They are between the new Sogo and Takashimaya in TienMu on a smaller road -a bit hard to find.  View Business Card

Shi Dong Road Lane 91 #17

02-2876-1562

Taste – 8/10

Value for Price – 9/10

All of their 7 pizzas are either 200 or 220 NT, 3 of which are vegetarian.  They are baked in a stone oven and ready in about 10 minutes.  Unfortunately they don’t deliver, and on the night I visited there was almost an hour wait to get a pizza.  There is 1 table outside with 2 chairs, so I wouldn’t recommend going there to eat, but the pizza spoke for itself.

This was the German Sausage Pizza.  They used plenty of toppings and the flavor was OK.

This was my favorite between the two – the Goat Cheese.  It was a nice mix of flavors and herbs, I will get this one again next time I visit.

The pizza was awesome, we’ll be back again to try some more pizzas and this time we’ll call ahead.

In response to this, Taiwan has gotten organized.  All over town, restaurants are posting this picture in their windows:

I have been seeing this picture everywhere!  You can see from the symbolism that they’ve said NO to US Beef.   The red head on the cow shows that it is in fact MAD, and there’s even a number at the bottom unique to this store.    The situation has gotten to the point where Taiwan has asked America to respect its wishes and will stop importing these beef parts.  Last week, the Taiwan Legislature revised a law to ban the import of the Beef and now the executive branch is busy explaining why to the US government.

The top character is the traditional form, which I’ve heard has been in use about 2000 years.  Japan adapted it and it’s been simplified to an even greater extent in modern Chinese.  I like this example because it shows how it has changed in Japan slightly, and some words like hua (the 2nd character) haven’t been simplified to the extent they have been in China.

Taiwan has a convenience store culture.  There are 7-11′s, Family Mart’s, and OK Mart’s everywhere.  Furthermore, with the subway in Taipei being the highest rated in the world, lots of people get around via subway: hence the lack of McDonald’s drive thru windows.  So, our local breakfast sandwich is coming from a convenience store.   (By the way, if you want McDonald’s in Taiwan, you usually have it delivered via scooter at no charge)

This sandwich’s main ingredient is rice.  Actually, I’m assuming it comes from a japanese style dish called onigiri (rice ball).  You basically take some main ingredient, wrap it in rice, and then put a piece of norii (seaweed) around it.  I’m sure there are traditional chinese versions of it, but I’m guessing there’s a Japanese connection with it here in Taiwan.

So here it is.  I picked the bacon and egg variety.  Also, I picked 7-11 because they have the nice picture on the front, at the other stores you need to be able to reach Chinese to know what you’re buying.  There are also lots of seafood varieties, but I’ve always had a hard time eating seafood from 7-11.  This one costs 18 yuan which is about $0.55

You can see there’s about 1 piece of bacon an inch long in the whole thing…not exactly what you get at McDonald’s for $1.25.  It’s probably more like a potato salad with bacon.  Anyhow, it’s still pretty good

I’ve got the pictures in this album on Picasa, here are a couple of highlights.

This was taken from the mid-elevation point on the farm.  We were at about 1800m elevation.  Supposedly, tea can be considered high mountain if is produced about 1200m elevation.  The air was so clean and fresh up there!

This picture shows the farm and the processing buildings.  The larger looking building on the right is used only for drying.  It’s a big open room with a big blower inside.  The building on the left is where the tea is processed and where people sleep.

Here the freshly picked leaves are drying.  After a couple of hours, they’ll be put inside to dry further.  They will dry between a half day and an entire day based upon the temperature, humidity, etc.

Here is a process where heat is applied to the leaves.  They roll around in this big dryer.  After a minute or two of this, they’ll be put into a bag and crunched / rolled for a few minutes.  These two processes are reaped many many times (about 40 ) until the tea is done.  The drying process opens the tea leaves and drys them out, while the rolling compacts and closes them.

Tea tasting is constantly happening during the processing.  Grab a handful of tea, put it in a bowl and pour boiling hot water on it.  They also put a spoon in there which is used to smell the tea.  I was surprised at how much emphasis is put on the smell of the tea.

It was great to see another side of Taiwan; Getting off the beaten path.  Going up into the mountains, breathing the fresh air, being around all the tea…It was awesome.  I believe the best Oolong teas in the world are from Taiwan – and there’s lots of them around here!

The lemon juice – garlic base is named Marvini and is pretty good.  Our favorite uses Parmesan cheese instead and it’s called Jamie Oliver’s Summertime Pasta.  This one uses shrimp and no cheese.

We’ve adapted a couple things from Jamie’s version.  First, we’ve substituted the pine nuts with bacon (3 slices).  Second, we’ve substituted the parsley with basil.  The herb doesn’t actually matter, both of which you don’t taste at all.   Hope you enjoy the pictures of our finished product

I like to read the Leaf, there are some excellent articles on tea there.  Compared with a lot of the information on the internet, they are much more in depth. Tea is simple in that you either like it or you don’t, so experimenting is a great way to expand your understanding of tea.  I think the first experiment I did with tea was with different temperatures of water.

One article called Gong Fu Tea Tips (Part 3) highlights a few tea experiments you can do. After a long time, I finally tried experiment # 4, using different cups.  A 30 min train ride from Taipei is a town called YingGe, which is famous for pottery.  It’s a great place to walk around, relax and view some really beautiful pottery.  The cobblestone streets are closed off to cars, and you can even make your own pottery for about $3 US.

While there, I purchased two cheap tea cups (Each $4 US) and after getting home realized my daily tea tasted totally different in them.  I got out my best tea cups. They are about 100 years old, and were a gift from a friend (Thank you Aaron!). The tea tasted quite different. The new cup had a slight unpleasant taste, and the old cup also gave the tea a certain smoothness or roundness. It’s hard to describe, sometimes in Asia people say good teas will immediately coat your entire mouth.  Almost like there is a different viscosity to the tea.  With the old cups the sensation I got was more like this.

Does this really matter?  I think the main point is that I bought some bad teacups.  I’ve bought other cheap, new cups before and never had this experience.   When comparing these bad cups directly to my best ones, I was really surprised to find out how much difference there is.  How can this be?

Last weekend Nono and I had signed up for a 10k run in Taipei.  It was put on by Puma and took place on a Saturday night at 6:30pm.  I hadn’t thought twice about it, but it ended up being a bad idea.  I believe  Puma chose an evening run because they wanted to have a post-run party and concert.  There were some semi-famous names there for the performances after.

May is really hot and humid.  There’s frequent rain and the weather isn’t ideal.  So, on race day the weather was typical.  85 and humid.  Saturday morning I bought the newspaper and looked at this:

I had to teach a class in the morning, it’s on the 25th floor downtown.  Here’s what the air was looking like at 10am.  Add a busy day of 500,000 scooters, cars and everything else, the air is only going to get worse too.  We decided to skip the run and saw a movie instead

This picture was taken in Ying Ge, which is a pottery town a 30 min train ride from Taipei.

I have participated in two events where I’ve gotten to hear the President of Taiwan speak, in 8 months of living here.  It’s cool to be somewhere you can run into famous people from time to time.  BTW, yes that is another Wisconsonite pimping the Leinenkugels shirt