Appropriately, considering we'll be in Italy in a week or two, the whole experience was very authentic. Chefs and many of the staff are Italian and the fusion cuisine was apparently near perfect. With our world certified Pizz Oggi and now this place, we'll barely need to visit Italy, for the food at least! She caught up with all sorts of interesting gossip which is not for these public pages (!), and they had a relaxing and convivial experience.
I'll neatly segue to another convivial experience that I attended on Friday, that of the lower school Chrsitmas party. Upon arrival, one of my friends was struggling with the two mini-kegs of craft beer that had been ordered. I put my extensive bar experience to good use and manned one of the kegs, constantly adjusting the gas levels to keep the beer, and not the foam, flowing crisply. It was a bit of a juggling act, but things went smoothly and it gave me the chance to have a brief interaction with heaps of people without getting too caught up in minutia! It was a pretty fun party in the end: the division certainly has a more relaxed and inclusive vibe these days.
We'd heard tell of yet another custom burger experience in a nearby suburb lately, so we did a little explore on Saturday evening. Just a couple of stops downtown on the MRT found us at Shilin, a pulsing little hub of restaurants of all cuisines sandwiched in between cute shops selling umbrellas, all manner of cat-branded goods, second hand books or even sad, hot noodles! (see photo above)
Burger Ray was a great find a short stroll from the northern exit of the station. It has a signature draw-card of a gourmet foie gras and truffle burger, but neither Cass nor I are too enamoured of foie gras for all sorts of reasons so we chose differently. Cass ended up with the veggie version which she declared "best ever"...high praise from an aficionado of the form! Mine was right up there with the same status. The set-up is simple and clever. You order the base burger of your choice from a street-front window then select "extras" that you want. After that, you go inside, sit and wait and serve yourself drinks. When the burgers arrive you go to the salad hub and load up your burger with whatever quantity of other extras and sauces that you want. It truly is a signature meal in the end....great stuff!
We thought we'd wander along to 1Bite2Go to get a couple of pieces of their melt-in-your-mouth sour cream cheese cake to eat at home later on. On the way, we marveled again at the changes we've seen in the city and how just everything is almost literally at our doorstep. I suppose to emphasize this, we realized we were just a few steps away from the big yellow tech barn of 3C, so we went in to buy a new wi-fi router as ours has been on the blink necessitating a re-start every hour or so. A pack of blank DVDs and we signed up for a membership whereupon we needed to select "free" gift, so a new toaster in hand(along with DVDs and router), we went to get our cake then wander back to the MRT and home.
We'll be madly preparing for our trip next Saturday as we make our way through this last week of semester. Cats to be organized, clothes and tickets and info to be selected and secreted and then we'll be off. The blog will shut down for a few weeks, I'm anticipating resuming regular service on January 11th.
Just to remind us again that we're living in a Taiwanese neighburhood, the local temple went right off on Thursday night. I missed a lot of the firecracker action but made it for the "tongue lashing giant god's dance" practice. Hilarious! Photos: temple antics, beer wrangling, Burger Ray, sad noodles, sun cat and a couple of shots from the top of the stairs on Sunday. Cass is reading A Little Life and I'm enjoying some violent pulp Jack Reacher with Persuader.
