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