Pam in Taipei

A Weekend in the Taipei life... (and Food Festival Taipei)

I thought I would do a post on a typical PamBrian weekend in Taipei to show you how we spend our leisure hours (yes, the majority of it eating!).
Our last classes of the week are on Saturday morning, but this past weekend I had to do a make-up class in the afternoon because of the holiday last Monday and Tuesday for the Dragon Boat Festival (I know! It's fucked up! Whenever we get a holiday we have to make it up on a weekend day!)

Saturday night we went to our favourite Japanese BBQ restaurant, Gang Bei (Cheers). We had thin slices of beef tongue with fresh chopped spring onions, enoki mushrooms in butter broth, and lambchops! Next, we went to the big Vieshow cinemas in the posh Xinyi neighbourhood to see Ocean's 13. (I liked it! Fun like the first one).


Sunday, we turned down an invite to a beach and a pool party (wanted a break from the epic ride up the red subway line to the North Coast that we've taken the past three weekends - sorry Cullum! We won't wuss out next time) and decided last minute to go to the Taipei Food Festival at the World Trade Center downtown. Free food samples from all different countries in the world! (Thanks to a tip from Rebecca and Eric)

We started at the Taiwan section outside where they had misters on the fans to cool you as you walked through. Someone at one of the stalls handed us a little taste cup with what we thought would be rice wine or juice.... YUCK! A big mouthful of vinegar! We accidentally drank vinegar about three times that day. (Sheesh! You offer taste tests of vinegar with a dipped toothpick or a little chip or noodle with a taste squirt on top, not a thumbful of the straight stuff!). Anyway, the things down this laneway were dumplings, sesame and peanut glutinous candies, glutinous dumplings, deep-fried pork fat skin, and some caramel tea that made my face scrunch up and Brian laugh at me. Not sure if Taiwanese is my favourite kind of Chinese cuisine. Everything seems to be made with this translucent glutinous starch rubber that holds things together: everything from dumplings to beef balls to oyster omelettes to crab to dessert.

Here are some other interesting sights at the food fest:




"Zhong Zi" Auspicious at Dragon Boat Festival, they can commonly be found in North American Chinatowns around the Mid-Autumn Festival, but not in the sweet flavours (that are encased in gelatin AGAIN) found here: red bean (above), black sesame, peanut and others). Sticky rice is wrapped in lotus leaves and steamed. The ones you can find back home are salty with boiled egg and meat inside. I tried the sweet ones here for the first time. (Besides the gelatin,) they were quite tasty.
The Food Fest was an interesting load-up on the senses but tiny samples of prepared frozen and packaged food don't really feed you, so Brian took me to the Sushi Express that Rebecca and Eric took him to the day before. It's NT$30 a plate so that means US$1 sushi! Kinda like a step above supermarket sushi but definitely worth the price, and the food travels by on a train track, kinda like a restaurant-wide lazy Susan. They count up the plates at the end: We had 11 plates, so NT$330 or $11 Canadian for two (that's including two cans of beer!).

After lunch we were still trying to escape the suffocating heat (felt like 40 degrees Celsius with the humidity) so we finally tried an MTV parlour. No, this is not MusicTV but MOVIE TV. You get a private room and a movie rental with a larger than your home TV screen. Oh, and A/C of course. The wait was 40 minutes and as we browsed for a movie and glanced around, it dawned on us why these places are so popular here. Everyone in the waiting area lounge was paired up two by two (except a group of four foreigners) and holding hands. Servers were bringing soft drinks on trays around long winding corridors with motel wallpaper and wood trim.

When we got to the room we chuckled at the *ahem* couch - long enough to lay back in. This is the point where I should mention that nearly all Taiwanese unmarried people who still live in their hometown live with their parents (families are tight). This is when we realized that it wasn't MOVIE TV but MAKE-OUT TV! Haha! No, we didn't nookie in the room (WE don't live with our parents) but we did chuckle about it. Don't worry, the room was clean (except for the thick cigarette smoke coming in from the other rooms).

We actually watched a serious movie: The Last King of Scotland about the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin. It was really good and I can even tell you the whole plot to prove it. :)

After MTV we got some Pho at the Vietnamese place around the corner and went home, satisfied from another full weekend. (This is why I love you, Bri! Spontaneous days round the city are our specialty!)

More next weekend!

P.S. See more pics here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=11980&l=56f42&id=562540836

posted by Pamplemousse @ 11:10 AM 0 comments

Dragon Boat Festival Weekend

Started off our holiday weekend at Jolly's microbrewery (was so psyched when I found this place! The Scotch Ale is my fave). They also serve Thai food there - could it get any better? Homebrewed beer and Thai food? Together? In one place?

Next we went to a DJ'ed expat pool party -- decided it wasn't our scene, so the next day we went to the beach:

Baishawan (White Sand Beach) at the very northern-most tip of Taiwan. It was the nicest swimming beach I've been to - the waves were calm, the water warm, and no rocks to cut your feet! The sand was indeed white, and the water very clear and clean.

There were some peculiarities though - only 30% of the people there seemed to actually come to swim. The rest were huddled under these individual white shelters that covered the supervised portion of the beach end to end. You had to pay NT$200 to rent one. We took one look and kept walking to a quieter part of the beach. The second curiosity was that half of those Taiwanese who did go in the water were fully clothed - in long jeans and everything! We splashed around in the water happily for awhile till we tried to swim out a bit farther to get past the waves. Just as I did, a speed boat came cruising by and the lifeguard in it started insistently beeping his whistle at me until I moved close enough to the shore that the water was too shallow to swim in.

I tried again once he'd left and again, he came cruising back: "beep beep BEEP!" Well this was really no fun and rather paranoid! These were the calmest ocean waters I'd seen in Asia. The last few beaches I went to (in Taiwan and India, had waves that knocked me right off my feet and beat me up when I wasn't paying attention! Here it was serene!) Just around this time we ran into some friends who were trying to escape the crowds on the other side of the beach. They explained that the paranoid patrols were because 14 people drowned last year. (Well no wonder! They were probably wearing denim jeans and steel boots and sunk!) (Actually, though, I realize Taiwan doesn't really have a swimming culture - most don't really learn, so probably don't have swimsuits either and are happy splashing around in old clothes).

Anyway, Rich pointed out that everyone was being waved back to the shallow end unless you had a surfboard. So I decided to have a go at Cullum's surfboard. I've always thought it looked so hard but I got up on my knees on the first go and sailed right into the beach! It was exhilarating! I can't wait to rent my own board and really go at it.


We treated ourselves to some Taiwanese pepper crab and this tasty fish:


Some views of the boardwalk from the restaurant:


That evening we met up with some friends to drink Chimay in Sofa, a chill loungebar downtown. We talked about visiting the National Palace Museum which houses artifacts stolen from Mainland China. And also how Zach proposed to Rachel, in a park, after she opened a box labeled "Open Immediately" an hour earlier, and finding her boyfriend on a park bench. With a ring.

posted by Pamplemousse @ 11:08 PM 1 comments

When it rains,

It's been raining for a week and I just got to thinking this morning that how the weather affects your mood changes when you're in a different climate. Rain in Nova Scotia is so grey and depressing: a cold spring day after many cold winter days. But the rain here is a relief. A relief from the thickness of the heat. It washes away the humidity and the pollution, makes you want to open the windows, breathe a little deeper.

I don't know if it is mere coincidence, but I have felt like it has been opening me up, freeing things, allowing things to be washed away, allowing things to pour again.

I can feel in me that Winter is leaving,
Spring is here
and Summer is coming.

posted by Pamplemousse @ 9:34 AM 1 comments