasses.

And the best part of bottle service in Taiwan? You can literally say, “This bar has a bottle with my name on it!”