Lone Locust Productions

Category: Travel

Travel-related posts before they get moved to travel.lonelocust.com

  • Day 1 – What I ate

    Had three meals today, for breakfast, on the way “home” from the airport, we stopped at some “famous” place that makes shao bing you tiao (燒餅油條). I forgot to get pictures and will try to get some later, but it is basically several pieces of deep fried batter in long stick shapes, wrapped by another piece of pan-fried dough, rather in the shape of a squared-off pita. It’s filling, but it can hardly be nutritionally wholesome. This place apparently had “thin” and “thick”, the thick being a unique non-traditional specialty form from this particular restaurant. The difference between the two was almost imperceptible.

    Din Tai Fung

    Lunch they insisted on taking me to Din Tai Feng, which is almost always welcome.

    We went out later in the day to stay awake and we stopped at the nearby MOS burger (a new one has opened up less than three blocks from home) for my dinner.

    I enjoy MOS Burger because it is different but, of all the hamburger places, they make it the hardest. There’s no combo meal with a cheeseburger, and there’s no pretty picture menu for the illiterate foreigners (like me), and then they have to ask about options so I always have to order my food “the hard way”. “I’d like one MOS Cheese hamburger, spicy, no tomato. One small order of french fries (if only I knew how to ask them to salt them.) One large drink, cola. To eat here.” (In chinese, of course)

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    The incompetence of my pronunciation not withstanding, I can usually get my point across, unless they start asking questions. Now they’ve added a new one, “Do you want ice in your cola?” Anything they can do to make it hard for me.

    Because I basically don’t have a huge repertoire of restaurant reviews for Taipei, but Ifrequently read the Hungry Girl’s Guide to Taipei blog, which has a nice back-catalog of restaurant reviews, for her comments on:

    MOS Burger

    I’ll try to link to her reviews on places that I eat at.

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  • Taiwan 2007 – Day One – Arrival

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    We’re in Taipei.

    I’m very proud of my kids, their behavior was almost flawless over the long haul to Taiwan.

    The flight was tedious, but I managed to sleep for about 2/3 of it. I was amused by Singapore Air’s choice of TV shows. While I appreciate their choice of Doctor Who as one of the selections, with only one episode to choose from, Rise of the Cybermen, I can’t help wondering if a better choice wouldn’t have been an episode that wasn’t part one of a two-part story. Still, I watched Doctor Who while flying over Siberia. How cool is that?

    We arrived around 6:00AM local time, and our goal for today is nothing more than staying awake until 8PM or so.
    The rainy season officially started yesterday and it was pouring all morning. It’s hot, humid and miserable, there’s no other description for it. It’s tough adapting from a lifetime of living in the “dry heat” or Arizona.

    There’s a snag connecting our laptops into the home network, but hopefully that will be resolved before tomorrow. All I can do now it write posts and wait for a chance to send them.

    I haven’t quite figured out what format my posts will take on this trip. Since all we’ve really done today is eat, I’ve been concentrating on taking pictures. I’ve created a single photoset called Taiwan 2007 for the repository of all the photos I upload which should be all photos I take (as a backup). I’ll see about making some form of edited highlights areas.

    Afternote: I made it till 6:30, it’s now 2:00AM in the morning and I’m wide awake, but that gave me the opportunity to figure out hoe to connect to the internet via a PPPoE DSL connection. I’ve not seen one of those before but it works. I’ve even iChatted back home with no problems.

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    We thought that was going to be the end of the day, just relaxing and trying to stay awake, but instead we headed out to get contact lens for Irene (no prescription required in these parts.) As we walked around we passed something that really impressed me. Only in Taipei would they have a family waterpark/sewage treatment plant. How brilliant is that!

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  • The In-Laws and the Toilet Paper

    I’m quite looking forward to our rapidly approaching trip to Taiwan to visit my wife’s parents, but there’s just one area that really bothers me… but things are looking up this time.

    That area? The Toilet Paper dilemma.

    The details may not be for everyone. Only read on if you dare…
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  • Escape from Prescott

    The grey weather continued again today and by the time we’d eaten, cleaned up and gotten packed, it was nearly lunchtime. We had to check out and, not wanting to leave computers and cameras alone in the car, we decided to have lunch and return home.

    We made another go at Kendall’s Famous Burgers & Ice Cream. Well, it was OK, I suppose. I tossed caution and insurance company warnings to the wind and asked for my burger to be medium-rare, despite the warnings that it would increase my chances of food-borne illness.

    I can only say, if my burger was medium-rare, the ordinary medium ones must be charcoal briquets. The meat was overdone, and therefore flavorless and the buns weren’t particularly fresh. It was just a run-of-mill, garden variety hamburger.

    We were considering going up into the woods and walking around a bit, despite everything being muddy, but, once again, as we left Kendall’s, the temperature was dropping rapidly, indicating another storm front was moving in.

    We just decided to go home.

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    Prescott is an interesting little town. Perhaps it’s not so little anymore. The center of town is the only genuine Victorian settlement of any size that remains standing in Arizona and it’s charming. Unfortunately, what was once a small town in moderate climate, is now a sprawl incorporating Prescott, Prescott Valley and Chino Valley. Of the three, only Prescott has any charm. The other towns are sprawled out across the dull, empty plains surrounding Prescott.

    Meanwhile, the land in Prescott has become so desirable, many of the houses for sale were pushing a half a million dollars.

    There’s also a curious phenomena and one that does not bode well for Prescott. There were block watch and security system signs everywhere. Typically, I expect to only see that in neighborhoods that have problems with crime. Considering the look of many of the teenagers running around Prescott, I can imagine they’re a bit of problem.

    I guess I’ll have to start looking for a different town to retire to.

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  • Picture worth 1,000 words?

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    It’s been unseasonably hot in Phoenix the last few weeks, with temperatures well into the 90s. Both Michelle and Irene are on spring break this week, so we decided to head to the cooler country for a few days. With this vacation planned for several weeks, today we headed to Prescott.

    Pity that the storms rolled into Arizona last night. This morning it was already pouring and while it looked like it was going to clear up by the time we were leaving town, apparently it did not.

    When we arrived in Prescott we headed for Golden Corral, a buffet restaurant Irene really likes. They were recovering from a power failure and apparently had no croutons nor fried foods because of it. (Their sign actually said “no bread, no soups and no fried foods” – Why else would one go to Golden Corral?)

    Immediately upon check-in at the hotel, I got called from work. The storm was pounding Phoenix and our offices lost all power for hours.

    We started walking around town, but were soon turned back by rain, and so we were stuck in the hotel for the rest of the day.

    Photos follow:
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  • Love Those Dumplings

    Din Tai Fung

    Foo(d) Bar Blog => Din Tai Fung

    There’s a funny thing about doing food and restaurant reviews. Even though I know fully well that each person has their own taste and that you can’t hope to agree with anyone except perhaps yourself, there’s a certain weird self-affirmation when you run across someone who records a similar impression of a restaurant – particularly one you consider exceptional.

    In this case I came across this new review over at the Foo(d) Bar Blog, which I believe is also based in the Phoenix area, but in this case is reviewing Din Tai Fung, a restaurant in my wife’s old neighborhood: Taipei, Taiwan. (What are the odds?)

    Referring to their world-famous xiao long bao:

    What makes Xiaolongbao different from other types of steamed buns and dumplings is the filling. In addition to meat, the dumplings are also stuffed with gelatenous stock before being steamed. Once steamed, the gelatin melts and becomes the soup inside the bun. When you eat a xiaolongbao, you get a nice combination of meat, soup, and wrapper. The soup buns at Din Tai Fung were awesome. The soup was very hot, and it was easy to scald yourself if you didn’t let them cool just a bit before eating. Wait too long, though, and the soup wasn’t quite as good. What also makes the xiaolongbao unique at Din Tai Fung is the number of pleats in each dumpling. Apparently, the buns at Din Tai Fung have more pleats than most other places, which is a result of years of experimentation by the owner.

    Read the rest of his review via this link.

    If you’re ever in Taipei, you can hardly go wrong at Din Tai Fung. (They also have branches in Japan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Korea, Indonesia and here in the States in the Los Angeles area.)

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  • Roasted Turkey Doritos

    The Taiwan Kid => Turkey-Flavored Doritos

    Somewhere Dr. Evil has a lab where they cook up these products:

    I’ll give you something to Ho!, Ho!, Ho! about–how about Doritos Roasted Turkey flavored chips? And the chips are even shaped like Christmas trees! It would be easy to think that this is some sort of art project, but it seems to be readily available at 7-11s here. And popular too–I grabbed the last bag in the store. Every foreigner in the neighborhood must have bought a bag to blog about.

    I noticed there was no comment on how they taste.

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  • A different notion of hiking…

    Vanderbilt Forums => Short stroll in a Chinese national park

    I’m always fascinated by the various notions of recreation in national parks around the world. While I’m not sure exactly where this series of pictures is, it looks a lot like the Three Gorges.

    You have to see all these pictures to believe this is really a hiking trail.

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  • Trip To San Diego – Memorialized in a Comic Book

    New Macs come with a terribly amusing program, Comic Life, which is really fun. For a bit of fun, I put together a comic version of our recent trip to San Diego. Check it our here.

    Tell me what you think!

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  • Forgetting San Diego

    I actually started writing my (then journal, now) blog entries back in 1998 because I wanted to remember my travels. I’ve got a great head from facts and figures and a particularly lousy one for remembering places and dates.

    That makes it all the more annoying that, having just been in San Diego and writing my entries in a timely fashion, I completely forgot to mention to coolest thing on the trip. On Zoo day, we went afterwards to the natural history museum. It’s an OK museum, quite small, but it has some interesting displays.

    In the basement, they had a temporary exhibit called Dinosaurs Reel and Robotic. (I hate the fact that link will be bad someday. I wonder if it is on archive.org yet?) It was a fantastic collection of classic movie posters, artwork, comic books, old novels, actual movie props (like the brontosaur from Son of Kong) from all over the world. There were also robotic dinosaurs armatures and animatronic displays. The most striking to me was an authentic re-creation of the tyrannosaur from King Kong, placed in front of painted background, with a foreground glass matte. It was setup exactly as it would be for filming, complete with a viewfinder to look at the shot though.

    You could look all around it and see how obviously fake it was, but when you looked through the viewfinder it’s completely convincing. I’m really glad I got to see that and I’m tempted to try playing around with some foreground mattes just for fun.

    Why didn’t I remember this cool exhibit? When I wrote my blog, I looked at my pictures for the day to refresh my memory.

    This exhibit didn’t allow photography. Blast their eyes.

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