Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 8)

For our final day in Singapore we'd scheduled some heavy duty eating at one restaurant priced high for the food and another priced high for the view. In between we visited the zoo, that being the Singapore Zoo and zoo number six in the last three years.

The first thing we did was dart over to Chinatown to get any souvenirs we wanted, as we wouldn't be devoting any attention to that later in the day. I got two rhino figurines (I collect them when traveling, it's a family thing) and bargained hard enough to basically get the less expensive one as a freebie for buying the more expensive one (20% off).

Lunch was the second order of business for this day, and our dining destination was FiftyThree, a molecular gastronomy restaurant founded by a chef who trained at El Bulli*. It pretty consistently shows up in reviews as a place you should be sure to eat in Singapore so we really wanted to try it but not to pay their dinner prices, which probably would have set us back $500US with wine. Originally our reservation was for a day prior, but they'd apparently accidentally overbooked and contacted us with great contrition to see if another day might work for us. It really didn't matter much to our schedule and so we moved our reservation up.
The first thing we noticed was that this was the kind of place that would be easy to overbook, since it has about six tables. I'll try to keep the following culinary discussion at a reasonable level. We didn't feel like being the rubes taking pictures, so I've posted links to someone's photos on Flikr.

Ultra-thin potato chips dusted with yogurt powder: I was most impressed by how thin they'd been able to slice the potato. Not bad, liked the sour tang.

Chips

Two kinds of very fresh buckwheat rolls : one normal looking one and one dark earthy brown colored one that they had added ground charcoal to. Very interesting and surprising flavor, something I would like to experiment with. The butter they told us was imported from England but the fun part was that it had roasted barley in it which added crunch and more earthy flavor. Another thing I would never have thought of that I'd be willing to try to duplicate. The bread course was delightful for being so damn unusual but also really good.

Bread in a bag

Butter with roast barley

After that we each picked a three-course lunch menu, but we selected from the possible ways to create a lunch menu such that we had no overlap between orders, so we both ate half of six dishes. Let's see if I can remember all of them.

Before I really get going, I'm going to say that if there were distinguishing features that tied everything together, they would be subtlety and complexity. Every dish had about six things going on, none of which dominated. Also, the ingredients used were truly unimpeachable.

Seared scallops and chicken bits with carrot reduction sauce and greens salad: Perfect scallops. I stress complexity again, because this had several flavors in it that I couldn't identify except that I liked them.

Scallop and Chicken App

Fresh peas and beans salad with coconut cream foam: The peas and beans were good enough to eat plain by the bucketful, and their bitterness and strong vegetable flavors were softened by the sweet coconut cream.

Broad Bean Salad

Seared monkfish on lentils: This was really good too. The fish was wonderful and fatty and flavorful enough to stand up to the lentils. Can't find a picture - was a substitute dish due to scarcity of the fish they usually use.

Lamb with thin-sliced root vegetables: Possibly the best lamb I have ever had. Sublimely flavorful and perfectly tender. The thin-sliced roots had soaked up the excess fat and were wonderfully lamb-flavored too.

Really Good Lamb

Molecular gastronomy strawberries, ice cream, pistachio emulsion, chocolate, etc: This was probably the weakest dish of the lot but not bad. Basically all the stuff in the title was kind of laid across the plate. The waiter said it was new, asked what I thought about it, and may have gotten a bit more of a reply than he expected as I verbally disassembled it and suggested alternative configurations with more visual interest and elegance for the same ingredients. Still it was interesting and tasty once I manually mushed everything together myself. I don't see pictures of it on Flikr.

Dark chocolate cake: Ana ate most of this one; it was too dark and rich for me. I think she was happy not to have to share too much.

Cake

Apple gummy: You were supposed to let it dissolve on your tongue and savor the apple flavor. It was good but nothing terribly exciting.

Gummy Thing

Another pleasant surprise came with the check. They gave us one of our two lunches free for the bad booking and asking us to change our schedule. That brought the cost of business right down to not a heck of a lot more than we paid for pizza for two the day before. Frankly, that was an excessive gesture - giving us some of the upgrades to dishes that we'd ordered for free (some courses in the sets had if-you-want-this-one-it's-extra going on) would have been quite sufficient but we didn't protest too much because hey, free money. If we're ever back in Singapore we'll happily make it up to them.

Lunch was filling but not so big as to leave us feeling low in the water, which was good because after leaving it was time to catch a bus to the zoo and wander around in blazing sunlight. Like the Night Zoo, the really remarkable aspect of the Singapore Zoo is the design of the enclosures. They all look very natural and well integrated into the jungle. Also as before, they have species you don't see so much in the US.

Note the complete lack of a fence that matters

Nifty sign

The orangutans were hanging out on vines above the road

This one had a fence, thankfully

We got a good couple of hours in, but about the time we were beginning to think about catching a bus back to the city the sky opened up and it rained like crazy. I'd packed my small portable umbrella but Ana's was still in Kanazawa so we did the best we could with mine but both got quite wet. We scurried from roofed area to roofed area working our way back across the entire zoo as we had been at the furthest point from the main gate when it started raining. By the time we were back in the city the rain had passed, and we changed into slightly more upscale clothing (carried in the backpack all day) in remarkably clean subway bathrooms prior to heading to our time-sensitive dinner reservation.

The reason the reservation was time-sensitive was that we'd signed up for dinner on the Singapore Flyer, which is basically an extraordinarily large (actually the largest in the world) Ferris Wheel with gondolas big enough to park a minivan in and still have room to open the doors. All day long they sell tickets to go up and see Singapore laid out before you at about $20US per person per revolution, and each revolution lasts half an hour. In the evening you can book a table in one specific gondola that they outfit as a flying restaurant, which feeds you while you orbit twice above the city. It's best to be on time for it because if you're not ready when the restaurant is in position to take on diners, you've pretty much missed your one 45-second window to get on board. Yeah, it's a touristy thing to do, and we figured it to not have the best food, but then again we were in fact tourists and it sounded fun in a cheesy way so we signed up.

The Flyer isn't easy to get to from the subway (again, if we were back in 2011 there would be a subway station right beneath it - they are for sure putting the new ones in helpful places) and we sweated a little bit as we had to tack back and forth to get to it, but arrived and boarded with at least five or seven minutes to spare. They made a big show of having a (fairly luxurious) VIP lounge for the diners to wait in while the riff-raff who were just riding the Flyer waited in lines outside.

Boarding was a fun experience, as the car never actually stops moving and it is a looong way down beneath it, albeit with nets to mitigate that fatal falling sensation. While we boarded from one side wait staff stampeded through the door on the opposite side of the gondola, bringing the food and beverages on board and laying out the various tables.

Especially after discussing the FiftyThree meal in this post I don't want to go through what they served, but it could at best be called competent, and not all of it would score that high. I'd settle around the level of "edible", the kind of thing you'd get served at a wedding at a low-end country club on the chef's day off**, except they started with pretty expensive ingredients before doing bad things to them. Also, we're 99% sure they accidentally replaced the Champagne our menu called for with a different white called for by another menu, but we didn't complain because it was actually a pretty interesting and went well with the asparagus salad. It just was certainly not normal Champagne and we wish we knew what it actually was.

That's not Champagne

Another interesting quirk was the music being played in the background. They had a little monitor in the corner of the gondola showing the names of the songs, and it was clear to us that most if not all of the music being played had been illegally downloaded by how the names of the songs were written. Also, the music that had been stolen was very much the 80's and hilariously so. Since when is "Beat It" the background music for an elegant dinner? Other selections included "Staying Alive" (actually the 70's), "Like a Prayer", and "Billie Jean". Also, the background music definitely started playing the same songs again after about 40 minutes.
This silliness wouldn't have been fun if it hadn't been to the pure absurdity of the whole thing and the views, which were really pretty special.

Downtown Singapore from our dinner table

They gave us a survey at the end asking if our waiter had been any good. I'm not sure I usually see that kind of thing at any place higher-end than maybe Chili's? Dessert in the VIP lounge was passable. Overall, we were happier than you might expect to have paid them the entirely too much for this experience, but it's the kind of thing we'll only ever need to do once.

It still wasn't that late in the evening and we were in the mood to keep the party alive, so we walked up to Raffles, which is unequivocally the most famous hotel and bar in Singapore. It's been there since 1887 in various forms and they invented the Singapore Sling (signature beverage of Singapore) there. The prices on the board outside almost warded us off, but this being our last night before going back to Japan we said screw it and went in. The drinks were outrageously priced but at least for that you got some pleasing eccentricity in the layout and style of the bar, and the drinks themselves were pretty good. Ana got the original Singapore Sling and our investigations determined that it was undeniably superior to the ones served by Singapore Airlines, to no one's surprise. I had a gin and tonic to keep up the Britian-in-the-tropics theme and it was pretty generic for costing $25US, though it came as separate gin and tonic so the mixture could be adjusted to customer's taste which was an upscale touch. We had a lot of fun eating peanuts and throwing the shells on the floor like you're supposed to. Ana has a video showing the bar and the interesting fans built into it up on Flikr, or will soon.

Authentic Singapore Sling, in Singapore

Peanut shells on the floor, where they belong

And with our departure from Raffles, the international leg of this trip was pretty much over. Next I'll be filling you in on our prior-to-the-crack-of-dawn flight and either part or all of our time in Tokyo depending on how much mileage I'm getting out of it.

*Five-time #1 restaurant in the world, winning more times than any other restaurant. It's in Spain and has two million attempted reservations for 8,000 seats each year.

**There may be a slight case of hyperbole here. The food wasn't bad, it just wasn't notably good or interesting. We regularly do better in our own kitchen.

Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 7)

Now that we were back in Singapore, we got around to seeing some of the specific attractions of interest to us there. First up was the Singapore Orchid Gardens. These gardens are surrounded by the much larger Singapore Botanical Gardens, which are free to access, but the orchid part of it charges a small entry fee. Inside you find some pretty amazing things. We toured for several hours, and as with Taroko, the pictures will do better than words could, and still don't quite capture how it was.

Of course, more pictures are on Flickr. After that we needed some feeding, and wandered back down into the Orchard Road area looking at restaurants. We eventually settled on a branch of California Pizza Kitchen, which I feel is kind of funny because I'm pretty sure I've never eaten at one in the US. Pizza in Japan is outrageously expensive (think $30 for a medium pizza) so we welcomed the more conventional toppings and better price of pizza in Singapore. I had a Mediterranean pizza crammed with toppings that cannot be had in Japan like feta and olives and it provided substantial satisfaction. Ana had pepperoni and appeared to enjoy it.

After that it was late enough that it wasn't worth making the trip out to the zoo as we'd been considering because it closes early, so we penciled that into an empty spot in our schedule for the next day and moved up something else we'd been planning on doing, which was testing out one of the many custom tailors advertised in all over the city and exhaustively in the tourist maps. Ana had a greater need for properly fitted shirts since I do pretty well off the rack so she was the test subject. It turned out that probably most of the tailors in the city all set up shop in the exact same mall, which has three floors that each have about as many tailors as they have all other stores combined. We walked around a couple of times checking out different stores, but mostly they looked pretty similar and tended to have really aggressive hawkers outside the door which was a little off-putting. We eventually opted for the shop with the most polite hawker and had a discussion with the proprietor about fabrics and styles and the fact that no, we do not need six of this particular shirt, thank you very much. Ana got a good collared button-down work shirt made up for her in a sort of plum purple light cotton fabric. We paid a little more than we'd been hoping to spend but half of the point was the experience and that we got. I'm sure it cost less than the same service would at home. They delivered it to the hotel less than 24 hours after we placed our order.

Now that we'd killed another hour or so and it was evening, the zoo was closed but their Night Safari, which is effectively a different zoo right next to the zoo, was opening. We deciphered the Singaporean bus system and took the bus out into the countryside to visit the Night Zoo. For those of you keeping track at home, this is at least the fifth zoo we've been to in the last two years. I'm happy to report that despite my being a little jaded as far as zoos go at this point, the Night Safari at the Singapore Zoo is pretty neat.

Animals in the Night Zoo, right before it got too dark to take (good) pictures

The main idea of the Night Safari is that a lot of animals that one might ordinarily see in the zoo pretty much sleep all day and then become active at night. Thus, the best time to view these animals would be at night, if one wanted to see something besides them snoring the day away. The whole zoo is only used at night, and features both walking trails between enclosures and a tram that goes along some routes not accessible on foot. We figured the tram for the coolest part and jumped on right after arriving for their first tram ride of the evening. The Night Safari is quite dimly lit over most of it, with just enough light to see the animals by provided in most areas. The tram operator did a pretty good job of telling the audience where to look to see the animals and giving out more details about them, but was somewhat afflicted with the surplus drama that most tram-voice-over providers have. Several people on the tram either disregarded the warnings against flash photography or failed to disable their camera flashes to the extent that they actually stopped the tram and came down the rows giving people a hard time about it as well they should. I don't like camera flashes and my eyes are presumably much less sensitive than those of nocturnal animals. Seriously, people, how many warnings can you legitimately not see and hear?

All that aside, the Night Zoo (and the Singapore Zoo, which we visit the day after this) had really well designed enclosures such that in many cases it looks like there is no boundary or barrier between you and the animals. In some cases, there truly isn't because they just train the animals not to leave a specified area and then trust the training to keep them in. The lions and tigers and whatnot have a moat and so forth, of course, but the zoo planners did a really good job; the whole place felt more natural, open, and flowing than any zoo I've ever been in. In addition to that, their selection of animals featured a lot of creatures that we've previously not seen in other zoos, creating a sense of newness that was somewhat lacking in the last two or three zoos we've visited.

The walking trails turned out to be even better than the tram. They were narrow, dimly lit, and twisted through the jungle between enclosures, with thick trees and bushes on both sides and overhead. It really added to the atmosphere to walk amidst greenery instead of along wide open concrete or brick, and there were enough twists and turns circling around that it felt more like exploring than going in the circular promenade that it actually was. We'd be walking through actual jungle (behind the zoo is protected rainforest) and then all of a sudden there would be some kind of crazy-looking wild pigs almost close enough to touch, or a giraffe all of fifteen feet away. Sometimes the walking trails actually went through the enclosures, such as the one with the flying squirrels (they dive-bombed the crowd in front of us before vanishing into the bushes) or the fruit bats. The fruit bats were enormous and would whoosh by, nearly invisible in the dark, and then we turned to look where they went they were literally within arm's length chowing down on a papaya or something. That's not something you see every day.

In time we'd peered at all the animals to our satisfaction and caught the bus back to the city to find some food. Reasoning that the riverside district would probably be a bit more active now than in the afternoon when we'd wandered by the first time, and that it was close to the hotel, we decided to go find a restaurant in there. Diving into the middle of it, we were confronted by so many choices that we had a lot of trouble picking one place out of the crowd*. Many of the venues were actually more like nightclubs and we didn't want that, and some places were too fancy for how we were dressed and feeling. We ended up hitting a Scottish pub basically out of not making a decision earlier and me being interested in taking a look at their whiskey list, which proved to be the second best I've yet seen. Ana had something called a Bloody Eyeball, which had a convincing simulacrum of same in the drink, and we had fried chicken in lieu of organ meats. I think that, as long as I live, it is not terribly likely that I will visit another Scottish pub with the walls all painted magenta. That's probably unique.

And that about wraps up this fine day in Singapore. The next blog post will cover eating at one world-class restaurant and one entirely pedestrian tourist trap, along with a visit to Singapore's other zoo.

*The place with the hospital theme, where all the chairs were exam chairs, the tables looked like surgical tables, the lights looked like surgical lights, the drinks came in test tubes or syringes (shots, hah!), etc, did not tempt us.

Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 6)

After the previous day's adventures and late night, we slept in and then went directly to the airport for our flight back to Singapore. We had an uneventful bus ride back to the airport where we grabbed lunch and spent most of what we had left for Taiwanese currency.

View of the city from the bus to the airport

Ana bought a huge bowl of rice noodles which we shared (they had a lot more texture and chew than rice noodles I've had before, which was pleasant) and a mango smoothie that was not as good as the last one and for some reason gave me enormous brain freezes.

Better lunch than I expected in the airport

On the flight I amused myself by holding a contest between movies I'd never seen but knew to be bad. I was hoping for the amusing kind of bad. The worst movie would win. I selected Broken Arrow (cheesy 90's action movie with John Travolta) and 2012 (recent disaster schlock) and unfortunately they both turned out to be worse than so-bad-it's-good and into please-make-it-stop territory. I'm going to give Broken Arrow the win but cite 2012 with some kind of lifetime achievement award for largest plot holes*, bad science**, and having several nearly identical escape scenes. In any case, I recommend to any and all to avoid these movies unless possibly you're looking for something to make a drinking game out of.

Anyway, aside from the trauma I inflicted on myself with these movies the rest of the flight and airport experience was pretty uneventful, except that we noticed that Changi Airport in Singapore has a free butterfly garden available to all travelers to relieve stress and so forth. We walked by but didn't go in, and I account that a fairly unusual airport feature, hence the mention.

For our second stay in Singapore we switched from the low-cost hotel we'd used the first time to a room in a pretentious arty hotel that we'd gotten about 50% off on, which still made it the most expensive hotel we stayed in by a significant margin. The hotel was down in the upscale riverside district, which we learned is not particularly close to any major subway stops yet constructed (if we could wait until 2011 or so we'd have been all set) so we did a lot of walking to get ourselves and our luggage from the subway station to the hotel. By the time we actually got there it was getting pretty late at night so we ordered dinner from the expensive-but-not outrageous room service menu, which took a while to arrive but hit the spot.

Artsypants hotel we stayed in

In the morning we got some pictures of the room we were in. This particular hotel, Hotel Gallery, has a lot of standard rooms and then a couple dozen themed and named rooms. We weren't in the upper tier of what they'd be happy to ask you to pay for, but our room did have a name, that being Glasshaus. (the German spelling costs extra) As you can see from the pictures, there was no shortage of glass present. We were in the corner room outlined by yellow.

The next entry will include the Singapore Orchid Gardens and the Singapore Zoo's Night Safari.

And here's a notice that you'll probably only ever see in Singapore, for the road

*Watertight doors dramatically seal characters to their doom, but they're only separated by mesh from a large chamber that spans either side of the watertight doors that are thereby demonstrated to be totally pointless, except the big room doesn't flood because, why, exactly?)

**Fine, there's massive tectonic activity, whatever. That doesn't mean there can even be a tsunami big enough to go all the way across India and then still be high enough to flood the Himalayas. It would have to have been hundreds of miles tall at least and it was clearly shown to be less than half a mile tall at the shoreline based on the skyscrapers! How does a 2,500 foot wave swamp 29,000 foot mountains, let alone cover the intervening distance? Urg!

Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 5)

The first of our two full days in Taiwan we saw a really ugly piece of modern engineering and some exquisite artifacts of ancient China. The second day we set out in search of natural wonder, and came up with beauty to rival anything in the Emperor's vaults.

When planning this trip we'd initially come up a bit short in looking for something compelling to do on the second full day. Taipei gets a fair few foreigners but isn't a major tourist destination, unless shopping is your thing. There were certainly things to do, but with only two days we wanted something a little more spectacular and unusual. We looked at a lot of "What to do in Taiwan" websites and noticed that one destination outside in the country was drawing a lot of press. A few searches to find pictures of it later, we knew where we wanted to go for Taiwan day 2: Taroko Gorge, with the tourist name of "The Grand Canyon of Taiwan".

We had an 8:30 train leaving Taipei to take us halfway across the island to the small city of Hualien, the closest city to the gorge. The Taipei main train station was a bit of a maze but we didn't have any serious trouble finding the right track and boarding. We'd paid extra for a fast train, which does in two hours which a regular train takes four to do. If Taiwan was a clock, Taipei would be at 12 and Hualien at 3. The interior of the island features a lot of mountains and rough terrain, so the tracks follow the coast around the outside of the island.

Picture from the train to Hualien.

Seats on the left side of the train, facing out towards the ocean, are supposed to be the most desirable as far as sightseeing during the train ride, according to what we'd read on the internet. We had seats on the right side of the train. However, we compared the view out both sets of windows (looking past the people in the other row) and I don't think they were substantially different except for the parts where there was a cliff right next to the train on our side when the other side could still see something. There were definitely some things to see, though not hardly a patch on what was to come. Some pretty dramatic terrain sprinkled with towns with a different look than what we've seen before - should be noted that Taiwan is a lot further south than Japan and borders on the tropical so the greenery is more like jungle. Ana thought that some of the industrial equipment we saw in fog looked like stuff out of Myst or possibly Lost, but I didn't get that vibe.

There was some pretty dramatic terrain though.

When we arrived in Hualien, we were low on New Taiwan Dollars (about 3 cents each) and needed to find a money changer to turn our 10,000 Yen bills (about $110 each) into something a little more useable. A major problem in our plan emerged when we were informed that the money changer was closed on Sundays, which this was. I guess tourists don't come to town on Sunday? I don't get it. Anyway, we were sort of mulling our options when an enterprising female taxi driver (trade name of Tiffany) approached us to hawk her transportation services, which she was happy to provide in exchange for yen. We'd been planning to check around taxis and different tour buses to see what gave us a good vibe and a good price as far as getting from the station to the gorge, and frankly Tiffany looked a lot less sketchy than most of the guys hanging around their taxis, so we hired her for the day for a flat fee of about $60US. We could have found cheaper options but as the day went on we became increasingly happy with the deal we struck.

Since we hadn't been certain how exactly we were getting to the gorge from the station and our arrival time back at the station we'd only purchased one-way tickets to Haulien from Taipei. Now that we had a taxi all to ourselves and a guide who could tell us realistically how long things take, we wanted to get train tickets back. It turned out that the station we got off at didn't sell tickets for the express trains, so Tiffany drove us over to the next station, about fifteen minutes away, pointing out landmarks along the way like "That's the cement factory." At the other station we got express tickets back on a train that was about an hour later than the one we wanted but nothing too problematic. I'd been concerned that only slow trains or possibly even no trains would be available and we'd be in for an adventure as far as getting back to Taipei and making our flight, so an hour's delay was entirely acceptable.

Hualien main street, or one of them

Tickets in hand (we paid with a credit card) Tiffany mentioned that she knew a store that might change money for us, and since we were going to have to change money at least once more before leaving anyway we were for it. It turned out to be a sort of stone carvings and jewelry store, certainly targeting the tourist trade. I don't usually go in for such things but they had some pretty cool stuff in there - if we weren't already spending a lot of money on this trip I would have been tempted by some pretty expensive sculptures and carvings. First we changed money, and got a rate I later looked up and determined to be extremely fair, bordering on them giving us money in the process.

The store was staffed by a family, and the longer we stayed the more members of the family came out of the woodwork to show us different things and offer progressively better deals. The younger women in the family would offer a discount or two and then start looking at the matriarch, who would step in as final arbiter of just how much of a bargain they would offer these wealthy young Americans who had wandered into their nest. Some of what they were selling was high-end jade, which was well out of our price range, but Ana got an interesting amber-colored transparent fossil pendant and I bought a present for my mother.

Pendant - it is actually transparent to light but I couldn't get that in the picture

Unplanned souvenir shopping transactions completed, we proceeded to the main event. Tiffany suggested we stop and get any food or beverages we might need for the day as prices around the gorge tend to be high, but we had already stocked up in Taipei and had her drive us there without further ado.

Taroko Gorge is really more a series of jagged gorges, with various roads, trails, scenic overlooks, temples, and bridges connecting it all together. The distance between different elements of the park means that you really need transportation to move between them, though I would not mind spending a week walking across it if given the chance. Tiffany, being a professional driver of tourists around Taroko, has sort of a standard route that sees all the famous attractions in a logical order such that you spend more time seeing things and less time driving around, and she could adjust some things to add or subtract time, athleticism, and courage required by the overall route depending on what the customers want. We had enough of all the above to do the full version of almost all the various attractions that did not require permits from the Taiwanese government, those being the really long and dangerous trails going up into the mountains.

This is the official entrance to the park, and this is also us watching Tiffany for signs that vehicles were about to run us over from behind

When we encountered tour buses we were really glad to have a taxi. They all went way too fast and didn't have time to stop, look at amazing things, appreciate them, take pictures, take more pictures with fewer goofy faces, etc. We'd be standing somewhere in silence, happily stunned by the scenery (we got a lot of good pictures but not a one does it justice) and then this rampaging elephant herd of mainland Chinese or Japanese tourists would pass by walking rapidly and following a man with a flag and bullhorn. That would not have been nearly as much fun, especially since none of the groups was English-speaking.

See? The picture is blurry because tour groups move too fast!

Tiffany's English was pretty good (she told us she couldn't get into college because it wasn't good enough and she'd be practicing on her customers since then) and she had some interesting facts and stories to share. For instance, we listened more carefully when she warned us about rockfalls and to pay attention to same after hearing that her previous taxi had been crushed by falling rocks. That explained the new taxi, I guess. She would also consistently volunteer to take pictures of us so we didn't have to hold the camera ourselves, which resulted in a relative profundity of pretty good pictures of us.

Aaaaand some goofy ones - she had a lot of ideas for pictures, some of greater and lesser merit

This is from the inside of that pagoda from the prior picture. Let's not discuss how many stairs were between these two shots...

So we explored the various attractions of the area and took in the stunning scenery for five or six hours. I'm going to let the pictures do a lot of the talking as far as the actual time in Taroko. Hope you've got fast internet...

Unfortunately the road to this shrine was closed for repairs.

Note the house in the background - this is substantially up high

One of the trails went through cave we had to go through that was completely dark, so we used the camera flash to navigate

I told her to act scared for this one.

You should really check out all the panoramic shots and movies on Flikr (link at the bottom of the post)

We saw wild monkeys twice - must have been a tour group because the picture is blurry.

Ana models the helmet we needed for part of the Trail of 9 Turns. I love the "not absolutely safe".

This is a good example of why the helmets are a good idea. Note the painted pavement was forced in on itself; you can still see the top of what used to be the surface sticking out of the ground.

Despite the fact that she conquered the rock in fair combat, she was not allowed to bring it home.

Photographic proof that I don't always look totally unnatural in pictures. The question of if I always look unnatural in real life I'll leave for another day.

Eventually, we finished up around the time it was starting to think about getting dark. Tiffany dropped us off in Hualien, a short distance from the train station, so that we could see a bit of the town and kill some time before making the train. I napped a little on the train and Ana mostly knitted I think. When we arrived back in the city, we had one more thing that we had to do before calling it a day and heading back to Singapore in the morning.

One of the most famous things about Taipei, and something that all visitors are supposed to go try, is the Night Markets. They're basically indoor/outdoor food and recreation areas with a bit of a festival atmosphere that operate year round. They're very popular for inexpensive food and a good cheap night out for people young and old. We'd originally planned to go to Shihlin Night Market, the original and largest, the first night we were in Taiwan, but fatigue had ruled otherwise. The second night we ate at Yuma and were much too full to go in search of cheap eats. So this, our final night, we considered it imperative to experience this aspect of Taiwanese culture, and also we were all kinds of hungry.

Shihlin Night Market Interior

The subway has a stop directly across the street from Shihlin, and we waded in not knowing quite what to expect. We toured down a few of the various aisles and took a look around. It looked like a few basic types of food vendors were in operation and most stalls were one of about five kinds. We'd read that sort of the signature dish of night markets in general was fried chicken, which sounded pretty approachable, so we picked the stall that everybody else was lining up behind, figuring it for the local's choice, and spent about $4 to get more chicken than I've ever seen in my life.

Large Fried Chicken Stall sign: some characters I don't know, but it has "big" twice

Which when you see it, makes perfect sense. Note the use of two hands to hold it.

After consuming that monumental dish, were pretty much sated and didn't feel much like testing some of the other stuff that was around - none of it really demanded it - though I would love to go back with someone who knows the night markets better and eat my way around some more. We opted to sample some candied strawberries on a stick, which turned out to be pretty good. With that, and seeing that the rest of the place looked like more of the same, we finally called an end to a really long, really exciting, and overall really exhausting day. (The same could be said about this blog entry. 2000+ words!)

Ana with candied strawberries. She shared...a little.

Aaaaand go see Flikr for the other ~325 pictures from Taiwan.

Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 4 Part 2)

Our second big target for the day is the National Palace Museum, the primary repository for Chinese cultural artifacts on earth. When the previous government of China (currently in charge of Taiwan) was getting its ass kicked by the commies (currently in charge of mainland China) after WW2 they evacuated most of the treasures in the Forbidden City storehouses to Taiwan, along with other choice tidbits. The commies then destroyed most of their remaining historical artifacts during the Cultural Revolution, making the Taiwanese collection far more important and rare. Or at least this is how I remember it from classes in high school - the short version is, if you want to see historical Chinese stuff, the National Palace Museum is the best in the world, and probably nobody else is in the same tier. Only 1% of the total collection can be displayed at the same time - they rotate it every few months. It takes more than ten years of regular attendance to see everything.

Anyway, we took the subway most of the way there and then had to change to a cab for the last leg as it is well outside the city proper. We were running a bit later in the day than we wanted to be getting there, because it normally closes at 5PM and seeing even the 1% on display takes hours. Fortunately, we just happened to go on Saturday when they turned out to be open until 8PM, so we had time to see everything we wanted to, which was pretty much everything on display.

From prehistory until the beginning of the 20th century. Incidentally, I don't think the Chinese says the same thing as the English. I read it as something more like "Eight Thousand Year Long History" and don't see anything likely to be related to treasures or items of value. Andrew Tsai, correct me?

This picture was taken after we left the museum at the end of the day. It has several imposing entrances before you actually get to the door.

Pictures are understandably totally forbidden inside the building as the public never managed to actually turn the flash off until after they've set it off several times. Thus, I can't show you the things we saw very well, and descriptions aren't going to go far. I recommend you go to their website and look at the pictures they've taken of parts of the collection here. Go to Collections and then Selections. We especially enjoyed the bronzes, ceramics, and carvings. We spent probably five hours going between exhibits, hitting ones we were most interested in, circling back around when one area was too crowded, and generally getting lost in the intertwined exhibits.

One thing we mention as especially cool was reading Chinese characters from 2600BC - they are many that of course are not used in Japanese or even in Chinese any more, but some are clearly recognizable. I don't think we read any sentences but it was cool to pick out words here and there amongst things four-thousand-odd years old.

Tour groups comprised the majority of people visiting the museum and they were a real hazard - flying wedges zooming around the museum, following really loud people with bullhorns. Watching two going around a room in opposite directions was kind of funny; you'd expect bodies to fly when they met. The plus side of having these large ornery organisms trampling around was that when they weren't there, the place was pretty much empty. So when they showed up we just shifted to where they weren't and I don't think we missed much because we just kept doubling back later after seeing other stuff. I really, really enjoyed some of the exhibits (The bronzes! Amazing aesthetic and craftsmanship!) and would count the whole trip to Taiwan worth it for this visit alone.

We stayed much later at the museum than we had originally intended to because of the opportunities afforded us by the extended hours, and we totally and deliberately blew our dinner reservation in order to stick around. Finally, though, we'd seen everything we wanted to and were starting to get hungry. When we researched where to eat in Taipei we read a lot of recommendations before picking one place that didn't have anything to do with Chinese cuisine. It's called Yuma and it is full-on Tex-Mex in downtown Taipei. We went and had absurd nachos and really, really good BBQ ribs, and fajitas and Sprite and friendly English-fluent service and everything had portion sizes I would account large by American standards. It was fantastic, and even cost less than it would have at home. They didn't seem to mind that we were hours late for our reservation either (they had open space), though we apologized anyway.

You could feed a three-generation Japanese family for a week on those nachos!

Came a looooong way for this BBQ and I would challenge anyone not to enjoy these ribs. Maybe not the best I've ever had, but I did not expect them to be exceptional, which they were. If I wasn't totally stuffed I'd have ordered another round and eaten them with eyes-rolling-back ecstasy.

I felt a little bit guilty about not taking this opportunity to eat someplace serving Chinese in China, and we'd read about one particular Peking duck restaurant that caught our attention, but I can't be too sad about it in the end because we really enjoyed eating there and got things we won't eat again until August at the earliest. We'll try to do better when, at some point, we make it to China proper. Plus, I ate leftovers from Yuma the whole rest of the time we were in Taiwan. There was that much left, and they meticulously (to the point of humor) wrapped it up for us in carefully separated and secured individual packages for each little item. We considered going out and doing something more after finishing dinner, but with so much food in us and an early morning the next day, we just bought some supplies for the next day and hit the sack.

Spring Break 2010: Singapore, Taiwan, Singapore, Tokyo (Day 4 Part 1)

After making it to Taipei, Taiwan, the day before and sleeping in our hilariously round but not entirely uncomfortable hotel bed we woke up to the first of our two full days in Taiwan.

Here's a nice picture of the highway right next to the hotel.

The hotel offered complimentary breakfast so we sallied forth to test the quality of their offerings. We peered with some trepidation into the buffet trays and mostly didn't understand what was going on, or if we did, didn't much care for the look of it. Ana pretty much had toast, and I had a lot of the good fresh cherry tomatoes and sampled a few other items. The best part of breakfast was definitely the table on the roof of the hotel - the wall was a bit too high to see a whole lot of Taipei but the sun was shining, there was a little garden, and the temperature was entirely temperate.

I still don't know what the orange stuff was.

The view from our breakfast table

Food urges muted, we headed out to the first of our three big goals for the day, the Taipei 101 building. On the way to the subway station, a man on a bike singing opera rode by. He was actually pretty good.

I didn't put a picture of the nifty RFID plastic subway coin in before, so I'm putting it here.

Recently overtaken by the Burj Khalifa, the Taipei 101 is now the second tallest building in the world, and remains a significant piece of structural engineering while allowing for amazingly expansive views of Taipei despite the fact that it is hideously ugly. The Taipei 101 does not have any buildings of remotely comparable size anywhere near it, so when it stands above you it's hard to appreciate just how big it really is, which is nearly 1,700 feet tall to the point of the spire. The base of it is an enormous mall, above which are dozens of floors of office space, topped by the observation decks, on top of which there are some more offices, which I believe are occupied principally by building management and the like.

Taipei 101 from only a block or two away

The mall at the base is positively cavernous and not for the faint-of-credit-limit. For example, they weren't advertising Mercedes Benz, they were advertising specifically the AMG performance arm of Mercedes Benz. It looked like a great place to spend a lot of money for specific designer names on the tags of your clothes or wristwatch, but was pretty lacking in anything else. We zig-zagged across the mall, going up one floor at a time, just to see what they had. The food court on the top floor of the mall area was pretty fancy, but we kept moving up to the lobby for the observation decks.

Inside the shopping cathedral

More shopping cathedral

The lobby area was crowded and a bit of a madhouse, but we paid them about $30US for two tickets to the observation deck and got in line for the elevators. They make a big deal about the elevators because they're apparently still the fastest ones in the world. I'm pretty sure the school elevators take about the same amount of time to do five floors that these ones spend to hit the 89th floor observation lounge.

That's about 38 miles an hour, inside a building.

At the time we were in Taiwan, dust storms over the Gobi desert were putting a real haze in the air in all Asian parts east of the Gobi. We'd first thought that it was pollution, but later discussions with people who were elsewhere at the time and were seeing the same effects put us on the right track. Anyhow, for all the extraordinary height of the building, visibility was significantly limited by the dust in the air to, say, miles instead of light-years. I do wish we could have seen it on a really clear day but it was impressive nevertheless. Hold your hand at full arm's length; your forefinger nail is how big a city bus looked from up there.

The observation lounge is the whole 89th floor, and the city looks a lot like this in every direction.

The observation lounge also featured several souvenir areas hawking various things, including postcards with special postmarks that Ana decreed must be sent to several people, though not having addresses limited the potential audience sharply.

They also had ink stamps with pictures of the tower and the inexplicable "damper babies"

This is the 101's tuned mass damper. It keeps the building's swaying to a minimum, though my inner ear sent down a few notices saying that things here were perhaps not quite right.

And this is one of the four mascots for the 101 based on the damper, called "damper babies". I'm not sure these things were necessary or made any sense at all. The other colors are black, gold, and silver. Each one has a backstory and catchprase....

There were a lot of signs and info about the building posted in the observation deck. The engineers in us noticed that one of the signs rated the concrete used in the 101 to "10,000PSI" and immediately wondered which failure criterion the 10,000 psi applied to. We're guessing compressive failure but without indication the number means not a whole lot.

The floor above the windowed observation deck is an open-air observation deck. The was pretty much the same, except with a really big fence. From here it was clear that the floors above the observation decks are also office space.

After descending from the heights, Ana's attention was caught by signs advertising something calling itself New York New York, so we followed them to find out what it was. I'm still not exactly sure what that store sold, but it turned out to have a Coldstone right in front of it so we promptly had ice cream for lunch. I'm going to break Day 4 into two parts here. Next up is the National Palace Museum and then we eat Tex-Mex in Taipei for dinner.

New York New York's Statue of Liberty

I wasn't nearly as excited as her, but it was probably 90˚F out there so the ice cream was welcome.