davethegrinch.net

Dave says:

I must say, this is quite the civilized country. I don’t mean that in a demeaning way, a suggestion that perhaps the Koreans are still bashing people over the head with large tree branches, I mean it in a ‘civilized compared to the Asia we’ve come to know and love so far’ way. There’s none of that frontier town feeling that Vietnam or Cambodia exhibit or any of the well oiled tourist veneer that blights Thailand or the underlying oppression that is obvious in Malaysia. No, South Korea is a wealthy, balanced, um - dare I say ‘nice’ place to be. It’s almost that perfect balance between Asia and the West. A crossroads of the known and the unknown, and to boot, we appear to be the only westerners here.

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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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Sarah says:

Much to my delight, the Dutch love apple pie perhaps even more than the Americans do. Of course, they would never bake an apple pie from scratch at home. Heavens no, baking isn’t for doing at home, it’s for buying in a store. Check out the length our friend Beth had to go through to locate staple baking supplies in this city.

Fortunately, apple pie is on every cafe menu in the city so naturally it was our responsibilty to devote our seven months here to tasting every variety, rating them against each other and then proclaiming a ‘Best Apple Pie in Amsterdam’ winner. It would be rude not to. We weren’t so outrageous as to literally try every piece of pie in the city but we did try six, so roughly one per month considering time spent out of Amsterdam for the holidays and weekend trips.

Here are our results out of five bicycle bell dings: Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Says: 

Our apartment is situated on a piece of tourist trivia. It’s not that tourists flock to it but should they find themselves at our canal they can be heard letting out sighs of “ah” and “oh yeah” and muttering numbers under their breath. Thirty meters to the left of our front door is unofficially named the Seven Bridges, it being the only place in Amsterdam where seven bridges bridge several canals and all the spans can be seen at once. So, in homage to the tourists and the bridges, my final entry from this most agreeable city will be seven things beginning with “B” that have made our life here quite sublime.

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