My Asinine Thoughts

I went out with Jeff and Gina for dinner in Taipei yesterday to unwind after a week of hard work (just Gina actually). Jeff had a discount coupon for this poshy Thai cuisine restaurant located on the 6th floor of the Eslite building in Xinyi, so we succumbed to the promise of glorious food. It was an eat-all-you-can place so Jeff and I made sure we didn’t eat much for breakfast and lunch. In fact we only had french toast for brunch. Jeff did the cooking, and I did the washing up (my usual role in these rare forays into the kitchen). Jeff made a pretty decent french toast, I must admit. I have been encouraging his interest in the culinary arts for purely selfish reasons of course.

When we got to the restaurant, we were told that the coupon Jeff had was no good during weekends so they offered us a 10% discount instead, a couple of beats to make a decision…
Syempre go pa rin! We’ve been thinking about Thai food since the other day and you know how it is when you’re so looking forward to something that you can’t seem to see past it. There was no seeing past my desire to eat pad thai. No way no how.

After spending more than 2 hours in the restaurant, we stumbled out and headed straight to the bookstore where I RESISTED TEMPTATION! I didn’t buy the latest Empire magazine (aray! aray!) because it costs NT$410 or around $13 US. The price didn’t go up, it’s my money that has gone down is all. I also wanted to buy the latest Details magazine with Christian “swoon” Bale on the cover, but Gina was with me and she stopped me and put some sense into my head. Mental note: never bring Gina whenever I go magazine shopping (haha! joke! joke!)

I also wanted to visit my favorite bookstore located in the 101 mall and I was curious to see what it looked like now that it’s smaller in size (according to Jeff). I went, I saw, and I was so disappointed! It’s a shadow of its former self, my poor poor favorite bookstore of the past. It has been chopped to almost half its size I think! People should read more and buy more books, really!

God I missed Taiwan! That was my first thought as soon as my plane landed. I bought a bus ticket to Hsinchuang, got settled into my seat and looked out of my window for the whole trip. It has been almost 10 months since I left the country and I kept noticing little changes here and there as I was nearing home. One of the things that hasn’t changed though was the location of the restaurant that sells my favorite guo tie (potstickers). When I got to the apartment, I left my bags in my room and headed out for a late lunch. Yum! Yum! Yum! It’s definitely as good as I remember it to be. Later, I washed it all down with ComeBuy’s milk tea with pearls.

I’m back in Taiwan and will be staying here for a few weeks. When I left last year, I decided to pursue other things, and that decision still holds. But that doesn’t mean I can’t come back and reminisce… and eat. So many things in my life are uncertain right now and I’m not really sure what I’ll be doing in the next few months. Staying here for a while would do me some good and I terribly miss my former students… and Taiwanese food. I always go back to food, right?

I keep hoping and praying that my future plans will work out soon since it’s embarrassing to be so lacking in direction now that I’m about to hit 30. I’ve spent the past 29 years doing whatever I pleased (for the most part) and I think it’s high time for me to start making long-term plans. I’ve often buckled against convention and routine and while I feel it has made my life more interesting, it has made it quite difficult at times as well. I suppose I have to learn that change is not always advisable and that I have to accept and be content with the monotony of life.

I Miss the malls!

In all the years I spent in Taiwan, I probably only went to a couple of temples. You see one temple you’ve seen them all. That thought doesn’t apply to shopping malls though. I’ve come to realize and embrace the fact that I’m seriously deprived in terms of culture. If you ask me where I want to go: a cultural landmark or a mall, I’d choose the latter any day of the week. I love malls! Even during those times when all I could afford to buy was a cup of coffee.

It was a good thing that my Taiwan friends were just as much of a mallrat as I was so there wasn’t really any conflict whenever the weekend came up. Some of our perennial favorites are:

Breeze Center

Ah Breeze, shopping here is almost an impossibility since the shops are way out of my price range but it’s fun to look and the interior of the mall is really nice. Very clean, spacious and elegant. It’s a favorite because Jeff and I love going here to watch movies. It also focuses on Japanese products and I love Japanese products! There’s the supermarket at the basement that offers a wide range of Japanese food as well as imported stuff from the U.S. You can also find many cute stuff at Hands Tailung like the Japanese electric eraser and I also love buying magazines at Kinokuniya bookstore. I used to get my monthly Empire magazine here, sigh, those were the days.

Taipei 101 Mall

Aha! The 101 mall houses Page One, the largest English bookstore in Taiwan; my favorite place in the whole country! I also come here for the supermarket. Jason’s sells a wide variety of products and the bakeshop right at the entrance sells a lot of winner breads. My favorite is the cheese tart yum yum yum. Their squid ink bread is also a bestseller, just ask Joyce ;p

Global Mall

Global Mall is one of the easiest malls to get to from Hsinchuang since I only have to take the 802 bus to Xinpu and wait for the free shuttle bus that would take me to the mall. Global’s got a pretty big supermarket downstairs (Jusco), it’s fairly decent even if there aren’t a lot of imported products to be found. The clothes in the department store is the draw for me. The brands aren’t well-known but the clothes being sold are stylish yet affordable.

Living Mall (or Core Pacific City)

Living Mall is an architectural dream. The huge sphere outside (and inside) the mall sets it apart from the other malls in town because it looks so unique! The only regrettable thing I can say about the mall is that I’d have to take the 257 bus from Hsinchuang to get there, and I don’t want to die yet.

I took lots of pictures one day when Jeff, Joyce, Jernie and I went shopping. I was taking the pictures so wala ako sa pics!

RT Mart

The RT Mart in Neihu is a hypermarket that has several outlet stores inside. Favorites are the Nike outlet store and the Esprit outlet store. We try never to leave home without buying something.

Eslite Bookstore (in Xinyi and Dunhwa)

The Eslite bookstore doesn’t just sell books, there are also other shops that can be found in the Xinyi branch. While I have problems with the way the bookstore arranges its books, the wide range of magazines that they sell is impressive. Plus being open 24-hours a day (in the Dunhwa branch) also helps I suppose when one is hankering to buy a book at 3am in the morning.

Sogo

I have a love-hate relationship with Sogo. The space is cramped, there are too many shoppers elbowing each other and the products being sold look so deceptive. A pair of shoes arranged in unremarkable rows makes one think of those being sold in an SM Department store… until you see the price. Since there isn’t a lot of space, presentation isn’t really a priority and based on the number of women that can be found in the shoe area, it doesn’t matter. The new Sogo though is something else. It’s a lot more spacious and better organized than the other one.

Sometimes you see see artistas in Sogo. That’s Barbie shilling SKII products.

Miramar

I always make the mistake of calling this mall Marimar, I wonder why. This mall is the first one in Taiwan I think that’s got a huge ferris wheel attached to it. When I went to Nagoya, I saw one mall (Sunshine Sakae) that also had a ferris wheel attached to its side, only that one was much smaller. Figures Taiwan would follow… and try to top it!

Mommy and Marimar… see?

I Miss the breakfast food:

Fan Twan. There’s rice, pork floss, fried egg, buchi, and something else but the result is yummy!

Hwo Tway Tan Ping (egg pancake with ham)

Piping hot tow tsiyang (soy)

I Miss the bread:

This is my favorite. There’s chocolate and cream filling and the bread is crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.

I Miss the street food:

Fried Noodles

Jeff & Joyce’s favorite sa night market: Onion Pancake

Xiao Long Pao! My favorite mini siopaos right at the entrance of the night market

Street food near Jeff’s place. Most of the dishes there are winners!

I seem to be saying this a lot lately. So what do I miss about that little island? The privacy? The solitude? The safety and security? The work? The kids? The transportation system? The dumplings? The milk tea? The bread? The malls? The cute pets? Nova? NET? The night markets? The bien tangs (boxed meals)? The fan twan (rice in a roll)? Jay Chou? My answer? All of the above and then some!

I Miss the bad spelling.

Me celebrating my 3rd and last year.

Jeff still thinks we’ll go back, I think I might if I run out of money and options (soon haha!)

*Actually, there was no need to celebrate the years we’ve spent in Taiwan but we really wanted to eat the cake from Costco, so we justified it na lang.

As early as October last year, we’ve been seeing signs of rodent activity in our apartment. They were small things at first like recyclable trash being dragged under the washing machine, but it didn’t happen often so we weren’t too fussed about it. Then it was around Christmas when Joyce started cooking for the holiday celebration that the mouse got bolder and bolder. When I got back in January, it started attacking our food in the dining room. I had a whole pack of instant noodles that I was thinking of sending home devoured by the phantom mouse. Then it ate Joyce’s wetabix and milo powder then gnawed its way into my mahu which was in a hard plastic container. This was when we started calling it Mighty Mouse.

Mighty Mouse was probably getting bigger and bigger by this time because it kept eating more and more of our food. One day, it dived into my big can of mashed potatoes. I say dive because it ate the hard plastic cover, leaving a huge hole in the middle of the cover where it probably got its whole body in, enjoying my barely eaten Idahoan instant mashed potatoes. We bought rat poison and sticky fly-wood to catch the damned thing but it was no use! It was too smart for us. We placed rat poison and sausage in the middle of the fly-wood and this was what happened the next day:

The sausage was gone, leaving only its paw prints and the rat poison behind. We realized we weren’t dealing with a Mighty Mouse anymore, we were dealing with a cunning, pestilential rat! Therefore, I renamed it Ratatat.

Then Joyce noticed that Pong’s turtle food container was missing (Pong was in our living room!) I thought she probably mislaid it because it was a pretty big container, but we never found it. This would also explain why Pong has an unnatural growth on his neck. The rat probably tried to attack and Pong got away just in time. We were really scared by this time because it was already venturing into our living room. What really sealed the deal was when Joyce replaced Pong’s food container with a bigger one (slightly smaller than a Coke can) and it disappeared again!

After many many months of torture, we’ve still yet to see what the rat looked like. We were really wondering how it has remained silent and invisible since it started treating our kitchen then our living room into a restaurant. Then one night while we were already sleeping I heard my chili powder fall on the dining table. Glass on glass moron!!! I woke up and immediately went to Joyce’s room. We slowly went to the kitchen, got the broom and started looking around. There was really no place to hide other than the refrigerator so I started hitting it…then it came out! It was big! Joyce screamed her head off, I started whacking and Ratatat started jumping all over the place since we blocked off the way to the living room.

Realizing it was trapped, it jumped on the (closed) kitchen door and started climbing, holding on to god knows what and when it reached the top, it fell to the ground since it was so fat and heavy. Then it jumped on the chair, then on the dining table, then on the kitchen divider then went through to the other side. We didn’t sleep that night until we’ve sealed off the divider between the kitchen and the dining room. Finally, we saw what we were up against and we knew we were going to lose if we didn’t think of something else. The next day, we bought a rat cage.

After a couple of days, we went home one night and found this:

Joyce didn’t even want to look at it, and who could blame her? It looked disgusting! But I wanted to scare the rat out of it senses and gloat but when I approached it, I thought it would cower ala Gus in Cinderella, but no! It started jumping towards me even if it was in a cage, ready to attack! Damn blasted rat! Ako yung natakot! I didn’t want to touch the rat cage anymore, and Joyce didn’t want to see the rat cage and we couldn’t just leave Ratatat there to die and stink up the place so we called Jeff - who refused to come! Takot din sa daga!

It was a good thing that Gina’s assistant in Pinas was staying with them in Taiwan this June and she wasn’t scared of rats. They took a cab to our apartment, put the rat cage in a plastic bag and got rid of it somewhere in Hsinchuang Park. Whew! Finally it was over. If Pong could only speak, I’m sure he is also relieved that the menace is gone.

Rose is here in Taipei for work fun work and fun so we spent some time together a few days ago catching up and shopping. We ended up in New York New York and as we were about to leave I saw a new store in the corner of the mall, right next to the Statue of Liberty. COLD STONE CREAMERY !!!

The line was long, the ice cream was expensive but what the hell!

Next time, I’ll try customizing my very own ice cream. Yum yum yum!