However, they provided an English speaking tour guide to Chunnan and me so we did not have to fight with the tour groups too much. Also, weekday tours do not actually include the business side of the palace...just tour info displays. Next time we come we'll have to do a weekend tour.
On the way to the palace tour we ran across another branch of Crown & Fancy Bakery so I snapped a picture this time. This branch looked so much like the one we got the cakes from that I thought it WAS the same one. So this pic is a good stand-in for yesterday's post.
Across the corner from the Crown & Fancy was this 3-story Starbucks, so I had to take a picture of that too.
We also went back to the underground malls so I snapped this pic to fill in that posting hole too.
In the underground mall they had this arcade with a hundred claw machines al stuffed with little stuffed toys. I thought this Elmo one was particularly photogenic.
As a way to squash the underground economy throughout Taipei, the government instituted an "receipt lottery". Every store receipt you get has a lottery number printed on it and a few times a year they hold a drawing with a top prize of 2 million Taiwanese dollars. A side effect of the lottery were these charity donation boxes. People wishing to donate to a charity toss in their receipts and if the charity has the winning number you've done a really good deed. If not, then at least you feel like you tried.
For lunch we went to a food court with a store that served "shaved noodles". Chunnan has been telling me about these for a while now so I was happy to finally try them out. The noodle dough is in a big ball and the chef uses a sharp knife and a speedy and dexterous technique to whittle noodles off the dough and into the boiling water. We were not able to see it in action, but it sounds both fascinating and dangerous all at once.
Here's a closeup of the noodles so you can see the different texture and shape as opposed to hand-stretched noodles or machine made noodles. These are flatter, thicker, and chewier...and very tasty!
Later in the afternoon we took a side trip to visit some of Chunnan's relatives that he hasn't seen in about ten years and then Shu-Min took Chunnan and me to a hot springs up in the foothills north of Taipei. It's a gender-segregated and no-swimsuit spa so all we needed to bring was a towel and a bottle of water to replenish ourselves. We spent more than an hour bouncing back and forth between the hot spring, the cold pool, and the jacuzzi tub. I did not get any pics inside the spa, but Shu-Min did. I won't be posting those here. :-)
To wrap up the evening Shu-Min took us to Shabu-Shabu, a Japanese style hot pot restaurant. What we might call a fondu restaurant. Basically, you get a plate full of veggies and a bowl of noodles, then you chose several meats all cut very thin. Your table has a boiling broth pot for each diner so you mix it all together and make your own soup.
The spotlights at each table made photography difficult but here's Shu-Min with his veggies to the right, the hot pot over-exposed in the center, and some dipping sauce just above it.
Here is some of the meat and my hot pot boiling away. The term Shabu Shabu is Japanese for the act of holding the meat with your chop sticks and swishing it back and forth in the broth until it cooks.Tomorrow morning we leave on another train trip to another resort. This one is a hot springs resort up in the mountains and I have no idea if they'll have internet access or not. It may be late Thursday before I'm able to post again.
Friday we may head back to the local hot spring with Shu-Min, Saturday we're going back to the Shilin Night Market, Sunday will be another family day at Cher's house with games in the afternoon, then we catch the flight home at 10pm on Sunday. A few days ago I thought two weeks was to much, but now the trip is winding down and I'd like to stay another week or two. Oh well, gotta leave something to look forward to for the next trip.
Shu-Min looks very much like Chunnan.
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