davethegrinch.net

Dave Says:

We write a blog entry about food and drink for every country we visit. Why this is we don’t know, we are not gluttons, it just happened that way. Here comes the report for Taiwan: If you can kill it, you can fry it and if you can fry it, you can eat it. This may sound a little unfair and had I written this entry before we left the country it may have sounded a little different. Sure, the egg burrito things (gently fried) were nice and the dumplings (gently fried or abrasively steamed) were good too. However, nothing we ate in Taiwan appeared to be much better than cultural fast food. Their hotpot concept is quite good though - an all you can eat buffet of fresh veggies, meat and seafood that you cook yourself in a pot of broth at your table. However, much like poor Chang’s Mongolian Grill on Broadway, the excitement of creating your own custom soup wears thin once you realize that it all ends up tasting the same no matter how custom you make it.

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Sarah says:

To wake up in the morning in Amsterdam and go to bed that night in Taiwan is a crazy thing. Firstly, it takes 19 hours of travel to be able to accomplish such a feat of contrasting sleeping environments. But aside from flying time (small digression, we did so via Singapore Airlines and true to reputation, it was a very nice airline indeed and the food is really good…), it struck me as rather mind-boggling that Amsterdam and Taipei can co-exist simultaneously on the same planet. Over in Amsterdam people are living very Dutch lives and in Taipei people are living very Taiwanese lives and this is all happening at the same time, every single day and the Dutch aren’t thinking about the Taiwanese and the Taiwanese aren’t thinking about the Dutch. After all our traveling, David and I have started to view the world as being rather small but in this one moment, I felt the hugeness of the world and I truly did feel like I was on the other side of it.

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Dave says:
Green Island is awaiting a tsunami. It’s a small island lying 30km off the south east corner of Taiwan and right in the middle of the typhoon path. The tropical greenery, dormant volcano and rather shabby tourist town are getting ready for the big one. Unlike weather tsunamis however, the locals know exactly when this is one is going to hit: every Saturday from now until October.

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Dave Says:

What remains the most fascinating contradiction in Asia is what some travel writers refer to as “the old and the new” but what I prefer to call “superstition and capitalism”.

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