This made the news as far away as Pakistan.
As we returned from dinner the other day, Taipei 101, still the world’s tallest building, was lit up with the marriage (or is that “mappiageâ€) proposal.
No word on if Diana said, “yes†or, for that matter, even saw it.
Update: I’ve seen some indication that this was a “fake†proposal to “sell†the concept of using the Taipei 101 for marriage proposals.
How exciting is a list of my meals, day-by-day!? I know! I can hardy stand the excitement.
Still, I’m doing this for science. There are just some things that I either can’t get at home or they suck back home.
This morning I went back for Shao Bing You Tiao just so I could get a picture for everyone. We went to a place (might as well be nameless) on Heping Rd that my wife likes to get breakfast at. It wasn’t as flavorful as the “famous†(and yet still nameless, as far as I know) place we ate from yesterday. Photographically, though, they were pretty much the same. (Incidentally, if anyone knows the name of the famous place, it’s located near exit 4 of the Shandao temple MRT station.)
Lunch: Costco, hot dog and a soda. They used to have proper beef hot dogs at Costco Taiwan, but they’ve switched to pork for the “local tasteâ€, which just means they’re aren’t particularly good, but they’re better than any hot dog you’ll get at a Taiwanese 7-11.
Dinner: Stopped in at the Emperor’s Happy Pork Chop near Xinsheng and Xinyi Rds. Two years ago I had the pork chop with noodle soup. I recall liking the pork chop but being unimpressed with the soup. This time I went with a simple pork chop and rice. It still came with a bowl of clear soup, which just didn’t have much flavor. The rice was served with a variety of toppings.
The highlight of the meal was, of course, the pork chop and it was quite good, although there was a rather large fatty section near the bone which mostly went to waste.
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 (
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 wayâ€. “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)
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:
I’ll try to link to her reviews on places that I eat at.
Technorati Tags: Blog
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.
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!
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…
(more…)
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.)
Technorati Tags: Blog, Restaurant, Review, Taiwan, ä¸æ–‡
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.
The Taipei Kid => Taipei Tops for Rudeness (WTF?)
The China Post => New Yorkers most polite, Taipei residents among the rudest
My wife brought a Chinese-language news article siting a Reader’s Digest article to my attention the other day. Apparently Taipei came out at or near the bottom in terms of the Digest’s rudeness scale for cities. The article she was reading was in Chinese, so there wasn’t much point in my blogging it – and naturally, I haven’t read it, but the China Post has reported on it in English. (Found this by way of the Taipei Kid.)
Apparently the folks are the Digest secretly followed people around and observed things such things as opening doors, saying “thank you”, helping people pick things up that are dropped, etc. – All definitions of politeness entirely by Western standards. I don’t blame the people of Taipei for being miffed about this.
My experience has always been that people – at least those that have any real reason to interact with me – are kind to the point of being almost annoying. They try to do everything they can for you, even if you don’t want them to.
As for complete strangers… well, they exist in a state of polite indifference, but none have ever been rude to me.
The survey is a crock.
I just happened to stumble across 5 Takes this evening on TV.
It’s a program I’ve never watched before, but was fascinated by the concept: 5 people are given a bit of money, a laptop and a camera (crew, perhaps) and sent on trips. Personally, I wanted to audition but I’m too old, too married and too employed to go galavanting off like this.
Anyway, there’s no particular reason I hadn’t watched the show yet, just that it was never convenient. Tonight, which flipping through the channels I saw something you almost never see on US television: Taipei. Since it was on the Travel Channel, I had to stop and watch.
There’s such a lack of anything on Taiwan it was nice to see something and I think it was quite positive, overall. Taipei is a great, vibrant city with lots of interesting things to do.
One of them ate the obligatory “Stinky Tofu”, but they were duped into eating it boiled – even my wife won’t eat boiled stinky tofu – fried only.
I thought the guy who ate it was going to hurl right back into the hot pot on the table.