Breakfast in Taipei

Saturday morning we met Andy and Sugi in the lobby of our hotel (Park Taipei Hotel - highly recommended) and walked to a nearby restaurant for breakfast.  The section of Fu-Xing South Road near the hotel has many restaurants well-known for their breakfasts, some of which serve 24 hours a day.

The first sign that this would be good eats was the queue stretching out the front door and onto the sidewalk.  There were two, in fact: one for food to-go (many people in that line were carrying their tiffins or, as I believe the Singaporeans call them, their tingkats) and the other for dine-in.

The kitchen is right at the front of the shop, open-air under with a glass wall and window facing the interior dining area.  This is a busy and efficient kitchen with each person performing their tasks in a compact area; no wasted motions here.  The menu has variations of no more than a dozen items, if that, so it is more of a production line than anything else.

Our basic breakfast was four bowls of warm, sweetened soy milk, sesame pastry with fried "donut" inside, rice rolls (hidden under the sesame pastry), steamed Shanghainese style pork dumplings called xiao long bao, and some fried turnip cakes (not pictured).

Soy milk is not something I generally enjoy drinking but for some reason I find that when I have it in Asia, it is much more enjoyable than when I have it in the US.  It isn't chalky and there's no artificial vanilla flavor added to it.  It is especially nice when using it to dip the pastries.

The pastries, referred to colloquially as "Chinese donuts", are thin strips of unsweetened dough that are fried up.  In Thailand, these are generally shorter pieces but here in Taiwan (and most other places I've had them) they are a good ten inches long.  The ones we had were wrapped in a thin sesame pasty.  You dunked it in the soy milk then took a bite.

The dumplings (in the background) are one of my favorites, although this particular restaurant's were underseasoned.  They are made with a ground pork filling that has a small cube of gelatinous broth put inside the wrapper and then are steamed.  The broth liquifies and when you bite into it, you get a generous burst of "soup" with the meat.

The other thing we had were rice rolls (kind of like sushi) wrapped around a Chinese donut and stuffed with a dried, shredded pork and pickled veggies.  Very tasty!

This proved a tasty and filling start to our drizzly day.

First Day in Taipei

We arrived Friday morning about 11:00 at Taipei's International Airport after a smooth, three-hour flight from Bangkok.  Andy was kind enough to arrange for a car to pick us up and we were in the city before twelve-fifteen.  Amazing considering the distance from the airport to the city.

After a bit of freshening up, we met Andy and his girlfriend Sugi in the lobby of the Park Taipei Hotel, off to our first stop, the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, below.

This impressive memorial to the first president of Taiwan is part of a larger grounds that include the National Theatre and the National Concert hall, two traditionally designed buildings.

Inside the memorial hall we witnessed the impressive changing of the guard ceremony at the top of the hour.  There is some video footage I will edit of this.  Worth watching because - horrors! - one of the guards dropped his gun during the intricate maneuvers.

The military guards have to stand still for an entire hour.  Unable to move, they have to rely upon a civilian guard to come over, straighten their uniform and mop their brow. 

In the museum below the memorial hall was an exhibit of more contemporary Chinese scrolls including this cute one of an old couple perusing a photo album.

Tawn posed near one of the large doors leading into the museum level of the memorial hall.

In the evening we went to Ximending, the shopping district  on the west side of town that is the home of hip and trendy youth culture.  Similar to Shibuya in Tokyo, it is bright lights and tons of shops catering to an endless stream of people, mostly younger.

There's shopping for everyone.  Sugi found a beautiful leather bracelet that she really liked so a few minutes later, Andy was shelling out some New Taiwan Dollars.

There are some really nice graffiti in one section of Ximending.

Lots of street vendors serving foods of every kind.  Taipei is known for its good eats and tomorrow evening we will be dining at the night market.  Stay tuned for that entry.  Here was a fresh fruit vendor who was being shooed away by the police for being in a no-vendor area.

One thing I found a vendor selling that really surprised me: corn dogs!

Frosting a Cake

Never one to shy away from publicizing my failures, missteps and adventures in the kitchen, I decided on Monday to film my attempt at frosting a layer cake.  Having only done this a few times before, it was ... quite a production.  But as long as I can learn lessons from the experience (and eat the mistakes!) then that's the important thing, right?

The cake turned out looking okay, if a little lopsided.

The reason for the cake was my birthday, which I share with several other people.  I celebrated in conjunction with Jason, an Australian friend who turned thirty this year.

Our little dinner party group.  From left to right:Benji, Matt, Kobfa, me, Jason, Bundit, Zenya and Tawn.

Jason and I have blown out the candles and prepare to cut the cake.  Speaking of the September Issue, you can probably tell that one of us is a bit more of the fashionista.

Oh, the sad thing is that I made a mango coulis to go with this, poured it into a squeeze bottle and placed the bottle into the refrigerator to chill, subsequently forgetting to serve it with the cake.  D'oh!

Dinner After Fourteen Years

Out of the blue I received an email on Monday from a friend whom I have not seen in fourteen years.  We've traded very occasional emails, decreasing in volume to about once a year as of late.  The friend was in town on business and suggested we meet for dinner so last night we did.

When we last saw each other fourteen years ago, it was on my first trip out of the US, visiting him in Singapore.  He had just returned from almost ten years living and studying in the states and he was doing his compulsory military service.  Already, though, he was laying the groundwork to achieve great things, becoming one of the first people to identify themselves publicly as gay or lesbian in Singapore.  In the years since, he has become very involved in pushing for more rights for GLBT people across Asia.

Back when we first met while still in school, I could already tell that he was going to accomplish a lot in his life.  My pride in knowing him has not diminished even as our communication has grown less frequent.

The opportunity to meet again and to introduce him to Tawn was a nice one.  There was a little awkwardness (I felt, at least) because it has been easier for me to keep up with his activities due to his visibility, than for him to keep up with mine.  Such is the life when you are friends with a public figure, I suppose.

I hope we'll stay in touch in the coming years.  He remains a passionate person who is committed to important social causes.  I enjoy seeing his success.  I also hope that we'll be able to connect again on the level that led to our friendship in the first place, a level beyond the banalities of "What have you been up to?" and "So who are you seeing now?"  That takes time to reestablish, perhaps.

The September Issue

Fashion.  There is sort of this caricature of me that I'm not the fashionable person but that Tawn is.  Of course, Tawn's taste is impeccable and his interest in fashion is very high.  (See his blog, Bino on Fashion)  But that doesn't mean I'm disinterested in fashion or don't appreciate it.  I just rarely put too much thought into matters of fashion.

Last week we saw The September Issue, the new documentary by R.J. Cutler that is essentially the story of the person who inspired The Devil Wears Prada.  Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, is the high priestess of fashion, nearly singlehandedly starting trends and choosing what is in and what is out. 

The real star of the film, though, is Grace Coddington, a former model who is the creative director at Vogue.  Somewhat of a yin to Wintour's yang, Coddington fights to include things she thinks are beautiful and deserving, even going behind Wintour's back in one sequence to order undone some airbrushing she thinks is unnecessary.  Coddington and Wintour both started at Vogue the same day twenty years ago and have this interesting relationship that is both collaborative and antagonistic.

Watching this film provided an interesting insight into the world of fashion.  It also helped me coalesces some of my feelings about fashion.

Left, one of the photos from the September 2007 edition of Vogue as part of a shoot that Coddington designed.

If I've earned a reputation as a fashion phoebe, it is because (aside from my general lack of style in dressing myself) I don't see a need to know which designer is whom, what the latest style is, and what color will be in next autumn. 

Who is the designer at the house of Dior?  I don't know.  What is the significance of the Channel Chanel 2.55 bag?  Couldn't tell you, although Tawn has tried to educate me in these matters many, many times.

But when I watched the film, I enjoyed seeing the display of moving art worn gracefully by the deadly serious (and deadly skinny) young ladies strutting the catwalk.  Whatever happened to smiling models?  Wouldn't people prefer to buy fashions that appear on friendly looking ladies? 

I enjoyed seeing the passion and joy of some of the people involved in the business, especially the care Coddington gives to designing each photo shoot and the passion that young designer Thakoon Panichgul, a Thai-American whom Vogue selected for a young designer award and who is featured in the movie, puts into designing a modern take on the white t-shirt.  These people love what they do and are very gifted artists.

No, the thing that disinterests me about fashion is best exemplified by one of the various subeditors or whatnot who in the movie is caught on film constantly saying a different thing to each person, complimenting the ideas of whoever is talking and then back-stabbing them when they are out of the room.  That reminds me so much of what I found in the movie industry when I lived in LA.  Petty, petty, petty rivalries, hangers-on, and people whose interest was not about the art but about their inflated sense of self-importance.

There's a lot of that in many fields, I'm sure.  But I think fashion has to take the proverbial cake in terms of people who try and use fashion and style as a way to validate themselves and to elevate themselves over others rather than as a way to truly express themselves as individuals.