Tag: Food and Drink

  • Shrimp Fishing

    One activity that is truly Taiwanese is to go shrimp fishing. A swimming pool area is reserved for the wee crustaceans and we fire at them with bits of liver and smaller shrimp babies on the end of rods. Now, these babies really are quite a bit bigger than you may expect… and in fact are the largest shrimp (and most aggressive) I have ever come across. Not quite lobster sized… but big enough to hurt when they grab you, and grab they do, as you pull the hook out of their little mouths. Here is the pool… “come in – the water’s lovely!”

    Here is the lineup of the team at work (we had a whole pool booked for our pleasure)

    Michael hard at work drinking:

    The lovely, appetising bait:

    Rod’s eye view of proceedings (plus Lorenzo in the background):

    FOOD

  • Essential Beer

    Some great products around the place…. “Essential Beer”…. yes it is.

    And the ubiquitous Hello Kitty brand… it gets EVERYWHERE. Any product you can think of has been infected with the pink disease…. but this one is quite cool. It’s a CD player.

    An amazing smoke mask that is somewhat more melodramatic than usual in Europe!

    The local condom brand “Stonker Donker”

    … and even numbers sprayed onto the side of crates become interesting:

  • Cha

    Klara and I scoot off to the tea rooms in the mountains to the south of the city. Here is a quick view of what it may feel like to be a on a scooter… The awesome power of 150cc’s.

    At the tea room, and here is the tea set we are presented with. It is a real pleasure to hang out and look out over the city. The green tea is very delicate in flavour, though it is surprisingly difficult to get the taste really good, due to over brewing, under brewing, the wrong temperature, too many leaves… and no doubt a multitude of more spiritual factors related to the stars or feng shui.

    And here is an image over the city where Taipei 101 actually looks good and tall for once (it is the tallest building in the world, and yet it looks like a stack of American Chinese Take Out boxes stacked on top of one another.

    On the way back we went to Ting Tai Fung – one of the most famous restaurants in Taipei. It serves the most delicious Shanghai dumplings, and the queue outside to get seats is about 40 minutes. However, they are truly a special flavour. They cook each set in a bamboo basket that pile up into a steam chimney. Quite ingenious, I think, and the food stays warm for ages. Here is the kitchen:

    Klara and I in the Shi Da district of Taipei. Near here is a quite splendid ‘Shaved Ice’ cafe – they create what is effectively a pile of snow and top it with sweet, delicious mango. mmmmm….

    And here is the coolest dude I have ever seen (below, not above – that’s me). This is the absolutely standard pose of people in photos in Taiwan. I have no idea why… but if a camera appears, this is the effect.

    And here is the offending Shaved Ice… this time in fact at a place in Shilin food market. The expression explains things I don’t understand….

  • Downtown

    Woke up pretty hungover and headed downtown just wanted to get the measure of what it was like. However, wasted about an hour walking around totally lost, convinced I could not read a map and utterly confused. When I eventually worked things out it all became clear… the exit signs on the station were marked North, South, East and West. Okay. Logical? You would think so… The North exit is in the south. The south in the north. East in west and west in east! WHAT?!?! You crazy, crazy people! I had to get a coffee and sit down at that point because my brain hurt. And of course it pissed it down raining. Ha. And the coffee shop sold ‘Yorkshire Tea’ which made me chuckle.

    Also went around the equivalent of Tottenham court road. Whooooaaaa. TECHNOLOGY. Lots of fun, and I bought a calculator for doing sums as dividing everything by 60 to get the GBP equivalent was getting dull.

    Again, I ate sushi. Needed some fresh veg and I think it is a good way to eat healthily. Fish, rice and fresh crunchy veg. All the chinese stuff that tastes good I am sure contains large amounts of bad stuff. Everyone eats together in the evenings in the canteen, so I expect my veins to burst with cholestorol within weeks. In fact, I am eating together with them tonight. Makes sense, as it is free and I can enlist some help looking for flats and so on.

    Went to the cinema with Anke off the team. Supposed to be more of them but they bugged out. Was really nice to be in there as the Taiwanese audience really gets into the film and everyone laughs their socks off at the slightest joke.

    Went to a convenience store for food last night. Another world. Went round grabbing random things. New experiences in convenience food – will be testing out final phase on the toilet in the morning.