给熊猫眼编个小快板儿

熊猫眼有双眼皮, 最可怕她的怪脾气 如果不吃棒棒鸡 她就发火不理你!

熊猫眼怕吃不香 所以带她的豆瓣酱 把它刷在盘子上 恶心西餐都吃光!

Spicygirl 最近跑一趟天津出差了几天. 当时她问我需不需要什么. 除了叫她吃吃看天津有名小吃狗不理之外,我什么也想不出来了. 真可惜没让她帮我买天津最出色的民间艺术快板儿用的工具:竹板.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/26/2006 09:00:00 PM| |

 
One great characteristic of Taipei is the sheer number of places to eat. It must literally be in the thousands. Of course, not every one is a formal establishment. In fact, most are very small and unassuming, frequented by a specific, localized clientele. You see this most clearly in Taipei's residential neighborhoods. Each will have at least two or three tiny family-owned eateries providing simple fare like various noodle and rice dishes, soups and boiled dumplings. Nothing fancy, but it's convenient, hearty, cheap, and sometimes you find an unsung delicacy. One such place near my home is Shilipo 十里坡. The name means '10 Mile Slope', yet there isn't a hill within 10 miles of the place: Ten Mile Slope Restaurant on Wolong StreetThe white characters written on the right hand wall mention that they prepare all kinds of noodle dishes and boiled dumplings. It's not a great place, but certainly adequate, especially during one of Taipei's frequent bouts of rain when I can't be bothered to go very far. One drawback is that they are closed on the weekends and they shut down promptly by 8pm. Dumplings here are $4NT each, and there is only one kind: 韭菜 jiucai, or chives. They're not especially good, but will do. Their hot and sour soup is inconsistent like so many places in Taipei. When it is a good batch, however, it is the best I've had yet here, with its strong earthy aroma of mushrooms and wood-ear, and a nice vinegar bite. My favorite dish here, though, would have to be the stir-fried glutinous rice cakes 炒年糕: Stir-fried Glutinous Rice Cakes at ShilipoThese are very filling, have an al dente texture which I really like, and the sauce is first rate. Of course being the Louisianan/Sichuanese-by-osmosis that I am, the chili oil is never far away. Taiwanese tend to have a very bland palate. I think they consider water as part of the spice family. So how do you wash it all down? If you're like the locals, you reach for a bottle of Taiwan Beer:Taiwan is not a beer lover's paradise by any strech of the imagination, but the situation has vastly changed from when I first lived in Taiwan way back in 1988. In those days, the government enforced a very strict monopoly on alcohol, and Taiwan Beer was pretty much the only game in town. Things are much better today, and you can now enjoy beers from all over the world. I've even found draft Hoegaarden at one sports bar, The Tavern, at 14 Xinyi Road, Section 5. You better hurry though; I saw on the Chinese news the other night that some Taiwanese woman is suing the place over alleged sexual harrassment. Taiwan Beer has an evil reputation among Taiwan's laowai old-timers. Morning-after headaches suffered by imbibers are the stuff of legend. Many people believed that these were caused by formaldehyde, but I don't know if anyone ever conclusively proved it. The taste of Taiwan Beer has improved somewhat since I last had it over a decade ago. I'm not saying it's good, mind you. It most definitely is not. But it seems the awful aftertaste is not quite as strong as I remember. So they've either altered the brewing process, or my perception is distorted by flashbacks to The Great Indian Beer Battle. One of my first impressions of the Indian beers like Kingfisher and Sandpiper, when I initially tried them in Madras, was how much they reminded me of Taiwan Beer. It was not a pleasant association.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/20/2006 08:30:00 PM| |

 
Chinese food is justifiably famous throughout the world, so I thought readers might appreciate an introduction to the places I discover that I think deserve special mention. I've been eating out practically almost daily since I arrived in Taipei, in part because it's been so long since I enjoyed the food here, and also because of the stove situation in our apartment. I should also add that I'm spoiled beyond repair by the excellent culinary skills of Spicygirl. So until she moves here for good I'm surviving on Taipei street food, and I, your Galloping Glutton, am passing everything I find on to you. Bafang Yunji Dumpling HouseFirst up is the Bafang Yunji, a place for dumplings and potstickers. It is situated off Heping East Road on Heping East Road Lane 311-323, almost directly opposite the National Taipei University of Education. There is a traffic light at the lane, and it will be the second place on your left as you walk in the lane, right next to a Konica photo developing shop. You can't miss it. "Bafang Yunji" is a phrase that translates roughly as 'Gathering From All Directions'; it implies that the food here is so good that people come from all around. I have to say that this place does have the best dumplings and potstickers I've had so far in Taipei. With a price of 5 NT dollars each (about 15.5 cents US), they are more expensive than most other places, where dumplings run 4 NT dollars apiece, but it is definitely worth it. They offer the same four flavors for both boiled dumplings and potstickers, but I recommend you stick with two: spicy-flavor and chive 辣味 and 韭菜. The spicy-flavored variety in particular are absolutely delicious. They do not have an English menu, but they do speak a tiny bit of English, so if you don't know Chinese you should be alright. Bring your own beer of you want it, because they don't sell any. Here's my typical meal: Clockwise from top: Spicy-flavored dumplings, hot and sour soup, two types of potstickers, both spicy-flavored and chive, dipping sauceThe hot and sour soup is hit or miss. Sometimes it is almost tasteless, sometimes it is not bad. A bowl runs 25 NT dollars, as does their corn soup. This site has likely lost any relevance for my India readership, but if any of you are still out there, I've heard that there is a section in the Taipei suburb of Yonghe called 'Little Burma', where Taipei's admittedly small South Asian community gathers on the weekends. There are some desi here, and if there is any truth to the alleged existence of 'Little Burma', I'll track it down and report on what I find. Dosa and pongal in Taipei? We shall soon see...
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/19/2006 10:15:00 PM| |

 
报到:宝岛,我到了! Consider me back. I’m now all wired, both to the Internet and cable tv, after just two weeks. It took two months to reach the same stage at my last post in Chennai. We’ve got a very nice apartment in a posh part of Taipei, so we’re expecting many visits from family and friends. Spicygirl left today and is now back in HK; she’ll move here for good probably in mid August. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see too much of Taipei during her three-day visit, because it was more of a working trip. She had a few job interviews, and we spent the rest of the time trying to get our apartment in decent shape, because all our stuff arrived the day she got here. It’s looking a lot better now, but it still needs work, and I won’t have much time except on weekends. I’ll be sure to post some photos once it is presentable. I like everything about it except the stove. It is electric. Can you imagine that, an electric stove in a Chinese apartment? That’s even worse than bad fengshui. It is downright sacrilegious. No self-respecting Chinese home has an electric stove; they all use gas, because you simply can’t prepare edible Chinese meals on an electric range. It will be a problem for us, because we don’t cook western food. Well, I’m sure we’ll work something out. Other than that, I really love the place. It certainly beats my starving student digs of 13 years ago. We did manage to visit one of Taipei’s most famous restaurants, Ding Tai Feng. They make very good dumplings and other delicacies. It’s quite expensive by Taiwan standards, but a meal here is a must. Even Spicygirl loved it, and she’s not a dumpling maniac like me. But as you might imagine, dumplings alone will not suffice for a Sichuanese. She found a guide to Taipei restaurants in a local bookstore, and checked out the chapter on Sichuan [Szechuan] cuisine. As it turns out, there is an a street in the older Hsimending area of Taipei exclusively devoted to Sichuan food, called appropriately enough, “Sichuan Alley” (川菜巷). You’ll find it in a little lane right off Kunming Street near the intersection with Chengdu Road: Sichuan Alley in TaipeiIn just a few hundred meters, you’ll discover well over a dozen restaurants, all with Sichuan-themed food. The oldest has been at this location for over 50 years. It is the first place in the photo, on the right. We didn’t eat there, because Spicygirl went in and looked around, but didn’t think the food looked very spicy. When she told them that, they got kind of snippy about it, so we ate at the place on the left, Zhen Chuan Wei, which means ‘true Sichuan flavor’. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t think any of these places are truly authentic Sichuanese style. For one thing, the owners and cooks are all Taiwanese. Maybe 50 years ago, the restaurants on this street really were authentic, because Chiang Kai-shek’s last capital in the mainland before he fled to Taiwan was in Chongqing, and my guess is many Sichuanese made it to Taiwan at that time. This brings me to my first observation. It’s a commonly held belief that Taipei has the best Chinese food anywhere in the world. I think that is a misconception. The food here is good, very good even, and certainly better than what you’ll find almost anywhere else, but it does not qualify as ‘great’. I think the golden age of Chinese food in Taipei was in the 1960s and 70s, and it is an era which has long ended. My theory is this is because at that time the mainlanders who came over after 1949 were in their professional prime, especially restaurateurs. Having grown up and trained in the mainland, they really did make superb, authentic cuisines from their home provinces. But their succeeding generations became more and more ‘Taiwanicized’, whose tastes reflect that inescapable reality. Until very recently, almost no mainlanders could come to Taiwan, and that negatively affected the quality of the Chinese food here, other than the native Taiwanese style, of course. I’ll go as far to say that you can get more authentic Sichuan food in the US than you can here, simply because Sichuanese immigrate to the US, where they open and patronize authentic Sichuanese restaurants. The same holds true for those from China’s other provinces. Case in point, in the photo below are two ‘snack’ dishes (Chengdu xiaochi 成都小吃) I had in Virginia just a couple of days before arriving in Taiwan. They are from a place called ‘Sichuan Village’ located at 14005 Lee Jackson Memorial Hwy in Chantilly. These are more tasty and authentic than any Sichuan dish I’ve had yet in Taiwan (including when I lived here years ago): 麻辣豆花儿 and 酸辣粉I strongly urge anyone in the DC area to make the effort and try it, especially those at FSI going to Chengdu or another mainland post. A word of warning: DO NOT ORDER THE BUFFET. Insist on the Chinese menu. Last weekend I hooked up with the people you see above, all fine bloggers in their own rights: Poagao, Wayne and Mark. This was the first time I saw Poagao since 1989-90, when we did our junior year abroad together at Tunghai University in Taichung. You can read my previous entry about him here. He became something of a legend among those of us in that program who remained in touch in the following years. I can't really remember how I found him again (maybe I stumbled on his website), but I'm glad I did. Now I just have to get him to autograph his book for me. This was the first time I met Wayne, though I'd known about him ever since I first started this site in early 2003. He was a student in the Johns Hopkins program in Nanjing at the time, and kept up a quite interesting record of his Mainland experiences on his blog. He continued the site for a while after he moved to Taiwan, but unfortunately it is now defunct. Like Poagao, he is an excellent photographer, but I have to say he's dropped the ball on the Betelnut Beauty Project. Mark is a former student of mine from my grad school TA days at CU-Boulder. I always made it a point to tell my students that if they really wanted to learn Chinese they had to go live for an extended period in either the mainland or Taiwan. In all the years I've been involved with Chinese, I've only run across one person who managed respectable spoken Chinese without having done so, and I can only imagine how much better he'd have been if he had. So it did my heart good when Mark told me he's been living in Taiwan for three years. Of course, his Chinese is light years better than it was at CU. It looks like Wayne and Mark may be on their way to the mainland before too long, so I hope we get the chance to hang out again before they go. And I hope to see plenty more of Poagao over the next two years, even if only from the mosh pit at one of his concerts. Although we met up Taipei Station and had lunch in the food court below, we decided to head up to Keelung (Jilong) to take in the sites and visit its famed night market. Night markets are a Taiwan institution. They are filled with scores of vendor stalls selling all kinds of snacks and merchandise. Keelung is about an hour north by train from Taipei. We got really lucky with the sunny day, as Poagao told us that Keelung has the most miserable weather in Taiwan. Here are a few more photos (the rest are here): My favorite night market snack: BBQ corn Speaking of reunions, I dropped into my old language school at National Taiwan University the other day. It used to be known as "The Stanford Center", and I attended it from 1992-1993, before it moved to Beijing in 1997. Teachers at the Taiwan location then started their own school, ICLP. I didn't know if any of my teachers would still be there, but it turns out several of them are and they recognized me immediately, even after such a long time. I'll always be indebted to them; they are outstanding educators and I have very fond memories of my year there. We had a great visit and I'm sure we'll see a lot of each other over the next couple of years.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/18/2006 10:12:00 PM| |

 
UPDATE: I'm still here. Taipei has been a blast so far. I'm looking forward to posting up my initial impressions of Taipei after an absence of well over a decade, and hope to do so starting this weekend, because all my stuff has cleared customs and is set for delivery this week! If I can get everything squared away, look for the fun to begin. Spicygirl arrives for a weekend visit starting from Thursday, and I spent the day yesterday with a few local bloggers of some repute, so I plan to have something on that as well. Until then, thanks for your patience...
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/12/2006 07:38:00 AM| |

 
I've arrived safely, if not soundly, in Taiwan. Got here Friday evening at 8pm. One of my bags got offloaded in Tokyo for whatever reason, but they delivered it today and thankfully nothing was missing. I've spent pretty much this entire weekend in various stages of slumber, even when I was out and about. Hopefully, the jetlag wears off soon. Taipei seems far less chaotic then when I was last here 13+ years ago. It's been raining everyday, and much to my chagrin, the neighborhood restaurants all seem to close by 8pm---I'm just waking up by then. Once my computer arrives in the household effects shipment and I get everything set up, more will follow...it may be a couple of weeks though, unless I can find an I-cafe somewhere close by. Sure is great to be here!
- posted by Prince Roy @ 6/04/2006 09:45:00 PM| |