Dance like no one's watching

Booze Queen, AK and I didn’t join the day tour organised by Chan Brothers.  Instead, we visited Danshui and Jiufen on our own.  Danshui was quite a nice place to relax and pig out.  The smell of salt was so strong!  I don’t think the water would’ve been æ·¡ at all!

Smelly Toufu can be easily found in Taipei. 

I wonder which is smellier to the locals – smelly toufu or fried durian?  Haha.

The fried sotong (very common too) was sooooooooooooooooo yummy.  Salted & seasoned with chilli powder, it was sooo addictive.

We tried to eat at stalls that have been around for a long time…

I can’t remember the name of this anymore but it’s nice.  The pinkish soup tastes like fermented beancurd (“lam yu” in Cantonese) and the taupok skin absorbs all the flavour of the meat & seasoning.  I liked this.

The pau was also tasty.  The pork filling was really good though the skin of the pau could’ve been softer.

Found this store selling snacks and toys from my childhood days.

Cam-whoring at Danshui

Lady belting out Hokkien songs

Ximending!

Ah Zhong’s mee sua – the best mee sua I’ve had in my life

People in Taipei love to bring their dogs out.  I saw more dogs than kids!

I really love mala steamboat!

It was gooooooooooood!

Kiki’s Restaurant – serves Sichuan dishes.  Opened by Matilda Tao & some other celebrities.

Kangkong with fermented beancurd.  Reaaaaallly good.

Mala beef – this is a must try!  The medium spicy mala soup leaves a tingly feeling on the tongue.  The beef was tender & absorbed the flavour of the mala.  Soooooooooooooooooo good!

Sour & Spicy soup – didn’t really like it.  Felt that the flavours were a little muted.  The tiny strips of duck’s blood in it were… tasteless to me.  Haha.

“3 layer” pork w/ garlic + vinegar dip.  Pretty good.  The garlic adds a zest to the meat.

Obese ikan bilis (aka anchovies).  This would go great with beer!

My TPE clique and me at our company D&D.  Yay.  Finally a photo with my long long hair & curls.  Didn’t want to cut my hair b4 I took a photo.  Wahahahahaha.

Just got back from our company’s teambuilding trip to Taipei.  It was great!  The food and shopping at TPE is definitely cheaper than in SG or HK, though I really detest the motor bikes there!  Here’re some memories of the trip.

Saw this sign at the airport.  What a nice way of you’re drinking water recycled from pee & poop.

Braised beef noodles.

Lots of braised beef!

1-way MRT ticket

Shilin night market

Really good ice flakes!

Adding sauces to yummy fried stuff

The yummy fried stuff!

Flattened boneless fried chicken

Check out the huge drink!

Braised beancurd (tau kwa), kidney, fish cake, quail’s egg & I can’t remember what else.

Met a client for lunch today and visited a newly opened ramen place, Nantsuttei at Parco Marina Bay.  We arrived at 12:40pm and boy was the queue long.  We persevered and managed to get 2 seats at the counter at about 1pm.

The menu at Nantsuttei is rather limited.  I had the chashu ramen and added an egg.  The soup base was made from pork bone (tonkotsu) and was rich and full of flavour.  There’s this special shoyu sauce added to the top of the soup that gives it the blackish oily layer and it tastes really good (I view it as the equivalent of adding lard oil to soups). 

The slices of chashu were thinly cut and well braised.  Some parts of it were fatty – which melts in the mouth, though I didn’t really eat the fatty bits ‘cos I don’t like the mushy feeling it has.

The noodles were springy and cooked to perfection.  They had to be ‘cos there’s a timer that keeps count of how long the noodles have been boiling. 

The only thing I was disappointed with was the egg.  It was just a normal hard boiled egg – pretty tasteless. 

We also had a plate of pan fried gyoza which was not too bad, though I find the one at Baikohken tastier.

Another thing I found a little odd was that the restaurant does not serve Japanese tea.  In fact, the only beverages available are water and beer!

I think I still prefer Baikohken.  🙂

For more information on address, opening hours and the menu, please visit: http://www.nantsu.com/sg/.

an alarming twitpic error just happened to me. i posted a photo of my rabbit but the link that appeared on my twitter led to a pic that didn’t belong to me at all! wonder how did this happen! gosh!

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I’m seriously upset by this.  Thank goodness the strange photo that appeared under my account with the comment I posted for the pic I uploaded was that of some animal.  Imagine if it were a pornographic photo or something.  I could’ve been totally humiliated.  This will not do.  I’ve sent a tweet to @twitpic and I’m going to send an e-mail to them as well.  I’m shocked beyond words.

This reminds me of my imeem account – I’ve stopped using it but there was a time when I used to get logged into other users’ accounts 30% of the time.  Yeap.  You read right.  I would key in my userid & password and when the page reloaded, it was some other random user’s account!  I would have access too all the messages of the other user!  Scary right?

Anyone else encountered this problem?

For those who fancy accessing Wikipedia on your Symbian device, do check out http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/File:Wikipedia.wgz.

I just installed it on my X6 and it works pretty well – I did a search on Nico Rosberg. Haha.

Someone told me her English is good and that she used to always write reports to challenge credit committees and her legal counsel in her previous company.  I realised, however, that she is unable to differentiate simple vocabulary like “access” from “assess”, and today, she’s confused by how “you” versus “we” works in a letter. 

*Faints*.

Weather Forecast from Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau

Weather Forecast from weather.com

Don’t ask me why but all weather forecasts I saw online are about 2 degrees cooler than the forecast from Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau. Sigh… a little warm to wear boots it seems.  Why is it that the temperature last Tue / Wed / Thur was below 20deg, yesterday, today and tomorrow also below 20deg… but next week it’ll be in the low 20s?

The only thing all the websites seem to agree on is that it’s going to rain every day I’m in Taiwan.

SIGH.  I really really want to wear my boots!

This is what I call a parking idiot, as well as a cruel dog owner.

Not only can she/he not park straight, she/he always crosses over to the lot on the left, making it impossible for anyone to utilise the lot.  I wonder if our kind traffic wardens will issue a summon for this?  After all, if you’re only paying for 1 season parking coupon, how can you occupy more than 1 lot?

This person is not only a parking idiot, she/he is very cruel too.  Poor dog was left outside for hours (dog was already tied to the pillar in our sweltering weather when I walked past on the way out for lunch, and when I came back after 1.5 hours, the poor dog was still there with no water).  I intend to write a complaint to SPCA but I forgot to take note of the unit number of the flat.  Will do so the next time I pass by the flat, and I might just share the address with everyone.

My cellgroup regularly visits the restaurants and cofeeshops along Siglap Road for lunch after church.  Chewbacca, who’s our usual cause of gluttony, suggested trying this “famous bak chor mee place” he’d seen while driving along Changi Road.  Thought it was slightly further from church that we thought, the place was pretty ok.  Located at 316 Changi Road, this place seems popular with celebrities as we saw the photographs of many Mediacorp artistes adorn the wall.

I personally thought the menu was a little overpriced – I mean, $4.50 for a place for small noodles in a non-airconditioned, fly infested coffeeshop is just a little too much for me.

The food was above average I suppose (but you have to eat with one hand holding the chopsticks and the other hand moving non-stop to chase away the annoying flies).  I had the pork rib noodles.  The mee kia noodles was a little fatter than the usual mee kia but tasted good – springy and not overcooked.  The pork ribs were well-marinated and tasty, and what I appreciated best about it was that the flesh came easily off the bone (considering I had no difficulty eating with one chopstick wielding hand).  The chilli sauce was yummy and provided a good accent to the noodles.

I didn’t try the bak chor mee but the group did and they said it wasn’t too bad either.

We also ordered ngor hiang as our centre dish.  I quite liked this.  Though pathetically small, the ngor hiang wasn’t oily and I enjoyed the strong taste of the sweet water chestnut.

Not sure if I would frequent this place though.  I still think it’s overpriced even if the food wasn’t bad.