Taipei #7 - Friday

The IETF was trying out a different schedule this time, so we ended up working through what would have been the lunch break in the interest of ending earlier, so no lunch for me. I went back to Din Tai Fung with some colleagues for an early dinner, and it was just as good as the previous time. We fed 4 of us with a huge amount of food for less than $30 apiece. 

After dinner, the weather was “clear” enough to see the top of Taipei 101, so a couple of us headed for the observation deck. I use quotes there because it was actually pouring, but that seemed to keep the visibility a lot higher than the normal drizzle, so we figured it’d be better than nothing. It turned out to be a great view. This was one of the few times where I really wish I had brought a better camera than just the one in my phone – it really can’t deal with those very low-light shots that well. 

Taipei 101’s observation deck has elevators that hit a peak speed of 1010 Meters/minute, and the display in the elevator said that we ascended to 382 meters in 37 seconds. The elevators have an aerodynamics capsule complete with a spoiler on the top and bottom, and they have air pumps to help equalize the pressure for passenger comfort. It works better on the way up than on the way down, as I only had to pop my ears once on the ascent, but it happened about 4 separate times on the descent. 

One of the really cool things about the observation deck is that they have made the building’s tuned mass damper part of the public exhibit, so you can actually see the “Super Big Wind Dampener” in all of its 5 meter diameter, 660 metric ton glory. 

It wasn’t perceptibly moving when I was there, but they do have a pretty cool video of it serving its purpose during a typhoon. – click on “Wind Damper Functioning Film” – sorry, it’s all flash and there’s no way to directly link to it. 

Taipei #3 - Monday

More Taipei 101 today. For lunch, I tried a different stall. This time I got fried pork with miscellaneous vegetables, came with a side of rice and soup, and inexplicably, a fried egg. The presentation was pretty awesome, especially for a fast-food stand – the meal came out on a metal plate, still actively sizzling, and that was set into a wooden frame placed on the meal tray. Unfortunately, the food a bit of a let-down, especially considering the presentation and now good the other meals I’ve had here were. It reminded me of airline food. The vegetables looked (and tasted) like the cubed carrots and green peas that you get out of the freezer bag, and the pork was bland and dry. However, on the way out of the food court for lunch, we had a few minutes to kill, so we wandered into the toy store. 

While I was there, I saw things both creepy and awesome (and every combination of the two). Along with every Gundam and Pokemon type of thing ever, they had a great selection of Legos, R/C cars, plus a healthy dose of Japanese “kawaii” toys (think Hello Kitty and other cutesy things). 

The creepy stuff was this doll called Blythe which has a disproportionately large head and big anime-style eyes. Now that might make you think of the Bratz dolls, but apparently in that case, the creepy is overpowered by the slutty. This doll isn’t tarted up, so basically it ends up being something that kinda belongs in a knock-off Chucky movie – you know, you hear a noise from the closet, open the closet door and the doll is silently staring at you, so you throw it away, and the next day it shows up on your doorstep, staring at you through the window, and when you turn your back, it turns out to be hell-bent on your death and dismemberment? Yeah, kinda like that...

Also, they had these very weird knock-off Mickey and Minnie Mouse dolls that kind of looked like they cross-bred those characters with a robotic clown. Apparently they’re called “cubic mouth” and they may not actually be a knock-off: 

And last but not least… Manchhichi’s still exist! This store had an entire wall of them, all in different costumes.

Dinner tonight had a benefactor, so while it was still at Taipei 101, this one went a good bit more upscale. We went to a place called DiamondTony’s, which is on the 85^th floor. This is one of the destination restaurants in Taipei, owing to the view and to the high-quality ingredients featured. The meal choices were all “sets” where you would choose from a list of soup, cold appetizer, hot appetizer, entrée, and dessert. They started at NT$3500 ($100US) and went up from there.  My set had Lobster Bisque, a sashimi plate, quail with truffle, and the entrée was an Australian Waygu beef ribeye. Waygu beef is beef made in the style of Kobe beef, but not actually from the Kobe region of Japan, so like Kobe beef, it’s supposed to be the best beef you’ll ever have – extremely tender and flavorful. You’d think that with the combination of a view of Taipei from the 85^th floor and a meal like that, I’d be listing this among the top 5 dinners I’d ever had and raving about it for a long time to come. I feel almost guilty to say that actually, it was a bit disappointing. The quail was good, but mostly tasted like chicken, and the beef was very tender, but it was also quite under-seasoned even after I used the provided pink sea salt, and was not particularly well-seared. So generally, you might say that this is a restaurant known for its atmosphere and its view than for its food. As far as the view goes… This time of year, it’s very Seattle-like in Taipei. While the weather is warm, in the 70s, this week it has been almost constantly drizzling, interrupted with brief periods of actual rain. As a result, most days, we haven’t even been able to see the top of Taipei 101 from the street. It was similarly clouded-in during dinner, so the view was mostly like eating inside of a cloud. You could see some of the city if you walked right over to the window, but otherwise not so much. The folks I ate with are good friends, so we had a great time either way. 

One thing that was of note at this restaurant – it had without a doubt the coolest bathroom I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. The bathroom itself is quite modern and clean in design, but that’s not the interesting part. It is in a corner of the building, probably where an executive corner office would be if this was a corporate space, so it, like the rest of the space, is lined with windows. 

The urinals are on a half-wall facing the windows, so, you get a fantastic view whilst availing yourself of the facilities, especially on the one side, where there are windows to your left as well. I can’t imagine what it’s like when the building isn’t fogged in...

Taipei #2 - Sunday

Today I went back to Taipei 101 food court for lunch, and if it’s possible, it was even busier. Everywhere had a line, and watching for a table was worse than finding a parking space at Costco on a Saturday. I got a great big bowl of noodles with vegetables, pork, and kimchi in broth plus some tea for about $5, and then carried it around for about 15 minutes looking for a table before I gave up and ended up finding an unused bit of counter space at the corner of one of the food stalls and ate standing there. For someone with fairly poor fine motor skills, I’m getting surprisingly good at picking up noodles with chopsticks (at least in order to get them to my mouth in order to slurp them up). The food was again quite tasty – I guess if you’re not a fan of Kimchi it might not be your thing, but I pretty much never met fermented cabbage that I didn’t like, and the Kimchi added a nice sour and spicy component to the broth that was really good.

In what is rapidly becoming a theme (hey, it’s close, there are lots of options, it’s cheap, and the food is good), we went back to Taipei 101 for dinner. While most of the places are just little stalls where you order your food and then find a table in the common seating areas, there are a couple of actual sit-down restaurants. We had a group of 10, so we actually got reservations for a private room at a place called Din Tai Fung, which specializes in dumplings, buns, and other steamed items. They are apparently one-star Michelin rated, and it was definitely worth it. We ordered all sorts of different dumplings with different combinations of meat and vegetables in them, as well as several varieties of Xaio Long Bao, which are a special kind of dumpling that contains a solid filling as well as a bit of broth, and is then steamed. You take the dumpling out of the bamboo steamer tray, dip it in the sauce, which is a mixture of Chinese black vinegar, soy sauce, and julienned ginger, and then place it in your spoon (one of those wide, flat spoons you always get in the Asian restaurants). You use your chopsticks to pierce the dumpling to release the broth and steam (so that you don’t burn the heck out of your mouth), and then eat. Gooooood stuff. Worth noting that they have a US franchise now too. We had a couple of soups, including a very good hot and sour soup and a shrimp wonton soup. There were also dessert dumplings, one filled with red bean paste (sweetened) and another filled with Taro.

I also had my first sampling of the local beer, aptly named “Taiwan Beer” which makes up the majority of the market here. It’s a fairly standard pilsner, but as one of my colleagues noted, it is a bit more full-bodied than most of the other well-known Asian pilsners, almost like a less-hoppy Heineken. The interesting thing about this meal was the price. The way that they work it is that a private room comes with a base price. That is, we can have the room, but we are going to be charged a minimum of NT$10,000. However, the cost of the room itself drops the more food and drink we order, so if we spend $10,000 or more on dinner, the room is free (or put another way, we pay for the room, and up to $10,000 worth of food & drink is free). What this means is that for a party of 10, enough food to thoroughly stuff us all was about $34(US) apiece.  I’ve eaten at plenty of places where the food wasn’t as good and the entrée alone cost more than that.

Taipei #1 - Saturday

I''m staying at the Grand Hyatt Taipei. It is a nice, if fairly standard business-class hotel across the road from the Taipei International Conference Center (TICC) where IETF is being  held. According to The Internet, which is never known to be wrong about such things, it’s apparently haunted, and has several different tapestries hanging in the entry hall that are supposed to ward off evil spirits and protect the home… 

Breakfast is included in my room rate, so I tried out the buffet this AM. As with other places I’ve stayed in Asia, it’s a huge buffet with a combination of American, European, and Asian breakfast items. So this morning I was able to have: crispy bacon (they made a point to label it “crispy” and indeed it was), honey baked ham, and I could have had an omelette, a crepe, etc if I so desired. However, also on offer were Chinese buns and dumplings, and miscellaneous hot Chinese food items that you wouldn’t normally consider breakfast.  I remember really liking the buns and dumplings from Beijing, and well, I can get an omelette anywhere, so you can guess what I went for. By far the most exotic thing I tried was something called “century eggs” available either by themselves or in shredded pork congee, If that list sent you directly to read the Wikipedia link, don’t feel bad, the only part of that I recognized was “pork” too. Congee is basically rice porridge, and is not all that flavorful by itself, but the pork was a nice addition. The Century Egg in the congee was more of a textural element than it was a flavor, as the pork was the main thing you tasted. I also had a century egg by itself. The egg white was translucent and brown, and had the consistency of gelatin and very little flavor. The best way I know to describe the yolk was that it was “distilled” egg yolk – more concentrated flavor, but you were more aware of the sulfurous and other off-tasting compounds in the flavor profile too. That is to say, it wasn’t bad, but not something I’m likely to crave. They also had a section of fresh honeycomb set up with a tray underneath it, so that you could cut off a section of the honeycomb yourself, and if you wanted, you could get some additional honey from the tray.

 I had some carrot juice this morning, but I hear that it constitutes murder, so I probably should enjoy it sparingly. J

Here's a great picture of the Taipei skyline from a Flickr user. 

If you click to make the picture bigger, and look just to the left of Taipei 101, there is a building with red square lights around the top windows. That was across the square from our hotel, so that gives you an idea of where I was staying. This was taken from the opposite direction (on the hills overlooking the city to the east). My room faced west towards the mountains.

The downside of today is that it’s been rainy and gross much of the day, and I haven’t been inclined to go exploring given the weather. One of the things on my list was to go up on Taipei 101’s observation deck, but the visibility is so low that I think that would be a waste of time and money, so that may have to wait. I did go out at dinnertime and check out the mall at Taipei 101 (it’s basically across the street from my hotel), and it was so misty/foggy that you couldn’t even see the top of the building from the street, so my hunch was correct. 

 The mall is pretty amazing though – it’s 5 floors of all high-end designer shops (Bulgari, Tissot, DeBeers, Emporio Armani, etc). However, the reason that I went over there was to grab some dinner. They have a huge food court on the basement level, probably 40 or 50 different restaurants, including a McDonalds, a KFC, a Subway, a Cold Stone Creamery, and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel place. It’s very busy, and a bit of an assault on the senses, especially for a jet-lagged tourist. Rest assured, dear reader, that I didn’t punk out and fly 10K miles to eat at McDonalds. I found a Japanese place called Momoya, and got a set (combo) with Shrimp Tempura and Udon Noodles, plus a Kirin for about $8.50. It was a good amount of food, and pretty tasty. I saw one of those sushi places where you sit at the bar and take things off of the conveyor belt as they go past, but it had a pretty good line, so maybe I’ll try to hit that some other time.