Taipei coffee and food

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Taipei is a much more sophisticated city now than it was two decades ago. At my first meeting in Taipei (I'm on an advisory board for study abroad programs in China), I was amazed when we were offered a choice of espresso drinks from a nearby café. But the food that was spread out for us to eat was just like what I would have expected to see in the early 90s.

Some of these things are decent Chinese snacks, but quite a few are horrendous pseudo-Western foods.  In particular:

(Just in case you're wondering, that's a strawberry-egg-lettuce-mayonnaise sandwich.)

(Those are hot-dog halves, disguised as wholes.)

At last something real: delicious dàntǎ 蛋塔 (egg tarts).

The snacks may not have been good, but the views from Chengchi University were spectacular.  That's Taipei 101 (formerly the tallest building in the world) in the distance in the center-right of the picture.

We had a rather unpleasant Western style lunch in a restaurant on campus.  Here's what I saw in the restroom after lunch:

The ad deserves a close-up.

Suffice to say there is no shortage of sexual innuendo to be seen.

For dinner we went to a restaurant called Lianchi Ge (Lotus Pond Pavilion).  It's one of those vegetarian restaurants where much of the food looks (and occasionally tastes) like meat.  It's said that this cuisine was created for Buddhist monks who missed their pre-vow sinful eating habits.

Yes, that's a piece of "salmon sashimi" on the left.

Here are my seconds, featuring "pork", "chicken", and "maguro sashimi".

All the above happened on Sunday.  Monday, the next day, was the subject of the previous post.

On Tuesday I went on a tour of the National Palace Museum (great as always), followed by lunch at the Grand Hotel, and an afternoon/evening at Dànshuǐ 淡水 (Tamsui), former capital of Taiwan under the Portuguese and Dutch.

The view from our private dining room at the Grand Hotel:

The lunch banquet menu:

The only picture I took at the famous Red Hair Fort at Tamsui was this poster of Herbert Giles, one of the inventors of the Wade-Giles transcription of Mandarin, beloved of several generations of Western Sinologists.

The views at the waterfront were quite spectacular, and only enhanced by the threatening clouds.

Excellent use of the word "saporous"!

Ah, good ol' Taiwanese squid-on-a-stick:

Dinner in this lovely restaurant, the Red 3 Café.

Food was blechy.  Don't bother eating Western in Taiwan.  Stick to the squid-on-a-stick.

Wednesday we had a reunion for all the Sino-Tibetan conference attendees who had worked together at Berkeley on the STEDT project.  It was also at a vegetarian restaurant where the food looks like meat!  But not the same one.

What I liked most about the restaurant was the crazy coffee machine, which sucked milk out of a carton through a tube for steamed-milk espresso drinks.  There's also a bean grinder on top.

I was so excited by this machine that I had to film it in operation.

The other thing that obsessed me during this week in Taiwan was the walk signals.  I loved the way the little animated green walking man would start rushing as time drew short.  I spent several days trying to film this, but kept failing to get the shot I wanted.  Sometimes the timing of the animation clashed with the frame rate of my camera, so it didn't show up properly.  Other times there was bright sunlight obscuring the image, or I couldn't get a clear shot without standing in traffic.  Or it was pouring rain.  Finally, after several days of frustration, I got it.  Notice how at 14 seconds the little guy starts to run like mad: