Food post

Today we went to Taipei 101, which was (as of a decade ago) the tallest building in the world. But I've been slacking on blogging, so I'll talk about that in a separate post.

Outside of the Taipei 101 excursion, the past few days haven't been too exciting or tourist-y. I did get to see two of the neighborhood cats, though! I thought that they'd be skittish when I approached them to take a picture, but they didn't run away at all. Maybe they were expecting me to have cat food. 

Stop luring me into feeding you with your pleading eyes

A very well-fed street cat

Yesterday, Andrew and I met up with a couple of his friends and ate at a pesudo-American restaurant. I had a veggie burger and fries, which were passable, but it was kind of a weird experience. Something about eating burgers and fries in Taipei felt wrong.

 

 

 

Not pictured: the menu option for a burger with peanut butter

I've always been puzzled by the "in a foreign country? let's find the McDonalds immediately" mindset, so it's possible that's where my unease came from. But maybe it wasn't about not wanting to seek out vaguely American food; we stopped for cake on our way to the laundromat and that felt very right. 

ahh, home

And some more foodblogging.

Most people probably don't learn to love kimchi in Taiwan?

This giant bubble tea cost about $1.25

All of the bubble tea is one of my favorite parts of my trip. The one on the right is lychee flavored. The texture of the lychee gel threw me off but the tea was delicious. I'd only had lychees in frozen yogurt before and let me tell you, they are much better when they are not frozen and imported!

Cold noodles (I was a noob and took off some of the spicy pepper
flakes) and purple rice with coconut milk (delicious).

Red bean and custard shaved ice. THIS IS AMAZING.

Our standard, very low-maintenance breakfast.
The bread is red bean bread (10/10 would recommend)

I've been adopting a policy of trying everything as long as it's not meat. It has served me really well, because I initially have had a "???" gut reaction to many the foods that have turned out to be the best (see: red bean shaved ice... or anything with red beans in it, really). Even the thousand-year-egg, which Andrew warned me I might not like (it looks a little scary and a lot of Westerners really hate it), pretty much just tasted like an egg.

You can tell it's not really 1000 years old
because it has no wrinkles

picture from wikipedia

Moral of the story, food in Taiwan is delicious; eat it all.