Lots to recap here, I’ve gotten a bit behind. Pictures to come later.
Shanghai
- I got ripped off by the cabbie on the way to the hotel and ended up paying about $10 US extra
- The city sprawls and traffic was horrible. It took me an hour to an hour and a half to get from the hotel the office each way.
- The local work folks couldn’t have been friendlier, showing us around on weeknights and weekends
- Leo took us to Xintendi - an upscale walk thorugh bourgeoisie mall across from the first communist party hall
- We explored the lights and architecture of the Bund and had Italian dinner on the 56th floor of the Hyatt.
- Lei took us to the underground mall, featuring hardcore haggling for counterfeit designer goods. My opening bid would be 20% of the quoted price (i.e 80% lower), and I’d make the deal for no more than 30% of the original.
- Jenny took us on the train to Hongzhou, where we looked at Temples and rode steel Chinese rental bikes around the locally famous lake.
- We bought hairy crabs and snakes and other stuff at the seafood market, then had a restaurant cook it all up for a team dinner. I ate snake gall bladder, a duck’s head (best parts: tongue and brains), and drank lots of 白九(bai jiu/rice liquor/shiver). You open the carapace of the crab up with your chopstick as if picking a lock and then eat the roe that tastes just like egg yolk (the males moreso than the females)
- Mediocre buffet breakfast at the Hilton International Shanghai was $33 US dollars each day. Instead, I bought ramen noodles for breakfast at work for 40 cents.
- We rode the Maglev train to and from the airport at 350km/h (217mph). It leaned in the turns. It was awesome
All in all, we were happy to get back Taipei. For the first time, it felt like coming “home”.
Yi Lan
Went to northeast Taiwan last weekend with a group of expats organized by The Center. Getting there required going through the 5th longest road tunnel in the world (18 miles). We stayed in a really interesting B&B and did some hiking around the local mountains. One of the trails had a rope bridge over a river and getting to the other one required riding on a small scale logging train. I saw a monkey in the forest.
The mountains are all dense subtropical forest, but the valleys around the mountains are totally desolate – so much water falls during the typhoon that it turns into a giant washout that just wipes everything out, leaving a dried up riverbed behind.
We also sampled some of the local food with a barbeque on Saturday night (pork, steaks, fishballs, shrimp and veggies). Best food of the weekend was the deep fried “onion pancake” with scallions, eggs and batter.
Thanksgiving
Today is Thanksgiving in America, but not so much in Taiwan. I worked. You can’t find turkey here, and even if you could, we have no way to cook a whole bird. Michelle suggested hacking it up and putting it in the toaster oven, but I don’t think this will have the desired effect. We could have gone to one of the international hotels and had an authentic dinner, but we had Chinese lessons tonight so really didn’t have time. Instead, Cynthia made miso soup from scratch (she made her own dashi broth from kombu seaweed and bonito fish flakes) along with some teriaki chicken and noodles. In the middle of our meal, I spotted a huge cockroach brazenly walking across the floor. We killed it, but the food just didn’t taste as good thereafter. I have no idea where it came from . . . I think we would have noticed it flying through the door, it must have come in on my bag or through the walls. We hope this is an isolated event but fear it will not be – other expats have warned us about this sort of thing.
Cynthia is going to make a “real” Thanksgiving dinner for me and some coworkers next Wednesday instead. We’ll have a crock pot chicken (no crispy skin I guess), my Grandma’s stuffing (which we should be able to faithfully replicate with local ingredients), mashers, green bean casserole, and maybe a squash based dessert. I’m looking forward to it.
This weekend we’re going hiking with a club from work on an organized trip. We think this will be a more hardcore hiking experience – hitting a couple peaks of more than 11,000 feet and rumors of some slopes requiring rope. It’s hard to really tell because the details are all in Chinese, and we’re staying in huts along the way, so we don’t need to bring most of our regular backpacking gear – it will be more like a couple of day hikes. I will of course log a trip report here. Hope you have/had a good Thanksgiving.
