BEER & CHEESE

Well hopefully that title caught your attention. It certainly caught mine, though more for the latter half.

BEER & CHEESE is a new bar which has opened up near Daan Park, located at No.169 Jianguo South Road, Section 2, Daan District.
Link to their Facebook page.

This bar is very new. How new was made apparent when I decided to give them a try, only to discover that they didn't have much cheese on offer. Well, to be blunt, all they could offer was a toasted cheese sandwich - a very good one, mind you, with really tasty bread filled with herbs and void of any ghastly sugar.
[Sadly I forgot to take a picture of one.]

I'll be quite frank. I'm not much of a beer drinker, preferring vodka and whiskey myself. This is a synopsis of my brief  experimenting.

Being in a European mood, we dove headlong into the produce of a microbrewery from the Netherlands called De Molen. We began with Blikken & Blozen (translated roughly as "to glance and blush"). It has the faintest of sweet overtones and is a very pleasant blend.

I also tried a Scottish beer called 5 A.M. Saint from Brewdog. This is a red ale and (I've been told, though have yet to confirm) is the style of beer that has come to dominate the U.S.A.'s market.

[Proof for my friends that I on occasion I do get down from my high horse and engage in the drinks of the common people.]

Next on the list of De Molen drinks to be consumed was Bommen & Granaten (translated as "Bombs & Grenades") which is actually a barley wine. It's a lot heavier than the other beers at 15% alcohol, though not as potent in flavour as a stout.

Last on my list for this round is Pijl & Boog (translated as "Arrow and Bow"). It's a strong pale ale at 10% and it has a rather pleasant taste. I would say more, but I didn't get to taste a lot of this drink as it wasn't mine, but rather my girlfriend's.

Some odd edibles

A friend of mine visited Borneo and was there for just over a week, arriving back in the middle of this week. She's an ex-colleague, but still comes to the school to help with extra classes and will do so until the mid December when she and her boyfriend travel back home go get married.

Yesterday she was at school and had brought me something to try - two little sweets.

Seemingly ordinary and harmless, let me enlighten you as to the flavours of these little things. The green one is the less obscure one, being a pepper sweet. The yellow one is bird's nest flavoured.

I'm guessing that will sound a little odd to many people, so let me elaborate. There is a kind of bird which nests in caves in various parts of South-East Asia. They create nests using (amongst a few other things) their saliva. These nests are collected and used to make various types of food. When dissolved in water the nests create a gelatinous texture used for soup or sweet tong sui.

This is what a bird's nest looks like after it's been harvested and cleaned up.

Well, here goes. Let's test this sweet and see what it's like. It smells like spices, something that burns, like pepper or paprika. And the taste... is not dissimilar to what you'd expect from munching on a weaver's nest, texture aside.

It has an earthy taste of grass (yes, I know what that tastes like) and puts me in mind of the smell of a field after heavy rain. It's definitely unusual, but not bad and decidedly far from the worst thing I've tasted. I'm guessing its rarity is what makes it a sought after food.

Considering this is made of saliva, by proxy it's as though I'm kissing a bird. I'm not thrilled by that thought.

Ah, now the pepper sweet is a more familiar taste, though there is a good deal of sugar on it and it puts me in mind a generic chewy sweet, though with a decidedly strong aftertaste of pepper. Nothing too exciting, but a comforting flavour.

Wanderings continue...

It's a strange moment when you realise you have explored various areas of the country you're living in without having explored all (in even a great deal of) the city in which you live. I had a similar experience when I visited China in December-January of 2003-2004. Travelling with a friend and based in Shanghai, though we travelled all over, Shanghai was the last place we properly looked around.

My girlfriend and I have decided to rectify this situation. Occasionally, usually Saturdays, we travel around a new part of the city. Here's the map of the MRT (Mass Rapid Transport, or something).

Despite living near the south end of the brown line, I had never travelled to its northern and eastern extremities. Where the blue and brown lines meet in the middle of the map is roughly the city's centre, with Taipei 101 being a little east of that. The south ends of the green and blue lines are their own mini-cities which have grown into Taibei.

By contrast the top arc of the brown line is fairly new to development. It looks like it's being developed into a new commercial hub, but what struck us was how empty the streets were.

Full of brand new commercial buildings (maybe still going up) and elite residential blocks, the place feels deserted. The Taiwanese tradition of building convenience stores periodically a stone's throw from the next one seems to have been overlooked here, too.

We did come across one interesting building. At first we thought it was a building dedicated to the arts, expecting to find it full of studios and galleries, but on closer inspection (from the roadside, peering through windows) we saw the interior set up with many tables and chairs in the manner of a restaurant.

We are still unsure as to what the building is.

As always, I made a concerted effort to track down public artworks scattered around the district, almost reminiscent of a scavenger hunt. Here are what I saw.

A head postured for thought while a branch protrudes from one ear with a bird sitting on it.

A rather odd bear with tiny wings who appears to be accepting a hug.

A letter box trying desperately to appear old-fashioned.

This rather garish row of statues cluttering up the pavement outside some shop or other in the vain hope of drawing customers.

Some satyrs and the artist's name.

A self-titled woman on a horse.

This was a delightful find. The jury of my mind is still out on whether words are missing from the sign or whether there has been a communication error.

(That or the society's name is really written like that.)

They are attached to quite a fancy new residential building. It's possible (though unlikely) that it's simply the name of the block of flats.

One new discovery for me was this sport. I do not know it's name, but it appears to be a combination of golf and croquet. The participants hold what appear to be croquet mallets, but swing them in a decidedly golf manner. It was quite unusual.

Across the grassy stretch on which they played was another group hitting in the opposite direction. Perhaps there is an aspect of bowls in this game as well.

Our trip culminated in an escape from towering buildings of glass and steel, and the enjoying of Da Hu Park. The MRT leaves the city area to skirt the outside of the park, giving passengers a calm and pleasing view. We alighted and took a stroll.

As I am me, I couldn't help but climb a tree.

What I discovered is that some spiders coat the surface of branches with their webbing. It's not a practice I was previously familiar with, but whole branches are covered. It may also have been only this particular species of tree.

Many people in Taibei enjoy taking time off in parks. Something about looking at the greenery present in a park brings a calm that nothing else in the city can synthesize.

This bridge separates the park with a small area of land at the base of a small mountain. There are often hiking trails going up into the mountains around Taibei, and it's most likely that this one does, too.

View from the bridge

On the far side of the bridge were people fishing. There were also a number of these birds (herons?) which allowed us to get quite close for wild animals. Obviously they're used to being fed tidbits by the fishermen.

All in all, a pleasant Sunday afternoon's walk.

Wanderings in Town

Travelling up Zhongshan N. Road you'll find an extremely western-centred area of Taibei. There's a restaurant there which models itself on the one in the movie Pulp Fiction. (You know the one - tables designed to look like cars).

To be fair their food is rather good, but their service is terrible and their music is quite distasteful. They come across as desperate to appeal to foreigners, so they play anything with an English name on it. Completely inappropriate for the family atmosphere they're trying to cultivate.

Another curiosity was this shop which crossed our path. Don't let the plants on sale outside the door fool you, nor the name of the shop.

At least they're honest.

We stopped for a cup of coffee at a place called 8 oz. They sell coffee, but their main play is to tempt customers to buy home-made cheese cake to eat with it. 

We avoided the temptation, but were quite perplexed by their furniture.

The radio disguised as an old gramophone was delightful, but their baby chairs were an oddity.

They really were quite small.

(On a separate note, please forgive the low quality of the pictures. I forgot my camera on this particular occasion and so had to resort to my girlfriend's phone camera.)

On the plus side, there's always taking the piss on the MRT. Watching people's reactions to "crazy foreigners" is always entertaining.