Taiwan Day 10

On Sunday, our last full day in Taiwan, my mom’s students invited me and David out for lunch. It was their last day with my mom as well, so they decided to take all of us out to a restaurant near their university. David and I met up with my mom and her students and went to a nearby Thai restaurant. Here we are with her masters students:

The restaurant is all you can eat, but you order dishes from a menu and they’ll bring it out until you say no more. We ordered the entire menu and then picked out what we liked for seconds. We also got free slushies – I ordered the cherry lemon blueberry:

The waiter continuously brought out food, including:

Green papaya with chili flakes:

Fried chicken with hot sauce:

Beef with chili dipping sauce:

Fish:

Shaved beef tendon:

And duck blood, a first for me:

David had pig’s blood once, as a kid, when he mistook it for tofu in a Chinese lunchbox that my aunt bought for us. The texture is tender like tofu, but had a little salty taste…almost like tasting your own blood, in cube form.

And a lot more food:

After departing from our huge lunch, we finally found a Meet Fresh (after asking multiple people in various convenience stores in our broken Chinese). We ate a large serving of grass jelly with shaved ice and waddled our way back to the train station to meet up with my dad and a professor at NTU.

After my mom finished teaching, we met up with her for our last meal in Taipei. We went to a restaurant close to my dad’s city house, Yin Yee, or Silver Wings. My dad takes company there a lot because they serve traditional Southeastern Chinese food. My mom also invited her sister and her family – here are all of us at dinner:

We started off with my favorite cold appetizer – cabbage with vinegar, bean curd, scallions, and peanuts:

My dad also ordered a pork dish where they press different types of pork together and slice it:

Another appetizer – fresh eel:

Next came a large pressed duck that was served tableside by a waitress:

Each bun was filled with lots of crisp duck skin and duck meat:

Next came the pig’s foot and leg:

The waitress broke apart the foot and leg with a spoon to show how tender it was – there’s a large layer of gelatin before the tender meat:

My dad also ordered noodles for me and David since it was our birthdays; traditionally, you eat long noodles on your birthday for longevity and you can’t cut them when you’re serving the noodles!

For dessert, my dad ordered Chinese style crepes that are fried and filled with red bean:

They were really delicious, even though I was so excited to eat them that I accidentally burnt my tongue on them! My dad was going to pay for dinner, but my cousin ended up treating all of us for a wonderful last meal in Taipei.

After dinner, it was pouring rain, but it was our last night in Taipei so we decided to get some more dessert. We kept telling my mom about Meet Fresh, but everytime we found one, she was teaching her students, so my dad took us to a place by his house that served comparable shaved ice. My mom ordered shaved ice with taro balls, red beans and mochi, topped with condensed milk:

In his effort to recreate the Meet Fresh shaved ice, my brother ordered a shaved ice with grass jelly, mochi, taro balls, yam balls and red beans, topped with condensed milk.

We walked around the area one last time and then got into cabs to head back to our hotel. My dad bought us a birthday cake and everyone sang happy birthday to us before we blew out our candles:

The cakes in Taiwan are so delicious; this cakes layers were: cake, whipped cream, taro paste, more cake, more whipped cream, PUDDING, more whipped cream, and then taro with whipped cream and fresh fruits:

YUM YUM YUM!

On Monday, my dad met us at the airport at 5 AM, had breakfast with us, and then bid us adieu! We flew to Shanghai to go to the World Expo, then to Guilin to see the caves, and then to Chongqing. We had a wonderful time in Taipei and I might go back soon for school!