Tuesday was a relaxed day, with no specific itinerary. When I awoke, the fever was gone, for which I was very grateful.
We went around Taipei by bus to various stores and restaurants. I picked up a Mah Jong game set at a Mah Jong store. At the distinctive Eslite Bookseller I purchased a book on Mah Jong, including instructions (in English), some Chinese/English dictionaries and a couple of gifts.
The Eslite Bookseller is an interesting bookstore, similar to Borders or Barnes & Noble back home. It contains a large selection of books in Chinese, English and Japanese, plus a coffee and gift shop. Eslite, unlike the other cramped and utilitarian bookstores in Taiwan, was open and distinctive – a considerable departure from the others.
I was very disappointed though, I could find no Japanese Ultraman books, but often saw an Ultraman sticker on the front of scooters. The sticker was a great pose of Ultraman firing his beam weapon forward – appropriate indeed for the traffic conditions of Taipei!
I had seen several Kentucky Fried Chicken shops in Taipei and decided I needed good old-fashioned fried chicken for lunch. Instead of KFC, Chu-wan took me to TKK International Fried Chicken.
She said, “It’s like Kentucky Fried Chicken, only better.”
Well, her definition of “better” turns out to be fried chicken without batter, but it was pretty good nonetheless!
The French Fries were another story. They were made from sweet potatoes. Yams. Yuck. I suspect the expression on my face was somewhere between comical and horrific as I chomped into that first “french fry”.
Dinner was at Sizzler.
I loved their little picture menus that made it easy for the illiterate foreign traveler to order a meal. I just pointed at the picture on the menu of what I wanted, in this case, the Sizzler Sirloin Steak, and they responded by telling me (through my companion interpreter, of course), “Sorry, we don’t sell sirloin steaks anymore.”
Well, a ribeye steak and the salad bar made a good dinner anyway. One odd thing was that the steak tasted… different. It wasn’t bad, just… different. It was as if the very cow itself had a different underlying genetic structure.