Taiwan Day 4

My mom had a break from teaching on Monday and we took advantage of the break by meeting up with her friends at NCCU, where my mom also attended college. We had lunch in their union, where we ate German food and drank interesting coffee (David drank a blended papaya coffee that was really interestingly bitter). David and I planned to visit the Taipei Zoo to see the pandas China gifted Taiwan, but ran out of time because we were meeting all of my mom’s friends.

After a full day at NCCU, we went back to the hotel and got ready for dinner. We didn’t have any plans for where we were going to eat, so we decided to just get in a cab and ask the cab driver where we should go and what we should eat. The cab driver recommended a bunch of places and we decided to go to Beijing Do it True:

The restaurant opened in 1949 and has been visited by many presidents (on the walls, there are pictures of their more famous visitors, including George Bush). There were two dishes that I really liked – one was a vegetable cold dish with seaweed and a little bit of kewpie on top:

The other dish I really liked was another cold dish – liang ban tsai (cold mixed vegetables):

Napa cabbage was thinly sliced and mixed with vinegar, soy sauce, dried bean curd, cilantro, and peanuts. We also ordered a bunch of other dishes (I will post pictures of those once I get home!)

After eating at Beijing Do it True, we walked to Sogo:

When we were kids, there was only one Sogo in Taipei, but now there are THREE! The newest Sogo has a lot of higher end shops (Hermes, Chanel, Burberry, Cartier, etc), but this Sogo is the original and we used to visit all the time to eat gelato from Capatina:

They’ve redone the food court at the original Sogo (it’s almost non-existent now) but when we were kids, Capatina used to scoop the gelato into pyramids that David and I absolutely loved.

Sogo also used to have this clock that played music – we were looking for it for a while because David thought it was a lot bigger:

Was there some kind of exhibit when we were kids that used to come out at every hour? David thought the clock was a lot bigger (and I seem to remember some kind of moving mannequins) but maybe it’s just our imagination since it was such a long time ago!