Kiki’s Dinner Service

Posted on 27 November 2009 by christao408

Funny how two and a half days in a city can take a week two blog about. We’re nearing the end, though. More telling, perhaps, is that Andy is just catching up to the first day of our trip. Of course he has many more pictures than I do plus had been in Taipei for a week before we arrived.

The final day in Taipei followed the bleak and misty pattern that had been the tone of the weekend. We took the subway to the north end of town, out past the suburbs, really, to the Tamsui Fisherman’s Wharf and the nearby market area. From the terminal station of the subway (Danshui) we strolled along several streets that had many of the same foods and items for sale that we had seen at the night market.

The mist was just enough to get you wet if you weren’t using an umbrella but not enough to keep us from enjoying browsing the shops. We had just eaten bao at Din Tai Fung so there wasn’t a lot of room left for snacking. That didn’t keep me from looking at all the interesting things to eat.

Two types of noodles! And the vendor’s arm as she stirs them.

Stuffed tofu skins. Not sure what it is stuffed with but I’m sure someone will tell me in the comments. Pretty sure that isn’t mozzarella cheese on top, though.

I did buy some grilled mochi (pounded rice). The proprietor’s daughter was running the stand and took my order, grilled the mochi, figured out which bottle had the sauce I ordered (she sniffed them), took my money and made change. Very cute.

We then got on a ferry to the Fisherman’s Wharf. Looking at the map, we probably could have taken a bus or walked there just as easily. The Fisherman’s Wharf is “D” on the map and the shopping street is “A”. As the boat approached the mouth of the river and made the turn around the breakwater to the entrance to the wharf, we were rocked with some pretty strong waves. Strong enough to crash across the bow and onto the lower windows, which is where we were sitting.

The big attraction at the wharf is Lovers Bridge, shown in both the above pictures. By this point the wind was really blowing and the mist was growing heavier. As Sugi and I posed for a picture, her umbrella was caught by the wind and snapped like a twig. I’m sure Andy will have a picture of that for you soon.

Tawn smartly stayed in a coffee shop, taking a nap, while the rest of us wandered about, sacrificing umbrellas to the winds.

That evening, after some gift shopping (pineapple cake!) at Sogo, we met Andy’s parents for dinner at Kiki Restaurant, a Szuchuan restaurant that’s been around for nearly twenty years. If you ask me, Szuchuan may be the tastiest of all the Chinese cuisines.

Tawn, Andy, Andy’s parents, Sugi and me in front of the restaurant. I think Andy has his mom’s nose and eyes and his father’s forehead and chin. Let’s discuss…

The restaurant had wonderful lighting for taking pictures. If you are designing a restaurant, please spare a thought to food bloggers and install halogen lamps over the tables.

Braised tofu. Had my mother made tofu this way when I was growing up, I would have learned to love it much earlier.

An elaborate version of drunken chicken.

Bitter melon with salted duck egg.

Morning glory stir fried with garlic and fermented tofu.

Boiled pork with thick, sweet soy sauce.

Dan dan noodles – served with ground pork and bok choy.

Tripe and duck’s blood stew in a spicy chili sauce. We got into a discussion of what tripe is. I had always thought it was intestine but, as I’ve since learned thanks to Wikipedia, it is stomach. There you go.

So called “water wok” beef – a stew with bean sprouts and bamboo shoots. The type of chili in here isn’t spicy so much as it numbs the tongue for several minutes. Seriously, the front half of my tongue was numb after two servings.

Last but not least, yes we did try stinky tofu. Here it is fried up in a dish with dried chilies and spring onions. Actually, pretty tasty.

The meal was excellent and a bit thank you to Andy’s father for treating us. It was an excellent end to the trip as we headed to the airport shortly thereafter. But not before some dessert!

Stopping at a local dessert chain we encountered some Engrish. “Garss jelly” and “Retrospective tea” were two of my favorites. It would seem that “old-fashioned” might be a better translation. Note that in addition to English we have Japanese. Ah-ha! More proof that there are lots of Japanese tourists here.

Last but not least, here’s a photo Andy took while I was filming my tasting of salted plum stuffed cherry tomatoes dipped in candy coating at the night market. Superb shot.

Din Tai Fung Dumplings

Posted on 25 November 2009 by christao408

Perhaps the best of all the great food we ate in Taipei were the dumplings and bao at Din Tai Fung. Before we headed there, we received many recommendations to try the xiao long bao, Shanghainese steamed buns, from this famous fifty-year old chain. Since I love Shanghainese buns, I was excited to try.

If you’d like, here’s a short video (less than two minutes):

What you might notice first at the branch of Din Tai Fung located in the basement of Sogo department store are the large plate glass windows that let you and everyone else look in on the kitchen. This has to be the ultimate sign of confidence for a restaurant for poor sanitation or hygiene, sloppy techniques and poor quality would become quickly apparent with such visibility. Certainly, this served as a visual promise of what was to come.

We took Andy’s parents’ recommendation seriously and ordered basically every type of dumpling they offered. The order taker looked a bit skeptical that the four of us were going to eat so much food. But who could possibly resist?

The lovely food we tried. Each dish is named in the video above. The key item is the lower left-hand dish – this is the famous xiao long bao, the Shanghainese style pork “soup” buns. They are called this because when forming them the cook places a small cube of gelatinized soup stock into the wrapper with the seasoned pork. When the buns are steamed the stock liquifies. The goal is to pick up and eat the buns without tearing the skin and, thus, spilling the soup.

Sugi didn’t know this the first time she tried to eat them, eliciting cries of anguish from her fellow diners as they watched the soup spill onto her plate.

Funnily enough, the restaurant provides a laminated sheet with directions in both Japanese and English (lots of Japanese tourists here) about how to properly enjoy your bao.

I’m pleased to announce that next time I fly through Taipei I will be scheduling my flights so I have a layover long enough to allow a trip into town to eat at Din Tai Fung. Oh, but the good news! There are some three dozen locations of the restaurant including several in Japan, Singapore, throughout east Asia and a branch in Los Angeles and Sydney. Even if I don’t get to Taipei I should be able to enjoy these dumplings much more often. When does the branch open here in Thailand?

Shilin Night Market – Taipei

Posted on 25 November 2009 by christao408

The food adventures continued on Saturday night when, after a day wandering around the malls adjacent to Taipei 101, we rode the subway to the north end of Taipei to visit the Shilin Night Market. This is the largest night market in Taipei.

Foods we enjoyed at the official food section of the market (as opposed to the endless rows of street vendors scattered throughout the rest of the market) included these dishes:

What did we eat? I’m afraid I didn’t take careful notes, especially while we were inside the food portion of the market. But from the upper left, clockwise, we have fried noodles with a ground pork mixture, a fried “pancake” that seems to be mostly made from corn starch with pickled cucumbers on top, an omelet with shrimp and greens with a thick sweet sauce, and steamed rice with another ground pork mixture.

The food in the indoor portion of the market was, honestly, a bit bland and a lot oily. Corn starch and oil were two of the main ingredients. The food was certainly interesting but the blandness, combined with the overwhelming smell of stinky tofu (a fermented tofu the smell of which some compare to death boiled over) from adjacent stalls, drove us back outside where we continued our hunt for food from the street vendors. Full story in the video.

Focusing my energies on video, I ended up not shooting pictures of the wide variety of interesting food available at the food court in Taipei 101’s shopping mall. See Andy’s entry to enjoy those pictures.

Taipei 101

Posted on 23 November 2009 by christao408

I’m a little slow getting these entries about Taipei posted as I have a lot of video and was hoping to do some editing for each entry. That, however, isn’t going to happen.

Tawn all wrapped up and ready to take on the cool weather in Taipei.

Saturday morning after breakfast we took a taxi to Taipei 101, previously the tallest building in the world and still the tallest in East Asia. Taipei as a whole is pretty flat and spread out so there are few buildings – and none immediately nearby – that challenge Taipei 101 in any serious way.

The morning, as you can see, was still misty with a light drizzle falling nonstop. In fact, the top of the tower was shrouded in passing clouds from time to time, promising a less than unlimited view. After debating whether it would be better to wait and hope for clearer weather, we finally decided to go ahead and ascend to the observation deck on the 89th floor as many tour groups were arriving.

The design of Taipei 101 incorporates many elements of feng shui, the system of aesthetics that balances astronomy and geography to receive the results of positive qi, or energy. For example, the structure is built to resemble bamboo, a supple and quick-growing grass. There are lucky coins placed on the four sides of the building and the edges are adorned with metal embellishments that look like stylized clouds. It is actually a very graceful building.

The elevators to the observation deck are supposedly the fastest in the world, reaching 1,010 meters/minute on the upwards journey and 600 meters/minute on descent. The ride from the 5th floor ticket queue to the 89th floor observation deck takes 37 seconds and, surprisingly, your ears don’t pop too badly thanks to a system of pumps that move air into and out of the passenger cab.

The view from the deck was limited, although it was interesting to watch clouds blowing past the building below you. Also, there was one side of the building (the downwind side) where the clouds were stacking up behind the building. I did shoot some video, but nothing to share with you yet.

Photo courtesy of Andy

Tawn and I with a mural of Taipei 101 and downtown Taipei on a sunnier (and more cartoonish) day. Below, Tawn and Sugi pose in the gift shop with a “damper baby”, the mascot of Taipei 101 whose image is based on the 660-ton pendulum mass damper that sways to offset building movement caused by earthquakes or strong gusts of wind. Notice that the eyes and mouth of the damper baby spell out “101”.

We spent most of the day in the malls surrounding Taipei 101, shopping and eating as there wasn’t a whole lot else to do on such a dreary day. That was fun enough, though, as it is about the company more than anything else.

Photo courtesy of Andy

Tawn poses in front of the Louis Vuitton store’s Christmas display.

Before heading out to the night market for dinner, I managed to get this decent shot of Taipei 101 at night, taken in front of Eslite Bookstore’s flagship location.

More about the night market (which was drier) tomorrow.

Breakfast in Taipei

Posted on 22 November 2009 by christao408

Saturday morning we met Andy and Sugi in the lobby of our hotel (Park Taipei Hotel – highly recommended) and walked to a nearby restaurant for breakfast. The section of Fu-Xing South Road near the hotel has many restaurants well-known for their breakfasts, some of which serve 24 hours a day. Andy took us to Yong He Dou Jiang (永和豆漿) at the corner of RuiAn and Section 2, Fu-Xing South Road.

The first sign that this would be good eats was the queue stretching out the front door and onto the sidewalk. There were two, in fact: one for food to-go (many people in that line were carrying their tiffins or, as I believe the Singaporeans call them, their tingkats) and the other for dine-in.

The kitchen is right at the front of the shop, open-air under with a glass wall and window facing the interior dining area. This is a busy and efficient kitchen with each person performing their tasks in a compact area; no wasted motions here. The menu has variations of no more than a dozen items, if that, so it is more of a production line than anything else.

Our basic breakfast was four bowls of warm, sweetened soy milk, sesame pastry with fried “donut” inside, rice rolls (hidden under the sesame pastry), steamed Shanghainese style pork dumplings called xiao long bao, and some fried turnip cakes (not pictured).

Soy milk is not something I generally enjoy drinking but for some reason I find that when I have it in Asia, it is much more enjoyable than when I have it in the US. It isn’t chalky and there’s no artificial vanilla flavor added to it. It is especially nice when using it to dip the pastries.

The pastries, referred to colloquially as “Chinese donuts”, are thin strips of unsweetened dough that are fried up. In Thailand, these are generally shorter pieces but here in Taiwan (and most other places I’ve had them) they are a good ten inches long. The ones we had were wrapped in a thin sesame pasty. You dunked it in the soy milk then took a bite.

The dumplings (in the background) are one of my favorites, although this particular restaurant’s were underseasoned. They are made with a ground pork filling that has a small cube of gelatinous broth put inside the wrapper and then are steamed. The broth liquifies and when you bite into it, you get a generous burst of “soup” with the meat.

The other thing we had were rice rolls (kind of like sushi) wrapped around a Chinese donut and stuffed with a dried, shredded pork and pickled veggies. Very tasty!

This proved a tasty and filling start to our drizzly day.

First Day in Taipei

Posted on 20 November 2009 by christao408

We arrived Friday morning about 11:00 at Taipei’s International Airport after a smooth, three-hour flight from Bangkok. Andy was kind enough to arrange for a car to pick us up and we were in the city before twelve-fifteen. Amazing considering the distance from the airport to the city.

After a bit of freshening up, we met Andy and his girlfriend Sugi in the lobby of the Park Taipei Hotel, off to our first stop, the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, below.

This impressive memorial to the first president of Taiwan is part of a larger grounds that include the National Theatre and the National Concert hall, two traditionally designed buildings.

Inside the memorial hall we witnessed the impressive changing of the guard ceremony at the top of the hour. There is some video footage I will edit of this. Worth watching because – horrors! – one of the guards dropped his gun during the intricate maneuvers.

The military guards have to stand still for an entire hour. Unable to move, they have to rely upon a civilian guard to come over, straighten their uniform and mop their brow.

In the museum below the memorial hall was an exhibit of more contemporary Chinese scrolls including this cute one of an old couple perusing a photo album.

Tawn posed near one of the large doors leading into the museum level of the memorial hall.

In the evening we went to Ximending, the shopping district on the west side of town that is the home of hip and trendy youth culture. Similar to Shibuya in Tokyo, it is bright lights and tons of shops catering to an endless stream of people, mostly younger.

There’s shopping for everyone. Sugi found a beautiful leather bracelet that she really liked so a few minutes later, Andy was shelling out some New Taiwan Dollars.

There are some really nice graffiti in one section of Ximending.

Lots of street vendors serving foods of every kind. Taipei is known for its good eats and tomorrow evening we will be dining at the night market. Stay tuned for that entry. Here was a fresh fruit vendor who was being shooed away by the police for being in a no-vendor area.

One thing I found a vendor selling that really surprised me: corn dogs!

Eighteen Hours in Taipei

Posted on 15 August 2008 by christao408

As my trip in Los Angeles wound to a close, I found myself increasingly under the weather. By mid-afternoon Saturday I felt some aches in my shoulder and neck and popped an ibuprofen tablet to keep down a mild fever.

Whether because of a bug I had acquired or simply running around too much and not sleeping enough along the way, I was hitting that dreaded obstacle to fun travel: being sick.

After returning from dinner in Culver City, I took a light weight sleeping pill and settled in for a good night’s rest.

Zombie much?

Sunday morning, some nine hours later, I could barely pull myself out of bed and shower. I felt like a zombie, like there was a layer of cement covering my body. Bill had agreed to join me for brunch with Gary and William in Venice Beach and I didn’t want to miss another opportunity to visit with them, so I forced myself to get up. But I was so tired that not only did I doze in the car as Bill drove to the west side, I could barely function over brunch, speaking very little, not eating much, and not taking any pictures – shocking!

Embarrassed by the awful impression I made (especially as I was just meeting Gary’s brother for the first time – “Hi, this is my friend Chris, he’s a zombie.”), but too tired at the moment to care much, I spent another couple of hours sleeping in the afternoon before catching my flight back to the Bay Area. And then I slept on the flight to the Bay Area.

Returning to Life

By the time I arrived in Oakland I was starting to feel human again – a little bit – and had dinner with Paul and Anita. We ate at Chow, a long time establishment at the corner of Church and Market Streets, that has been “around the corner” from most of the places I’ve lived in San Francisco, although not quite all of them.

I made the amazing discovery that eating some dinner, overcoming the lack of appetite I felt, actually improved things for me and I started to function more normally. After a very pleasant meal and good visiting, I returned to Anita’s to finish packing and take another two-hour nap before calling a taxi at 11 pm.

My flight from San Francisco to Taipei, which left at 1:40 am, actually was quite smooth. Originally seated in an aisle seat in the center seating section, I switched to a window seat so that a husband and wife could sit together. Normally, I don’t like to be stuck in window seats on long flights in economy class, because I can’t easily get out to stretch my legs or use the facilities. This time, however, it was fine because the lady on the aisle was about one-third my size. Teeny-tiny. Very easy to climb over even when she was asleep and everyone reclined their seat.

To top it off, I slept for about six hours of the twelve-hour flight. God bless Tylenol PM, protector saint of the jet setter.

Once again, EVA is to be commended for very good service in their “Elite” – premium economy – class. The food was tasty, portions generous, response to call buttons prompt, etc. Perhaps I should sell sponsorships? “EVA Airways is the official transpacific airline of this blog.” What could I get for that?

Loooooong Transit in Taipei

The flight arrived nearly an hour early into Taipei – about 4:45 am! This gave me about eighteen hours, a long layover I had intentionally scheduled so I would have an opportunity to explore the city. Thankfully, my friend Jay was in town and had time to meet for lunch.

Knowing that it was much too early to try to head into the city – the busses weren’t even running plus there wasn’t anything to do at that hour – I proceeded through security to the departure level and checked into the transit hotel. I love transit hotels. The ability to freshen up and even take a nap makes a long trip so much more pleasant.

I booked a room for five hours and was able to get almost four hours of sleep, although a on-and-off fever had me throwing the covers off then pulling them back on throughout the morning.

At 10:00, after showering, shaving and getting a cup of coffee from Starbucks, I retraced my route back through security (“Oh, I need to go to the transit desk, please.”) and then proceeded to immigration where I threw everyone off. It seems that there is a bank of early morning arrivals into the airport and then nothing for several hours, so immigration was literally closed. Nobody at any desk.

An officer came over to her station and waved me through, and a few other officers came over, curious where this random foreigner arrived from. Looking at my arrival information, the officer took several minutes to mentally process why, if I had been on a flight that arrived five hours ago, I was just passing through immigration now.

After explaining that I had been at the hotel, sleeping, she stamped my passport and then accidentally stamped my onwards boarding pass with the arrivals stamp. Whoops! That is meant to be stamped with the departure stamp when I leave Taiwan. So she grabbed her “void” stamp and tried to undo the damage, which would cause confusion later that day when I headed through the outbound immigration line.

Customs was equally empty, with a lady officer having to set down her breakfast and jog over to my line, only to wave me through without a second glance.

After storing my roll-aboard bag at the bag check (left hand side of the terminal as you exit), I bought my bus ticket into the city and headed on my way. Below, the view from the bus as I catch my first glimpse of Taipei 101, currently the world’s tallest building.

[As a side note about how one’s English degenerates after living overseas, it took me about a minute to decide how to spell “glimpse”, above. I couldn’t remember the “e” a the end and was sounding it out and spelling it different ways before I finally looked at a dictionary. Sad, sad, sad…]

Lunchtime

By the time I made it into central Taipei, a good 45-minute ride from the airport, it was nearly lunchtime. Jay met me in the lobby of the Shangri-La hotel, where I had frittered away a few minutes reading the Sunday NY Times, which I had carried for the past thirty hours and not made much progress on.

Jay’s a friend from San Francisco who moved to Taipei to start Portico Media, what originally was an animation company but now does production, distribution and a wide range of other media-related tasks.

It has been seven or eight years since we first met through the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. If I recall, Jay worked as an intern with the festival’s former director and there was some screening at the Castro Theatre in which we were both involved.

Anyhow, it is good to know nice people all around the world. Especially nice people with good taste in food! Jay took me to Yongkang Street, in the western end of the city, where we ate at the well-regarded Yong-Kang Beef Noodle Shop, left.

The neighborhood is a web of small streets mostly filled with small buildings, a very walkable neighborhood that reminded me a bit of New York’s Chinatown, but cleaner. Along the way we passed so many good-looking restaurants and I instantly regretted having but one day to give to this city.

Beef Noodles & c.

Yong-Kang Beef Noddle Shop is a compact, clean but not fancy two-story restaurant. We found room on the second floor and set about perusing the menu, which is limited to about fifteen key dishes, many of which we had the opportunity to try:

Working from the top row, across and down: Seaweed with garlic, steamed hog spareribs, cucumber with acorn jelly, the famous spicy beef noodle soup with soy sauce broth, spicy Schezhuan style pork dumplings, stacks of the hot spareribs steaming away in the downstairs kitchen.

The food was really good and I regretted that, as there were only two of us, we left some food on our plates. The beef noodle soup is made of very tender stewed meat with lots of gelatinous fat and connective tissue. Sometimes this is a little hard for me to get used to, as this is what I learned to leave on the plate when I was growing up, but you realize just how delicious it is, you realize you have to enjoy it!

Of course there was time for some dessert at Ice Monster (below), a local chain that serves various fruits, beans and jellies over shaved ice.

We shared a triple serving of fruit: mango, strawberry and kiwi topped with a scoop of mango ice cream. Oh, that was good!

Below, we get a photographer (you see him shooting two pictures above) to take a picture of us.

About Taipei

Since Jay had to go back to work, he put me in a taxi headed to the National Palace Museum on the north side of town. Along the way, I was a little surprised to see less traffic and far fewer scooters than I had expected. My vision of Taipei has been formed by the movies of just a few directors. Most notably, Tsai Ming-Liang and Edward Yang. From these films, I built the image in my mind of a Taipei that was perpetually polluted, crowded, and a teeming hornet’s nest of scooters.

While there were a lot of scooters, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected. In fact, given that the city has much more land to work with, it was less crowded and less vertical than, say, Hong Kong. To top it off, there was a monsoon working its way up from Hong Kong so the winds were very strong, making for beautifully clear skies and a very pleasant afternoon, despite the 34-degree temperature.

Below, one of many dogs I saw riding on scooters. How does he not fall off?

The front of the National Palace Museum and below that, the view looking at the entry garden. The museum has one of the largest collection of Chinese artifacts in the world, which were moved from Beijing by the nationalists during the Chinese civil war. While controversy surrounds many aspects of the museum’s existence, much as the China-Taiwan question is a live wire that sparks many conflicts, the museum has an excellent collection that is very well presented. On a future visit I will have to give it more time, as I didn’t want to spend my entire afternoon indoors on this trip.

From the museum, I caught the bus down the hill to the nearest MRT station. The transit system in Taipei is extensive and fairly easy to navigate. There are signs and announcements in English, including “next destination” signs inside the buses. You have to watch, though, as the English flashes by pretty quickly!

The MRT system is likewise easy to use and I found may way back into the heart of the city with no difficulties. Below, my train arrives. In the main stations, there are safety gates along the edge of the track. At smaller stations, it is open.

There were two things I still wanted to do: visit the observation deck at Taipei 101 and then also take the Maokong Gondola from the Taipei Zoo station. Somewhat along the lines of the Nong Ping 360 gondola that has opened in Hong Kong, the Maokong Gondola is an extensive line, built into the MRT system, that takes you up a series of hills and mountains to a temple from which you get a good view of the larger Taipei area.

The engineering of the system is fascinating as at one point the gondola line has to drop below a large number of high-tension power lines. The view is less spectacular than, say, from Victoria Peak in Hong Kong, but is still very nice.

Below: Sunset as seen from one of the gondola cars. Note that you can see Taipei 101 in the photo, which looks roughly northwest.

By the time I descended the gondola, the sun was tucking into the western horizon, ready for bed. Knowing that the airport was quite a ride away, I didn’t want to risk being delayed by going to the top of Taipei 101, which was a good thirty minutes away from the Taipei Zoo station where I picked up the gondola.

I called Jay to report my whereabouts, lest he feel responsible for having lost a visitor to the sprawling Taiwanese capital, and we agreed to meet for a quick dinner near his office. We headed out to a night market, a familiar site in Chinese cities around the world. Once again, we had some really tasty food to eat.

Above: Various meats and veggies are added to hot broth to make a satisfying soup. Below: A fresh oyster omelet is prepared for us.

Above: Our oyster omelet and zoh geng or meat noodle stew with pork sausage. Tasty, unfussy food for the market shopper.

Even though it was a Tuesday night, there were plenty of shoppers looking for bargains, below.

By this point, it was pushing 8:30 and I had an 11:05 flight. Not wanting to risk heavy traffic, we headed back to the Shangri-La Hotel and five minutes later I was on a bus to the airport. Many thanks to Jay for taking time out of his busy day to ensure I had a proper introduction to Taipei food. I’m going to pack Tawn up and head back one of these days soon to get some more.

Conclusion

The trip to the airport was smooth. I reclaimed my checked bag about thirty minutes late, but the lady didn’t charge me anything extra. Outbound immigration was a little confused why my boarding pass was stamped with an entry stamp and then subsequently voided. After a brief explanation, the officer added an exit stamp to the mess and I was on my way. Just enough time to shower and change at the transit hotel so my final flight would be made in comfort.

Eighteen hours doesn’t seem to be enough time to explore a city, but I found a lot to enjoy about Taipei and look forward to a trip back. It is much less intense than Hong Kong, a city I love, and that is a positive thing. Not everywhere needs to be so vertical and intense.

The flight back to Khrungthep was smooth and I enjoyed a long conversation with an American-born Thai from Arizona who was flying in to visit relatives and explore business opportunities. With the number of times this young man called me “sir”, I assumed he had served in the military at some point. Turns out to just be good manners on his part combined with a touch of looking middle-aged on my part.

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

Tag Archives: Taiwan